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About Choker
Product Description Zoe and Cara were as close as friends could be—until Zoe moved away. Miserable without Zoe, Cara grew into an unhappy sixteen-year-old, tormented by the popular girls and nursing a hopeless crush. Then one day Cara returns home from a miserable day at school to find Zoe sitting on her bed. Shocked and delighted, Cara agrees to hide Zoe from troubles at home and the two resume their friendship as though no time has passed. Zoe even helps Cara get up the courage to stand up for herself and talk to her crush. But when one of the popular girls winds up dead, Cara begins to suspect that Zoe is responsible, and her questions only feed Zoe’s anger. As Cara searches for answers, she is forced to confront a deadly truth…. From Booklist In this creepy psychological thriller, something disturbing is happening in the background while 16-year-old Cara narrates, oblivious; and readers will relish hunting for the clues. Cara is relieved when her best friend, Zoe, whom she hasn’t seen since moving away in fifth grade, appears at her house needing a hiding place. Cara is ridiculed at school—after a disastrous cafeteria incident, the mean girls call her “choker”—but Zoe always knows what to do. With her help, Cara successfully makes over her image, but the better Cara does, the more resentful Zoe becomes. When one mean girl drowns and another disappears, Cara starts wondering why Zoe has returned, and what she is hiding from. Right from the prologue, when young Zoe cajoles Cara to eat her mom’s “zombie” pills, it’s clear that their obsessive relationship is twisted, but Woods plays with readers’ expectations well enough to keep us guessing at Zoe’s true nature. Terrific pacing and mounting suspense lead to a resolution that may not surprise savvy readers but is nonetheless chilling. Grades 9-12. --Krista Hutley About the Author Elizabeth Woods lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Choker is her debut novel. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 CARA LANGE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY OF THE CAFE- teria, her nylon lunch bag in one hand. The din of chattering students floated above the sea of white Formica-topped tables, and a steamy potato-and-onion aroma emanated from the kitchen. Cara paused. She wasn’t sure she could stand another lunch tacked onto the other track girls like a vestigial organ—completely useless and unnecessary. She considered fleeing to the parking lot and eating lunch in her yellow ’99 Volvo. But no. She wasn’t that lame. Not yet. Cara forced her legs across the brown-tiled room. Sherman High hadn’t done a lot of updating since its construction in 1975, architecture’s notorious Brutalism phase. People driving by often mistook the sprawling building on the outskirts of Des Moines for a prison. Cara could have told them that assumption wasn’t far from the truth. She passed the emo kids in the corner, and the hipsters with their retro T-shirts, and the hippies eating organic yogurt. Some of the art students were stacking a bunch of chairs into a tower—some kind of new art installation? The track girls were clustered at their usual table, packed in tightly. Sarit Kohli, her dark braid reaching almost to her waist, inhaled a stack of turkey slices as she told Rachael Meade about yesterday’s practice. Julie Cohen chomped loudly on an apple while laughing at something Madeline Brazelton was texting. Cara stood over them for a minute, smiling vaguely, but no one looked up or even stopped talking. Finally, she dragged a chair over from the next table and squeezed in between Sarit and Madeline. “Oh, hey, Cara,” Sarit said, looking up. She inched her chair over. “Thanks.” Cara sat down. “Sure.” Sarit shrugged, already turning back to Rachael. Cara let the noise of the room swirl around her like smoke as she pulled a bag of baby carrots from her nylon sack and nibbled idly. Her eyes drifted across the room to the cafeteria door. Prom-princess Alexis Henning was just swaying through t
