Charlie is down to her absolute. Total. Last. Resort.
Despite a thoroughly comprehensive list of potential cherry poppers, er…suitors, and careful plotting, Charlie is three weeks into her devirginization campaign, still untouched, and getting desperate. In the movie of her life, this aspiring screenwriter is giving herself a PG, for please, get some.
Her project goes into freeze frame when her mom checks herself into rehab and packs Charlie off to live with her estranged, or just plain strange, grandfather, Monty. How is she supposed to get a date when she has to go pick up his Depends?
Enter Eric, a hot rehab grad on the road to redemption, and the only one who can make Charlie rethink her strategy. The more she gets to know him, the more convinced she becomes that is the one, and not just another to add to the list of people who will abandon her.
In this hilarious and heartbreaking story of one girl’s detoured road to womanhood, Charlie’s list develops a life of its own – right when she realizes there’s so much more to lose.
“What’s up?” I leaned over the front seat, turned down the radio, and checked the
time on the dashboard. “It’s only nine fifty. You said I could stay out till ten.” The curfew
was yet another way my mother attempted to de-stress her life and wreak havoc with
mine. She didn’t like having to worry about me staying out late, parting with friends, and
being out on the streets in the wee morning hours. Since Dad died, she’d become hyper
vigilant, pulling double duty in the parenting department. It was maddening. I mean, even
Cinderella had until midnight.
But in this instance, I was kind of relieved to have an excuse to bail. Not that I was chickening out. But the backseat? I could do better.
Ty tugged at a belt loop on my jeans. “Are you wearing a thong?” he whispered. He tugged harder. “Standard white cotton.”
I smacked his hand, plunked down into the seat.
“You have eight minutes,” Mom said. “If I don’t see Gribbons’ sorry excuse for a
truck pulling into our driveway…”
Another failed attempt, but it wasn’t disappointment that made it easier to breathe
as Ty revved the engine and fishtailed down the back road, skiffs of snow billowing in our wake.
I thought about the many books on screenwriting I’d borrowed from the public
library over the last year, the ones I practically inhaled in order to teach myself to write scripts. Great scripts that might just get me out of this town someday.
They all talked about it. The inciting incident. The one thing that changes the
main character’s life has to happen in the first few minutes and yet here I was three weeks into focused, plotted, storyboarded dating – and I was still a virgin.
Life really was stranger than fiction.
You couldn’t make this shit up.
Judith Tewes - author and screenwriter - resides in small town northern Alberta, where she: writes, sings, plays bass guitar in an all-woman band, walks her three crazy labs, and suspects she's living the life of a superhero's alias. Her edgy, contemporary young adult fiction is full of heart with a side of snark.
She also writes paranormal YA under the pen name, Judith Graves.
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