Love Triangle Entry #10

Title: LAST YEAR'S MISTAKE

Genre: YA Contemporary Romance

Word Count: 63,000

Query:

  

Seventeen year old Kelsey Crawford has almost no regrets about her family leaving the crappy Connecticut town she grew up in for beautiful, historical Newport, Rhode Island. No regrets except one – falling in love with her best friend David, and then abandoning him.

Kelsey's spent the last year constructing a new life to go with her new town, including cozying up to a new boyfriend who’s the total package of yummy. The last thing she wants to think about is the perfect storm of health problems that nearly sent her off the deep end sophomore year. Or the rumors that swirled out of control. Or, oh yeah, the fact that she hasn't spoken to David since that time they kissed. It’s all behind her now – until David is standing in the hall on the first day of school.

When Kelsey sees David, it isn’t only the bad memories that come rushing back. She can’t ignore the nagging feeling that something’s been missing from her perfect life, something more than the friend she left behind. Because the more time she and David spend together, the more she realizes it’s not just his friendship she misses. Either she can give in to her feelings and ruin everything she’s worked so hard to create – or let David go, and risk repeating last year’s mistake.

First 250:

If I had to see a ghost, I guess the first day of school was as good a time as any.

Not that he was really a ghost, but he might as well have been. I’d buried him with a chapter of my life that I’d closed the book on long ago. Or so I thought.

The first day of my senior year of high school started off normal enough. My mother made pancakes for my sister and me, the same as she did every first day of school.

“Problem, Kelsey?” Miranda asked as she caught me eyeing her plate.

“Want some pancakes with your butter and syrup?” I narrowed my eyes as the shimmery, sun kissed glow on her freckled cheeks distracted me from the pool of toxic waste in her dish. “Are you wearing my bronzer?”

Miranda looked down and giggled.

“How many times have I told you to quit touching my stuff?”

She stuck her tongue out at me, then eyed the band-aid wrapped around my pointer finger. 

“What’d you do to your finger?”

“Burned it on my flat iron. Now go put my bronzer back in my room.”

She scrunched up her nose and made her voice sour and prissy. “Ooh, Kelsey’s so great because she uses a flat iron and bronzer now.”

It took everything I had not to lunge across the table and yank her forever-disheveled, honey colored hair. It was the exact same color mine had been before I’d kicked it up a notch with some platinum blonde highlights. Never, though, had I let mine look like a tornado had taken up residence on my head.