A real date? He didn't quite dare react to this.

"Volunteer to CIU," repeated the page. "Volunteer to Pedi."

Down the far hall came a new set of pink jackets; the late-shift pink jackets. Seth and Diana were done. They were off.

"Anything but a Monday, Seth, would be good," said Diana. "If every Monday is going to be like this, I never want to miss one."

Seth had lost interest in Mondays, his thoughts taking a familiar downward spiral. She was so beautiful. "Sat.u.r.day?" he suggested, holding himself in till he saw whether she was serious. "A movie, too?"

"Sat.u.r.day," said Diana. "Dinner and a movie." She linked her pink-clad arm through his and looked back up at him and laughed. And this time, it was no air kiss.

In spite of the fact that in the last three hours Seth had worked on naked torn bodies and soppy babies and avulsed eyeb.a.l.l.s and druggies coming off highs, he was embarra.s.sed to be doing something as intimate as kissing in the hospital halls.

But he pulled it off.

Seth thought: finally. I'm eighteen, I'm at college, I can vote, I'm a grown-up...and I have a girlfriend.

Yes!

Seth and Diana left the Emergency Room. Hanging their pink jackets in the Volunteer closet, they signed out on their time sheets. When they left through the main entrance, a waiting taxi slid right up, whisking them back to the world of college dorms.

The world of a hurting city went on without them.

Agony and chaos, sorrow and fear. One person's story was replaced by another's in minutes.

Whatever day of the week a volunteer came to help, there would always be need.

A Biography of Caroline B. c.o.o.ney.

Caroline B. c.o.o.ney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library a.s.sociation, the New York Public Library, and more. c.o.o.ney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, c.o.o.ney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

c.o.o.ney has attended lots of colleges, picking up cla.s.ses wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his cla.s.s, c.o.o.ney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

c.o.o.ney's books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: "I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings." Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (19891992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, c.o.o.ney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.

c.o.o.ney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.

The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where c.o.o.ney grew up. She recalls: "In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody's cellar, going around and around the furnace!"

c.o.o.ney at age three.

c.o.o.ney, age ten, reading in bed-one of her favorite activities then and now.

Ten-year-old c.o.o.ney won a local library's summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrote reviews of Lois Lenski's Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George's Vison, the Mink. "What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention," she recalls.

c.o.o.ney's report card from sixth grade in 1959. "Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later," she says.

c.o.o.ney in middle school: "I went through some lumpy stages!"

In 1964, c.o.o.ney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. "I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!" c.o.o.ney says. "I love the phrase 'pen woman.' I'm proud to be one."

c.o.o.ney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.) c.o.o.ney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books c.o.o.ney wrote with Reit were by a.s.signment. "Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, 'entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,' which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by a.s.signment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought."

c.o.o.ney with her late agent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the t.i.tles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.

end.