CAGI Finalist #11

Title: LOVESENSE

Genre: YA Magical Realism

Word Count: 59,000

Query:

Seventeen-year-old Rae has spent her whole life with the ability to

smell when a relationship will sour just by looking a photograph of

the couple (rotting fish, anyone?). She calls it her “lovesense” and

uses it to anonymously run a love guru business at school. But after

seventeen years of smelling way more stinky socks than roses, Rae is

ready to give up on love altogether.

Until, that is, she finds a fifteen-year-old picture in her attic that

smells of apricots and honey. Even better? She's in the photo. Rae

seeks the identity of her mysterious playmate with a dedication she

usually reserves for her 100-meter hurdles, but as the semester

progresses, all she’s finding is trouble. She’s falling for her goofy

teammate, Sam—even though he’s already been crossed off her list of

possibilities, and, with just weeks until the city-county track

championships, her love-guru business is exposed. She is forced to

convince all her friends (and the administration) that she isn't a

psycho gypsy freak—or, worse, that she hasn't been taking advantage of

them for years.

Suspended from school, banned from the track championships, and

alienated from her classmates, Rae has one last opportunity to set

things right before her chance at finding the boy in the photo rots

like stink on cheese.

First 250:

I often regret my part-time job as the ice cream/photo counter girl at

Alfred’s Drug Store. But in a town as small as Sparrow, a

seventeen-year-old doesn’t have a lot of options.

No more reading relationships at work, I remind myself as I tap my

cross-trainers in time with the photo processor’s whir, whir, flip.

It spews three hundred prints of Mary Brighten and her fiancé, but I’m

not looking--especially after last week’s debacle with Mom’s friend

Barb. Trust me, being the first to know that your mom’s best friend’s

husband is leaving her for their pool boy sucks the big one.

Craning my neck I see the “Alfred’s has the Answer” digital clock:

forty-seven minutes until the bride waltzes in. The whir is louder

than our cheesy elevator music. And my nose, even though I’m telling

it no, is taking in bigger and bigger breaths. I pop another Altoid

into my already crammed mouth. I don’t want to know! Think about Barb.

But I’m like a crack addict needing my next hit. And there isn’t an

addiction recovery program to save me.

I pull a photo off the top of the stack. Even with the wonderful aroma

of fresh ink, it doesn’t begin to cover the stench of this couple.

It’s more than that rotten-egg sulfur smell I made in chem lab

yesterday. It’s also rotting meat and moldy, squishy potatoes. A good

dinner gone wrong.

As I squint at the picture, the formally clad couple separates, not

mere millimeters like I usually see, but to opposite sides of the

photo.