The Obvious Game
Today's the publication date for my friend Rita Arens' young-adult novel, The Obvious Game. It is a good book that you should and will read!
The Obvious Game centers around 15-year-old Diana Keller, who's having a tough time, to say the least. Her mom is battling cancer, and Diana's dealing with quite a body image problem, which nosedives straight into an eating disorder. Plus, you know, she's a teenager, and it doesn't get much worse than that.
I'm in mid-reading, myself, and I'm enthralled. Me, a full-fledged adult! So don't think you have to be one of those teens to enjoy this. (Although I'm sure the teenager in your life will love it, as well.)
Rita worked hard to get her book published. Here she is on overcoming rejection.
At some point, I realized I wanted this book more than I cared how embarrassed I had to be to get it published. I think that’s what gets things done. In my heart of hearts, I know that for every writer who just knew the right people and was so amazingly talented and writing the right thing at just the right moment, there are hundreds of thousands who are just like me, for whom every victory is hard won.
I love how refreshingly open Rita is about the process/psychic ordeal for a first-time novelist. Hooray for perseverance!
Would you like a copy of your own? Rita has graciously offered to give away one copy (with a signed bookplate) to a lucky winner. I require a comment with your most awkward teenage moment (or just *an* awkward moment, if there are too many to choose from) and I shall choose the winner by next Thursday, February 14th.
Alice
WE HAVE A WINNER.
Your anecdotes were all appropriately mortifying (and how!), but this one stood out above the rest. And will give me flashback-nightmares for at least a week.
When I was 14, I had the biggest crush on this football player (with a bowl haircut? what?). So of course, my idiot friends, Bowl Cut, and I thought it'd be super cool to sneak little bottles of booze into the woods outside of a big German fest and get drunk off of god awful cheap liquor. Freshmen are totally smart and consistently make good decisions. Cut to: Bowl Cut wants me to go on a a ride called The Breakdance. You know the one. You're in a pod that's spinning, on an arm that's spinning, while the whole thing SPINS. As we're hurling through the air and the neon lights are wavering back and forth and whizzing up and down, Bowl Cut turns to me and says, "I don't feel so good." I confidently responded, "Me neither, but there's no way I'm going to be sick." Then, my mouth opened. A river of vomit projected out of my face and hit every single other car on The Breakdance. The ride was spinning so violently that there was nothing anyone could do but hope their eyes and mouth were closed at the right time. And guess what? Bowl Cut did NOT want to be my boyfriend after that! I know... I was confused too.
Congratulations, Kate! I'll be contacting you about your copy of Rita's book.
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Summer camp. I was twelve, maybe, going on thirteen? My mom had recently bought me my first bra--a training bra!--that was, well, not very attractive or grown-up looking.
Per camp instructions, every item of clothing I brought with me was to have my name written on the tag so that on laundry day after you took your sack o' clothes to the laundry hut they could be returned, clean, to the appropriate laundry sack.
So, dutifully, we labeled every single article of clothing with my name or initials. Every sock. Every t-shirt. Every Hanes cotton high-waisted panty that my mother still bought for me even though they were baggy and ugly and uncomfortable.
Several days before the end of camp I went on a 3-day overnight hike with a handful of other girls in Pisgah National Forest. Almost as soon as we set up our tents and ate dinner the first night, it started raining. Hard. It rained all night, and all the next morning, and all the next afternoon. No one's tents were waterproofed properly, and the ground had turned to sloggy mud. During the second night of rain my tent's stakes lost their hold in the mud and collapsed inward on my friend & I. She started freaking out, the pool of rainwater that had collected on top of the tent flooded through the door, I had to run outside to try to fix the tent. Everything is soaked.
The next morning they cancel the rest of the hike because the rain isn't letting up, and everyone's clothes and sleeping bags are wet.
We return to camp and the counselor suggests that we take all of our wet clothes down to the laundry hut to be dried, since we are supposed to be packing up to go home in 2 days and there's not enough time for them to line dry. So I drop my sack of clothes off.
The next day there is a camp-wide assembly, I'm not sure for what because I'm outside playing tetherball with a friend instead. After a while we hear some yelling coming from the assembly, and it sounds like...it sounds like someone is calling my name.
They are! They are yelling my name, I guess I am supposed to be at that assembly.
So I go inside, just in time to see a pair of my underwear being thrown across the room. My Hanes, cotton, granny-panty underwear that was supposed to be dried and returned to my cabin but somehow ended up in the lost and found. A t-shirt followed, and a pair of shorts. Another t-shirt. With every item, the counselor would pick it up out of the lost and found, show everyone the item and wait for someone to raise their hand to claim it. If no one claimed it, they would read the name on the tag if there was one, and yell out the person's name. The person would then raise their hand, and the counselor would throw it across the room to them.
And then they picked up another pair of my underwear. I wasn't going to raise my hand for them, but at that point they knew where I was and threw them in my direction anyway. Except they missed, and ended up hitting an older girl in the face who cringed, made a disgusted face and flung them off.
And then...
Then they picked up my training bra. And held it out for all to see, and remarked on the lacy straps, and the small pink flower.
And then because no one was claiming it, and I guess because the counselor was bored, she pretended to put it on over her clothes, and 'model' it, strutting up and down the room, sticking her boobs out and asking the crowd if they thought it was pretty.
My heart was on the floor, I was DYING of embarassment, and of knowing that at any moment the counselor was going to look for the tag on it and read the name. MY name.
But she didn't. She continued strutting, and laughing, because my mom had somehow--somePRAISETHELORDhow--forgotten to write my name on the training bras.
I never claimed that bra, even though my mom had only bought me two. When she asked what happened to the other one I just shrugged and said, 'I guess it got lost in the laundry.'
I lightly and carefully sat down on the edge of an acquaintance's coffee table when I was 16...annnd then proceeded to *fall right through it and break it.*
It was outside for the trashmen the following day when we all went to pick him up to go out.
Effin' *mortifying.*