Eleven by Patricia Reilly Giff starts with, “Eleven could be anything. It was only two lines after all. It could be a month, a day, minutes. Maybe two trees in a bare winter field. A kid scribbling. A house number. It was Sam’s birthday, April Eleven. That was a good thing, a great thing, so why was he afraid of eleven?”
Sam finds a locked box in the attic, the attic he’s not supposed to be in. He is sure it contains the answer to his dreams about icy water and a boat crash. Locked inside he finds a papers which he is unable to read, until he meets Caroline, the new girl. Together they figure out who Sam really is, where he came from and why he fears ELEVEN.