Blind Speed Dating #25 (YA)

Title: THE ONES

Genre: YA light Sci Fi

Word Count: 70k

Query: 

Mina Gale longs to feel like less of a weirdo outsider at Grove High—almost as desperately as she longs for a conversation with that darkly handsome new transfer student, Nico Payne. Unfortunately, her straight As and play-it-safe practicality don’t exactly make her a friend magnet. But someone at Grove does feel a powerful attraction to Mina…and she’s about to find out who. 

It turns out Nico hasn’t been able to keep his mind off Mina, either. And for good reason. They’re numerological soul mates—rare “double elevens” who share an energy so charged it can punch open doors between eleven parallel universes. When one of them sucks Mina and Nico into another world, they find themselves stranded without a guide, a map, or a clue what any of this double eleven stuff really means. 

Their journey home rockets them from afterlife dimension to a narrow scrape with death in an anti-gravity world. And Mina realizes that playing it safe just isn’t going to cut it anymore if she hopes to make it back alive. But if holes keep ripping between dimensions every time they kiss, the biggest threat Mina and Nico will have 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 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…”