Today's Guest Blogger is a fellow She-Writer and member of the Blooming Late Group
Keeping Secrets
In
the YA novel, If I Could Be Like Jennifer Taylor, the main character,
Carolyn Samuels, has to keep a lot of secrets from her friends and
family. Have you ever had to keep a secret? What was the reason?
Carolyn
finds herself in the middle of a very bad situation. She learns a
terrible secret about the mean girl who has been bullying her since
middle school and she doesn’t know what to do about it. Jennifer Taylor,
the mean girl, is no one to cross. So Carolyn starts doing things she
would never do. She winds up doing things for Jennifer and she lies to
her parents and her best friends. Yet she keeps the secret.
Should
she have kept Jennifer’s secret? Maybe she should have told someone. If
you find a person who has a serious problem, when is it right to tell
on them so they can get help? Are you being helpful by keeping that
person’s secret or are you hurting them by keeping the secret?
As
the author I felt I had a responsibility to write this story as true to
life as possible. In my own life I have had to keep secrets. Sometimes
these secrets were very painful, yet my friend or relative depended upon
me keeping that secret for them. I felt I could not let them down.
Carolyn goes through a lot of soul searching about the secret and in the
process of keeping the secret winds up needing to cover up more and
more of her own activities to protect the secret. In other words,
needing to keep the secret caused a series of events associated with the
secret. None of the things that happen to Carolyn happened to me, and
also I was a little older than she. But she does have some pretty
tempting moments when all she needed to do was reveal Jennifer’s secret
and her life would go back to normal.
Does
she give Jennifer’s secret away and face the consequences or does she
keep it? All the answers are in If I Could Be Like Jennifer Taylor
released by MuseItUp Publishing and available at The Muse Bookstore and
Amazon, Barnes and Noble and almost all other internet sources.
Blurb:
Carolyn
Samuels is obsessed with the idea of being popular. She is convinced
that the only thing keeping her from happiness is her too heavy for
fashion body and not being a cheerleader. Hyperventilating when she gets
nervous doesn’t help. When she is paired for a math project with the
girl who tormented her in middle school, Jennifer Taylor, she is sure it
is going to be another year of pain. With Carolyn’s crush on Jennifer’s
hunky junior quarterback, Brad her freshman year in high school looks
like a rerun of middle school. When Jennifer is the only student who
knows why she fell in gym class, Carolyn is blackmailed into doing her
math homework in return for Jennifer’s silence. Jennifer takes on
Carolyn as a pity project since she can’t be seen with someone who
dresses in jeans and sweatshirts. When Jennifer invites Carolyn to spend
the night to make her over and teach her to tumble, Carolyn learns
Jennifer’s secret and lies to her own friends to cover it up. Will
Carolyn become a cheerleader and popular? Does she continue to keep
Jennifer’s secret? Or will she be a target of this mean girl again?
Also please visit my blog, Barbara’s Meanderings:
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@Barbehr
Please leave a comment about your own experience with secrets to be in the drawing to win a free ebook.
(I am giving away a free ebook to the person who wins the comment drawing)
Barbara Ehrentreu Bio
Barbara,
a retired teacher with a Masters degree in Reading and Writing K-12 and
seventeen years of teaching experience lives with her family in
Stamford, Connecticut. When she received her Masters degree she began
writing seriously. If I Could Be Like Jennifer Taylor, Barbara’s first
YA novel, was published by MuseItUp Publishing, September 16th and was
inspired by Paula Danziger. This novel recently won 2nd place in the
Preditors & Editors Poll for the Best Young Adult Book of 2011. In
addition, Barbara has a story in the anthology, Lavender Dreams, also
published by MuseItUp Publishing. All proceeds from this anthology go to
cancer research. Barbara also writes poetry and three of her poems are
included in the anthology, Prompted: An International Collection of
Poems, a collaboration of members of The Anthologists. Her blog,
Barbara’s Meanderings, http://barbaraehrentreu.
If I Could Be Like Jennifer Taylor - available from MuseItUp Publishing, Amazon, Kindle, No
Barbara's Meanderings
Red River Writers Live Tales from the Pages
NY Literature Examiner for Examiner.com
http://www.examiner.com/x-
Becky and I sit on the low seats in the bleachers, but Jennifer and her group saunter into the gym and choose the highest seats avoiding the rest of us. Miss Gaylon, the gym teacher introduces herself and gives us a few minutes until the last stragglers come from the locker room. For those few minutes, I almost feel comfortable. My breathing returns to normal. I hear giggles from Jennifer and her group, but I ignore it.
Excerpt:
Feeling my old hatred of gym, I glance across the locker room and see Jennifer in red designer shorts and a tight sleeveless shirt to match. She's standing in front of the only mirror in the room turning back and forth.
Feeling my old hatred of gym, I glance across the locker room and see Jennifer in red designer shorts and a tight sleeveless shirt to match. She's standing in front of the only mirror in the room turning back and forth.
Becky
and I slide into our loose camp shorts and a T-shirt, and once they're
on, we race onto the gym floor. Always better to be early for gym the
first day. You never knew what kind of teacher you'd have. My athletic
ability is zero, so I don’t take chances. Once I was a few minutes late,
and the gym teacher in middle school made me run around the gym ten
times. It took me the whole gym period.
"Maybe
it won't be so bad this year, Carolyn." Becky always tries to cheer me
up now. This wasn’t true a few years ago. I had to cheer her up a lot.
Becky’s brothers are just turning five, and they’re both in
kindergarten. Her mom remarried after being divorced for ten years.
Becky was just getting used to her new stepfather when her mom got
pregnant. I remember how miserable Becky was the first year of middle
school when her mom spent so much time with her twin brothers and didn’t
have enough time to help Becky with her homework. Luckily, Becky’s
stepfather is a history teacher, so she got very interested in history
and current events.Becky and I sit on the low seats in the bleachers, but Jennifer and her group saunter into the gym and choose the highest seats avoiding the rest of us. Miss Gaylon, the gym teacher introduces herself and gives us a few minutes until the last stragglers come from the locker room. For those few minutes, I almost feel comfortable. My breathing returns to normal. I hear giggles from Jennifer and her group, but I ignore it.
"Right, Becky, and maybe I'll learn to be a gymnast in ten minutes. Reality check, remember last year?"
"Okay, I'm hoping it won't be so bad."
"You mean like the dentist finding you only have one cavity and filling it the same day?"
"You’re so lame, Carolyn. Since we're all older, maybe she'll treat us differently. People change over the summer you know."
"Look at her, Becky."
Becky
turns to look over at the group at the top of the bleachers and then
turns back to look me in the eye. “You know you have to put that stupid
day behind you.”
I pretend not to know what she’s talking about. “What stupid day?”
Like I don’t remember every detail.
“The zip line day.”
“Oh,
that day,” I say with a combination grimace and smile. “The day I wound
up having to climb off the platform. I wanted to bore a hole into the
ground so I wouldn’t have to walk past them but couldn’t, and everyone
screamed at me: ‘Breathe, Carolyn, breathe.’”
“You
have to admit it was funny the way the gym teacher ran up the ladder
like a squirrel to rescue you. Everyone laughed at how stupid she
looked. Jennifer got the whole class going with that ridiculous
‘breathe, Carolyn, breathe.’” Becky looks behind her to Jennifer. “You
know I wanted to run over and punch her, but I couldn’t because I was
still on the platform, and it was my turn to go.”
“Yeah,
if I had a few more minutes, I would have been able to get up the
courage to grip the zip line and hook myself to it. Stupid teacher
didn’t give me a chance. This not breathing thing when I get nervous
really sucks.”
Becky nods because she knows me so well.
“So
then Jennifer started with that horrible chant, and of course, the
whole class followed her, like always.” My eyes fill with tears as I
remember, and my breathing is getting worse by the minute.
“I
thought it was a dumb idea to do ropes course stuff in school. We did
it at my camp the summer before, and no one was forced to do it. Anyone
could get nervous with Jennifer in front of them,” Becky comforts me.
I
continue talking as if I’m in a trance. “Remember how last year
whenever I ran into Jennifer she would whisper ‘breathe, Carolyn,
breathe,’ so no one could hear it except me. Once she did it just before
I had to go up in front of the class in math. Sometimes she would do
it in front of everyone and, of course, get a big laugh while I wanted
to turn into a piece of furniture.”
Becky
grabs my arm. “Do we have to go back over this again? You need to
forget about it.” She takes her hand away from my arm as I continue to
speak.
“Becky,
I can’t. The thing is it’s this bad movie in my brain looping the same
horrible scenes. The funny thing is, most of the time, she would ignore
me. I would never know what she was going to do. You have to admire
someone so single-minded she managed to get to me at just the right
time.
You remember don’t you? And today did you see how she wore the same outfit as me? It’s spooky.”
My
funny breathing returns as Miss Gaylon tells us to line up on the
yellow line alphabetically. I hope there will be someone to go between
Jennifer and me. No luck. Jennifer is going to be behind me all year. I
hold my breath. I couldn't stand more of the same this year. I pray for
the day to end soon. A glance at my new watch shows me fifteen more
minutes left of the period. Is Miss Gaylon's voice getting lower? What
is that pounding in my ears?
Jennifer turns to face me, and I hear, "Breathe, Carolyn, breathe.” Then my world turns black.
