She loves all of the above with cheese. Fortunately, her father-in-law is a cheese maker and she gets free cheese often! (www.springsidecheese.com)
PROJECTS
27 DAISIES is a contemporary YA novel and is complete at 50,000 words.
It’s been ten months and twenty-seven days since
Shelby Harris’s dad died. She’s three
hundred miles away from her best friend and boyfriend. It’s been two days since
her mom smiled for the first time, and Shelby’s not sure she’s ready to be the
only one left in mourning.
As an only child living with two doting parents,
Shelby’s life had been secure and comfortable.
She’d planned to graduate, go off to college with her best friend, and
live happily ever after with her boyfriend.
Now, her widowed mom announces there’s no money for college. Her
boyfriend has taken to drinking and finding solace with other girls in her
absence, and her best friend hints around the fact that she’s heading to
college out of state, far away from where they’d always planned to be together.
At seventeen, Shelby’s bound and determined to make
money for college and keep her life on track.
She can’t change the past or other people, but if there’s one thing she can control, it’s her own future. This
means no time for her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend or confiding in her distant best
friend. It especially means no time for
new friends or romance. Until Dane
strolls in with daisies, a cross at the base of his neck, and his constant
questions about faith, forgiveness, and love.
Just days after she’s opened up again, confided in him, and even kissed
him a little, she finds him in the arms of another girl. When sadness knocks her down, Shelby may not
have the strength to brush herself off and forge ahead--all alone--this one
last time.
he loves me. he loves me...not.
SHELBY
“I
don’t understand,” I call to him as he walks down the hallway.
“What?”
He doesn’t turn around, but at least he stops. His feet stopped walking away from me.
I
didn’t deserve even that much, so I’d take it.
I’d breathe it in because it might well be the last time I breathe the
same air as him. This new thought that I
might never be closer than these ten feet again whollop me the same as if
someone had barreled into my stomach.
Tears
sting my eyes. I bat them away, blinking
furiously, grateful now that he refused to turn around. And yet the words tumble from my mouth,
“Turn around.” I won’t beg.
“Please.”
He
stays, leaning slightly to the left, hands balled, unballed, balled at his sides.
“Fine.”
I breathe. “Fine.” One bratty tear slips down my cheek and the
feel of its wetness on my palm wakes me from this hazy dreamy nightmare and I
realize that my reality is stuffed in this moment. My future hangs on my next words. My past lay crumpled in a suitcase and Dane
is about to zip it up and ship it off to some unknown country that I’d never
find to reclaim it.
“I
don’t understand,” I say again.
Brilliant.
“That
makes two of us.” Without a glance, a
peek, a nod, he pushes off his left foot and walks down the hall. His tennis shoes pad away, not echoing, just
squeaking slightly. There is nothing
profound about the sound of his grand exit.
This movie reel should be edited for effect. The scene should most definitely be more
grand, more heart-wrenching, more.
Viewers should feel their hearts bleeding in this moment, their head
splitting from the pain of a sudden torrent of too many tears to cry through a
tiny tear duct, one at a slow, slow time.
Because this pain, this
ache is too much to bear in the silence of an empty hallway.
DANE
The hallway could be 1,000 feet long
as opposed to the 30 or so it really is.
I can’t make my feet cooperate, to move and get me to its end. Instead I stand here, forcing myself not to
turn around, walk the ten buttery steps toward her, and pull her up against
me. I want to tuck her head under my
chin, to bury my nose in her burnt honey hair.
I want to whisper words I thought when I wasn’t sleeping at 3 o’clock every
morning since the first day she opened her locker next to mine. I want to tell her every whispered word
pumping through my heart.
Whatever she is saying is lost
behind the thrumming in my ears.
Except,
something about her voice stops the beat, beat, beat. The splintering memory of our last
conversation suddenly makes this moment clear.
“I don’t understand,” she says. What the hell doesn’t she get? That she held my heart in her hands and wrung
it out in front of me? Tossed it back inside
its cage, flat and wrinkled and covered with poetry written for her alone? That her feelings were sung, clear and strong,
honest from the depths of her pale blue eyes?
“That makes two of us,” I say. And finally, mercifully, I am able to pick up
my right foot, my left, my right and I make it 2,000 feet when I can turn the
corner and breathe air that isn’t jam packed with unspoken words and unkissed
kisses and unembraced bodies.
Yes, clear air is better. Emptiness is better.
Than pain.
Three miles--on my Trek mountain
bike, down a city street--later, my phone rings. It’s Lou.
I forget to pedal and lose my footing.
My bike crashes to the ground and scrapes my calf on its way to the
pavement. “Damn.” I fumble to hit speak. “Lou, hello, hi.”
“It’s Mrs. Portman. Mary Lou is in the hospital. St. E’s.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Room 502,” she whispers.
“I’m on my way.”
lou
time slips…away. through my fingers and in and out, in and
out.
of
my lungs.
Shelby
was a friendly junior back in her island home on Lake Michigan, but ever since
her dad died and her mom moved her 300 miles from her boyfriend and best
friend, she’s become a senior who is depressed and introverted. It doesn’t help when her
long-distance romance ends and her best friend becomes detached. When Mom
announces she’s drained their savings and there’s no money for Shelby
to go to college, she feels trapped in a new town without anyone or any dreams
to rely on.
Since
she takes a job to earn money, she has no time for Dane, the boy who is
persistent in trying to take her out.
When she finally gives in, she finds he won’t be so easy to give
up when it comes time to move away.
Then
her ex-boyfriend shows up and she needs to decide if she truly wants to move on
or go back to the life she had before.
Shelby needs to come to terms with the fact that the past is over and
gone, and maybe, so is the girl she once was.
