Bouncer Post #101

Title: THE ONES

Genre: YA light Sci Fi

Word Count: 72,500

Query:

Numerology, the mystical science of numbers. Straight-A student Mina Gale doesn’t think much of patchouli-scented crap like that. She’s a practical, play-it-safe kind of girl if ever there was one.

Between her increasingly intrusive epilepsy and her dad’s recent death, all Mina wants is to feel like less of a weirdo outsider at Grove High. Well, that and a conversation with the darkly handsome new transfer student, Nico Payne. She just wishes her classmates would stop looking at her like she belongs in another dimension or something. What Mina doesn’t know yet is…

She kind of does. 

Turns out there’s a good reason Mina hasn’t been able to keep her mind off Nico. They’re numerological soul mates. Powerful “double elevens” who share an energy so charged it can punch open doors between eleven parallel universes.

When a door opens unexpectedly, Mina and Nico are sucked off their feet…and into another world. Stranded without a guide, a map or a clue what any of this double eleven stuff really means, the pair sets out to find their way home.  

The journey rockets them from highs (an afterlife dimension where Mina reunites with her deceased father) to lows (a narrow scrape with death in an anti-gravity world). It’s going to be a dangerous trek home, and playing it safe just isn’t going to cut it anymore if Mina wants to make it back alive.

But if holes keep ripping between dimensions every time they kiss, the biggest threat Mina and Nico have yet to face may actually be themselves.

I'm a SCBWI member and a writer/editor with seventeen years of magazine experience. My work has appeared often in Allure, Lucky, Glamour, and The Huffington Post. 

First 250:

The minutes didn’t crawl in Mr. Sykes’ Physics class, they zombie-walked. Each tick of the clock’s second hand was a painful, hunched jerk forward. In the desk diagonal to mine, Nico Payne wasn’t even pretending to pay attention. He kicked one of his Vans up onto his desk and squinted critically at the Bic pen scribble he’d just added to its toe.

God, he squinted great. He’d had the exact same expression on his face the first time I saw him. I’d walked over to Joe’s Italian Ice one hot night this summer and there he was, staring up at the list of flavors like he was contemplating the meaning of life instead of Peaches-N-Cream versus Bada Bing Cherry. One look at the guy and my guts swirled like a chocolate-vanilla twist. If I’d known he was going to be transferring to Grove in the fall, maybe I’d have gone up and introduced myself. 

But knowing me, probably not.

Mr. Sykes erased a velocity chart off the whiteboard and turned to face us. “As human beings,” he said, his voice raspy with age, “we experience the world in three space dimensions. One: Forward and back. Two: Side to side. Three: Up and down. And then, of course, we have the fourth dimension of time. However, many scientists with an interest in string theory believe in the existence of not four but eleven different dimensions.”

Nico smirked as he made Twilight Zone noises. “Do doo do doo do doo do doo…”