My new novel, 17 & Gone, comes out tomorrow, March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I’ve asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question… What haunted YOU at 17? Here’s a vlog from Melissa Walker revealing what she feared would never happen to her when she was 17 years old or ever…
Guest vlog from Melissa Walker
(Melissa Walker at 17, dressed for the senior prom.)
Melissa Walker reveals:
“What haunted me at 17 was that I was afraid I was never going to have a boyfriend… That is the very light way of saying that what haunted me was that I was afraid no one was ever going to love me.”
Watch the full video here:
Melissa Walker has worked as ELLEgirl Features Editor and Seventeen Prom Editor. She is the author of Small Town Sinners, the Violet on the Runway series, and Lovestruck Summer. Melissa manages the daily e-newsletter, iheartdaily.com and handles blogging for readergirlz.com.
Don’t miss the other posts in the series. Throughout the week, more YA authors will reveal what haunted them at 17. Here are the Haunted at 17 posts so far…
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be featuring all the posts in a round-up at the end of the week!
You don’t have to be a writer to take part in this. All you have to be is someone who was once 17.
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The 17 & Gone Blog Tour is all about the images that spoke to me—and inspired and illuminated parts of the story—while I was writing the book. I collected them on my Pinterest inspiration board, and each stop on the blog tour reveals one of these images and a passage inspired by it. Here’s an image that made me think of Abby at this stop at Confessions of a Readaholic.
Kristina Perez has interviewed me for her Madeleine Project. Come find out my answers to some of the most important questions.
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
My new novel, 17 & Gone, comes out tomorrow, March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I’ve asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question… What haunted YOU at 17? Here’s Carrie Ryan revealing how she ended up haunting herself when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Carrie Ryan
(Carrie Ryan at 17.)
“Carrie, you are only 17. Live long and enjoy your life. You are a person, so stand up and be one. In life, not everyone will like you, that is a fact all people must face. In the same respect, many people will like you, so make sure it’s the real you they like.”
—From my journal, May 1, 1995 (when I was 17)
What haunted me when I was 17? Myself. I still have my journals from high school, and reading back over them, there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear: I was always getting in my own way. Trying so desperately to figure out who I was that I wasn’t allowing myself to just be.
I was haunted by this idea that there could be this perfect me out there—that I could find some sort of combination of traits and qualities that would make me work. And by work I mean would make me feel settled in my own skin. I spent a lot of time chasing after an idea of myself that people would admire, love, respect, desire.
Usually I merely appropriated what I saw and liked in others: if I met someone I admired for their mastery of an instrument, then I tried to become adept at an instrument as well. Same with soccer and painting and poetry (ugh, if you asked me what haunts me now, I’d have to say some of the wretched angsty poetry I wrote in high school).
I tried to be the same (same clothes, same taste in music, same likes & dislikes) and I tried to be different (outspoken, brazen, athletic). Even as I told myself I was just expressing who I truly was, I knew there was no such thing. I wasn’t much of anything; instead I became a reflection of attributes that I admired in other people.
In many respects ghosts are apparitions of a person truly alive, and at 17, that’s what I was: a shadow who desperately wanted to believe that she was real. Who didn’t understand what it really meant to “be yourself,” because I was anything but myself (though don’t get me wrong—there were strong flickers of the woman I’d become even then).
When I think back to myself at 17, I think of all the ghosts in school around me and in my mind, that’s who they all still are. It’s always strange to run into those people—my former friends and classmates—now, because most of them have become vibrantly alive.
And I always find it curious that whenever I visit a school, there’s a moment when I feel like that old ghost of myself—the girl at 17 who so desperately wanted to be herself but didn’t know what that meant—stirring inside me. She’s the shadow that still clings to me and whispers, “What happens if you’re yourself and they don’t like you?”
And in the end, I tell her the same thing she told herself at 17: not everyone will like you, but many will. Sometimes it’s an answer that satisfies both of us, and sometimes it satisfies neither.
That’s the thing about hauntings—they’re remnants of a thing that came before, and they’re almost impossible to get rid of.
Carrie Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Forest of Hands and Teeth series, which has been translated into over eighteen languages and is in development as a major motion picture. She is also the editor of the anthology Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction, as well as the author of Infinity Ring: Divide and Conquer, the second book in Scholastic’s new multi-author/multi-platform series for middle grade readers. A former litigator, Carrie now writes full time and lives with her husband, two fat cats, and one large dog in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Don’t miss the other posts in the series. Throughout the week, more YA authors will reveal what haunted them at 17. Here are the Haunted at 17 posts so far…
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be featuring all the posts in a round-up at the end of the week!
You don’t have to be a writer to take part in this. All you have to be is someone who was once 17.
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The 17 & Gone Blog Tour is all about the images that spoke to me—and inspired and illuminated parts of the story—while I was writing the book. I collected them on my Pinterest inspiration board, and each stop on the blog tour reveals one of these images and a passage inspired by it. Here’s an image that made me think of Abby at this stop at Confessions of a Readaholic.
Kristina Perez has interviewed me for her Madeleine Project. Come find out my answers to some of the most important questions.
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
My new novel, 17 & Gone, comes out this week on March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I’ve asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question… What haunted YOU at 17? Here’s Tiffany Trent revealing what obsessed and haunted her when she was 17 years old…
THE WOMAN WHO HOPES FOR TOMORROW
Guest post by Tiffany Trent
(Tiffany Trent at 17.)
What haunted me at 17 haunts me still. Back then, of course, it was fresher. At age 8 or 9, I’d seen a program on HBO narrated by Orson Welles—The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. It was about Nostradamus and his predictions of war, terror, and famine. It made such a deep impression on me that I had elaborate nightmares about it for years, and some of my first stories came from these nightmares. It was the first time I understood war as more than an abstract concept. It was the first time I looked at the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions and understood this was the sort of thing that could happen to us if we weren’t careful.
Lucky for me, I suppose, I was born toward the end of the Cold War. We didn’t have to hide under our desks, but we were afraid, nonetheless.
But there was another war going on, one far more subtle and insidious, and I became aware of it only slowly. I can dimly remember the oil crisis of the ’70s, my legs stuck to the hot naugahyde seats while my mother waited in the gas lines.
My father and I loved to explore the natural world together. Over and over wherever we went, seeking the world my father had known as a child, we found it shrinking. I could only get the barest glimpse of the world he had known as the bulldozers pushed over the trees he’d loved and raked long red scars along the paths he’d walked.
I would often watch the mountains, the trees, the birds slowly diminishing and I realized one day that if all of this were gone, we would be gone, too. I became an eco-warrior in high school, trying to push everyone to recycle, trying to reduce my waste output. My parents had always gardened, and I tried to get my father to use organic methods (sometimes he would, but often he wouldn’t). I campaigned for the Sierra Club and helped clean up Tinker Creek, the Roanoke River, roadsides…whenever I could.
To tell you the truth, I was pretty obnoxious about all of it, and I’m sure many people got tired of my rants about how we were destroying the earth. I was so focused on the land and its creatures that I seldom thought of humans at all, except as pests that needed to be controlled.
I went to college first in wildlife management (and, when that didn’t work out), then in English with a heavy emphasis on environmental literature. I got graduate degrees in both creative writing and environmental studies. I’ve been around the world and seen even more devastation than Nostradamus could have possibly dreamed. And I’ve seen people stuck in the middle of it, trying to make a living in the toxic fields of modern civilization, smiling all the while.
My fear is different than it was when I was 17, but it’s still there. I am less certain of the answers, and I’m more aware that humans are a precious part of the solution, whatever that may be. What I’ve learned from the people I’ve met is that we cannot live in fear all the time. We must turn that fear to love. And I think that is part of why I write what I write, part of why I was so very honored when earlier this spring my novel The Unnaturalists won a Green Earth Book Award Honor for its environmental message.
I still have hope that there is time for a different future, one that does not include the nightmares of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. I still have hope that whatever we fear for ourselves and our children can be turned into the love of doing what’s right for all of us.
Tiffany Trent is the author of the award-winning young adult steampunk fantasy THE UNNATURALISTS and the HALLOWMERE series. She has also published numerous short stories and environmental essays. She lives and writes in the New River Valley of Virginia. When not writing, she’s out chasing chickens or playing with bees.
Don’t miss the other posts in the series. Throughout the week, more YA authors will reveal what haunted them at 17. Here are the Haunted at 17 posts so far…
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be featuring all the posts in a round-up at the end of the week!
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The 17 & Gone Blog Tour is all about the images that spoke to me—and inspired and illuminated parts of the story—while I was writing the book. I collected them all on my Pinterest inspiration board, and each stop on the blog tour reveals one of these images and a passage inspired by it. Here’s the first stop: my guest post on Mundie Moms.
I’m touched and honored to say that Courtney Summers is holding a giveaway for 17 & Goneright now—she’s been so kind and supportive, which means extra-much to me because I admire her like whoa! She’s giving away 17 & Gone (along with an ARC of the anthology Defy the Dark). Enter her Facebook giveaway. This giveaway closes soon!
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
My new novel, 17 & Gone, comes out this week on March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I’ve asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question… What haunted YOU at 17? Here’s Gayle Forman revealing the ghost she was chasing when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Gayle Forman
This is me at 17. I’m the girl in the middle with the large gray cardigan and the blow-dryer pointing at her head. I don’t look particularly haunted, do I? I wasn’t.
I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been in my life. I’d just spent most of the previous year living in England, in this dinky little village of 500 people, and somehow had wound up at this crazy school full of the loveliest anarchists and punks and poets and hippies and musicians and brainiacs and weirdoes you could find. It was the first time in my life I’d felt part of a community like that, and the first time that the suspicion that I’d always harbored—that life could be bigger than it was in my suburban town—was proven gloriously true.
But two months later, I was back in my suburban town and I was miserable and sad and feeling like that entire experience was made-up. That it was a haunting, a spectral reality that hadn’t really existed, that I’d only conjured. I didn’t want to escape my haunting. I wanted it back.
So I chased it. For years. I traveled after high school instead of going to college and I traveled while I was in college. I traveled as a journalist and then when I got married, I traveled around the world for a year with my husband.
But though I loved traveling—loved all the things it taught me and all the ways it changed me and all the people it introduced me to—and though it showed me how big the world was, I don’t know that I captured that sense of largeness I’d found, and had been haunted by, the year I lived in my little village.
I only captured the ghost, so to speak, when I stopped chasing it. When I settled down in Brooklyn, and found the loveliest community of punks and hippies and writers and parents and artists and chefs and activists and teachers and musicians. Life feels strangely big here, even when my daily range doesn’t take me that far from home (though five miles from home is the Center of the Universe). As it turned out, the big life I was looking for all along, it didn’t have so much to do with location (though I can’t imagine living anywhere other than here) so much as finding the meaning in my own life in the context of a larger community.
I will have to stage a mass photo on a bed, with guitar and hair dryer, and then the haunting will truly be over.
Gayle Forman is an award-winning author and journalist whose articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Don’t miss the other posts in the series. Throughout the week, more YA authors will reveal what haunted them at 17. Here are the Haunted at 17 posts so far…
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted you at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like it, and I’ll be featuring all the posts in a round-up at the end of the week!
GIVEAWAY!
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The 17 & Gone Blog Tour is all about the images that spoke to me—and inspired and illuminated parts of the story—while I was writing the book. I collected them all on my Pinterest inspiration board, and each stop on the blog tour reveals one of these images and a passage inspired by it. Here’s the first stop: my guest post on Mundie Moms.
I’m touched and honored to say that Courtney Summers is holding a giveaway for 17 & Goneright now—she’s been so kind and supportive, which means extra-much to me because I admire her like whoa! She’s giving away 17 & Gone (along with an ARC of the anthology Defy the Dark). Enter her Facebook giveaway. This giveaway closes soon!
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
My new novel, 17 & Gone, comes out this week on March 21, and to mark the release of this story about a 17-year-old girl haunted by the missing, I’ve asked some authors I know to join me in answering this question… What haunted YOU at 17? Here’s Libba Bray revealing her disturbing fears when she was 17 years old…
Guest post by Libba Bray
“We were just young and restless and bored.”
—“Night Moves” Bob Seger
(Libba Bray at 17. Photo taken in the library.)
We were seventeen, and sex was everywhere.
It was a constant, high-pitched whine to which our ears had just become attuned, and now we couldn’t stop hearing. On the back row of the midnight movie. In the parking lot of the Pizza Hut. Walking through lake-side parties with plastic cups of beer in one hand. Nestled into backseats in cars with fogged windows. Stretched out on the night-cool grass in the city park with a view of the silent steeple of the First Baptist Church. Navigating the high school hallways, every encounter at the lockers or water fountain or classroom an unspoken invitation to a possible kiss, a probable more.
Our town was small and dusty and unexciting, and the current of our collective yearning was as palpable as electricity crackling along power lines: You don’t see it, but you know it’s there. Sex. My older brother’s friends had gone from protesting my presence to offering me weed and rides to the Sonic in cars with killer sound systems. I watched their fingers strumming guitars and imagined those fingers entwined in my hair, stroking along my collarbone. The lanky, confident strides of long-haired boys loping into record stores, thumbs hooked through Levi’s belt loops was an aphrodisiac. Tanned, muscular arms swooping suds over the hoods of beat-up Impalas and Ford trucks parked in oil-stained driveways brought on fits of girl-klatch giggles. Sometimes, we’d sit on the curb in front of my friend Charlotte’s house baking in the Texas heat, just waiting for a glimpse of John Collins who lived two houses down. When we were lucky, the garage door would rise robotically, and he’d emerge with his amplifier in hand, those long, Robert Plant–worthy curls a gleaming advertisement for our girlish fantasies.
Sex. Romance. Desire. Fear.
It wasn’t always welcome. When my BFF, Eleanor, and I went to the county fair that summer, a toothless, tattooed carny leaned in to secure the metal bar on our Ferris wheel seat and flicked his tongue suggestively at us. “I like to eat pussy,” he said with a cackle and sent us skyward, around and around, pinned and helpless. There was the married businessman at the community theatre who made a habit of cornering teenaged girls at wrap parties. Once, as I perched on the edge of a chair, he surreptitiously stroked his palm up the inside my thigh, under my dress, venturing higher and higher while I said nothing. Truth: It was wrong of him. Other truth: I liked it. I took that wandering hand as proof of my desirability.
I was seventeen and haunted by the idea that I was inherently unlovable. Undesirable. Unwanted. Sometimes, I’d lie on the bed with a hand mirror, examining my nascent woman-face by degrees: freckled, full cheeks. Possibly promising pout. The natural arch of an eyebrow, the only hint of glamour. My face was a prairie—open, plain, colorless, solid and friendly, if not exciting or exotic. I’d lower my eyelids to half-mast, part my lips, fan my hair out on the pillow and try to imagine what I would look like in the throes of passion. Ridiculous? Amazing? Embarrassing? Sexy? Ordinary? Forgettable? I’d study pictures of Debbie Harry and Kate Bush, slapping on gobs of rainbow-palette makeup, then taking it all off again as if I already knew it was a hollow attempt at an enchantment I could never really own. Would I ever be enough as myself, or would I always be chasing an ideal that was not my birthright?
Jokes and sarcasm, these were my twin shields against attachment and a lust I felt deeply but also feared. “No need to look my way, kids, I’m just here for the laughs.” If I really was a joke, I wanted to laugh first.
Occasionally, I dressed up my needs in elaborate role-play fantasies, like the time I went to the Kimball Art Museum to see an Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit with the object of my infatuation, Greg. I’d already spun out an entire fantasy dating life for Greg and me in which we attended theater festivals and drank gin-and-tonics like modern Salinger characters. My body hummed from the nearness of him. That afternoon, as we passed photograph after photograph, I peered into the eyes of the subjects in those black-and-white squares of stark realism placed evenly and carefully apart on the wall and wished that they could answer my questions: “Does he like me? Will he kiss me? Am I enough?” We stood with our hands hanging at our sides, dangerously free, daringly close, our heads cocked at the same angle, and he confessed his crush on my best friend and asked for my help in wooing her. I had not been enough, after all. On the ride home across the flatline of I-35W, The Cars “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” filling the front seat, I felt a mixture of regret and relief. There was nothing to tie me to this dead-end place, after all—for if there was anything more terrifying than sex, it was the idea of the ordinary.
At seventeen, my friends were all doing it. I was the last virgin standing. Giggling, eyes bright and hopeful, they talked incessantly and in detail of their sexual assignations. Names. Dates. Sounds. Smells. Frequency. Facial expressions. Idiosyncrasies. Annoyances. Shortcomings. All the things men secretly fear we talk about when they’re not around. I’d sit on the bed listening, taking mental notes but not truly comprehending. It was like rushing a sorority years before they’d actually consider my application.
My first—and only—high school boyfriend had broken up with me that December. John was a terrific guy, a philosophical, gentle giant of a drummer who’d taken my adolescent hormones to warp speed. After months of backseat fumbling and painfully protracted groping sessions, it was time. I went to the Planned Parenthood located, ironically, next to the town’s one Catholic church, and spent five hours watching sex ed films in order to gain access to the free birth control pills. “You have to start on the first day of your next period,” the nurse informed me. “Then it’ll take a full month before you’re safe.” By my calculations, we were looking at a six-week waiting period. Jesus. I’d explode before then. Some kind of spontaneous sexual combustion. But if there was anything that scared me more than sex and my mother, it was unwanted pregnancy. So wait I did. And when the calendar-circled day finally arrived, I dabbed some Love’s Baby Soft behind my ears and waved goodbye to Eleanor giving me a thumbs up at her bedroom window as I walked out to John’s car.
Except that it turns out I wasn’t ready after all. That night, as we parked in his car in sight of the town’s green-and-white water tower, I picked a fight and we parted ways, him feeling hurt and bewildered, me feeling scared and asinine, knowing I’d ruined everything. A month later, the inevitable break-up followed. I lay on the bed examining my tear-streaked prairie face in the mirror. “There’s something wrong with you,” I said and turned away to cry into my pillow.
June, 1981. My pal, Richard’s, parents were out of town. A few of us decided to gobble down Black Mollies, chase it with beer, and speed our way through his birthday pool party. That’s where I ran into Bob. I’d met him several times before at other parties where we traded banter and outrageously silly dance moves. Tall, dark-eyed, with a quick wit and a Dracula cape—yes, an actual cape—Bob was a perfect candidate for my romantic yearnings. He was aloof. Unattainable. If I could make him want me, then it had to prove how incredibly irresistible I was. How worthy. It was insurance for my gun-shy heart.
Men didn’t leave irresistible women. This is what I told myself at seventeen. When my father came out to us, packed his suitcase and left for Dallas, taking up later with a lover who would become a second dad to me, I blamed my mother. If only she’d been prettier. Sexier. If she’d done some impossible, unnamable thing differently, my father would still love her, I told myself. It was absurd, of course, childish and unsympathetic, and it carried within it the warped DNA of self-loathing. This was the thing I wanted to deny, the truth hiding behind the smile of every boy I longed to kiss: If she could be left, so could I. And why would you open your heart and your arms, take a boy inside you, only to watch him go?
In the living room of Richard’s house, the New Wave kids pogo-d to The Cure, The Clash, Gary Numan. “I need to talk to you,” I said to Richard and motioned him outside by the pool. The speed buzzed in my veins like New Year’s resolutions. Bold and hopeful, it muzzled my inhibitions.
“I really, really like Bob. Can you find out if he likes me?”
Richard glanced through the sliding glass doors at the dance party. The frenetic beats of Rock Lobster. Down, down, down… “You don’t want to do that,” he said in a hedging way I interpreted as both kind and pitying. I felt mortified and strangely validated, as if this rejection offered proof of my fears: Ah, you see? No boy wants to slay a dragon for you. Back to the stable with you, wench! Remember your place.
Ordinarily, my pride would have required a joke at that point to cover my hurt. But the beer and drugs had worn down my defenses. I was raw need, no chaser.
“Why not?” was all I could ask, hating myself for even that much of a follow-up.
“It’s just not a good idea,” he said.
I nodded. “Okay.” Because there was nothing else to say.
Of course, I ignored his advice, following Bob from room to room, letting my shirt slump provocatively off one shoulder, Flashdance style, doing my best to seem alluring until he finally left abruptly, and I drowned my misery in more beer.
It had never dawned on me that Bob was gay; Richard, too. Or that my frequent attraction to gay men was both an Oedipal Circus and an unconscious need to “play house” sexually with boys who might require cover of their own. I was only seventeen and could not yet conceive of the ways in which our hearts, those faulty compasses, those magnificent frigates, conspire at times to keep us at sea, hopeful and searching.
Later that night, Eleanor and I were stopped by a cop on the way home from the party at 2:00 a.m. We’d crossed a median in front of the Denny’s, and after some furious eyelash batting and “Oh my gosh”-ing—sexual politics again—he let us off with just a warning. Terrified and jittery, we swore off drugs forever, a hollow promise as it turned out, and we sat on her bed by lamplight rehashing the night. Greg had finally made his move. They’d nearly done it in Richard’s darkened bedroom while on the other side of the door, the party raged on. I told her about Bob’s rejection and Richard’s discomfiting advice, and she assured me, in the way that sleepy best friends do, that it had nothing to do with me.
But I remained unconvinced.
Libba Bray is the New York Times bestselling author of The Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing); the Michael L. Printz Award–winning Going Bovine; Beauty Queens, an LA Times Book Prize finalist; and The Diviners series. She is originally from Texas but makes her home in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, son, and two sociopathic cats.
Want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a signed hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on this Haunted at 17 post will be entered to win. You can also enter by filling out this entry form.
The giveaway is international. Closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. Two winners will be chosen.
MORE 17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The YA blog WORD for Teens has interviewed me about 17 & Gone. Here’s what I think about blogging as an author, why boy characters are so tricky for me to name, and moving to Mars (random, but I really do think about it).
I shared the places where I wrote 17 & Gone—with photos!—including a cluttered corner of my apartment, two artist colonies, my favorite café, and my beautiful writing space overlooking lower Broadway. Check out my In Search of the Write Space post on Meagan Spooner’s site, and be sure to enter the giveaway… I think you have just one day left to enter!
I’m touched and honored to say that Courtney Summers is holding a giveaway for 17 & Goneright now—she’s been so kind and supportive, which means extra-much to me because I admire her like whoa! She’s giving away 17 & Gone (along with an ARC of the anthology Defy the Dark). Enter her Facebook giveaway.
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
Feel inspired and want to share what haunted YOU at 17? If you write a post on your blog, leave a link or tweet it to me. I’ll send you some 17 & GONE swag!
It’s bright and early on a Monday morning and I can hear this low little whisper in the back cobwebbed corner of my brain. Psst, it goes, trying to get my undistracted attention. This is the week your book comes out.
The voice isn’t taunting me as some voices do: This is the week my book comes out!
THIS Thursday! March 21. I can see the date on my calendar!
Since this is the 17 & Gone release week, I wanted to do something to mark the moment. To celebrate. And what is one thing I like doing, as many of my blog readers will attest to? Running a little blog series and inviting guest authors to take part.
17 & Gone is the story of Lauren, a girl haunted by a host of missing girls. All she knows is the girls are all 17—like she is—and they’re all gone without a trace. It’s this haunting that consumes Lauren and propels the story, as she races to find out why these lost girls are contacting her, and if this means she could be next.
In keeping with the idea of hauntings, I’ve asked some YA authors I know to share posts answering this question:
What haunted YOU when you were 17?
Starting today, I’ll be featuring some of these posts here on my blog—and some of the authors will be responding to this question on their own blogs. I’ll be sure to share those links here, too! And of course I’ll reveal my own disturbed psyche when I was 17, because how could I ask other authors to if I won’t? (To make sure I was being true to my 17-year-old self, I even dug out my old typewritten poems and stories from that year… they are… gutting, embarrassing, and more revealing than I ever imagined.) A peek:
(An untitled poem I wrote about a boy who didn’t deserve a poem, circa 1992.)
I also want to open the question up to you, if you feel inspired to reveal what haunted (obsessed, bothered, consumed) you when you were 17.
And by “you,” I mean everyone and anyone—my writer friends and my other creative friends. I mean readers and book bloggers and people who’ve lived through that year of being 17, which is probably most of you, and who see this post and think you may want to respond to the question. What haunted YOU at 17? If you write a response to this prompt, share the link with me by commenting here or by tweeting at me and I’ll include it in my round-up of all the posts later this week. And in thanks, I’ll also send you some 17 & Gone swag if you’d like some!
The first post in the series will be up today, and it’s by an author who sure knows how to unsettle her readers: Libba Bray. She’s away in Italy this week (my breath caught as I typed those words! Away in Italy!), but she kindly gave me this post before she left so I could share it with you for 17 & Gone’s release. Thank you so much, Libba!
And thank you in advance to all the other generous YA authors who will be taking part in revealing pieces of their haunted pasts.
THE VOICE IN MY HEAD SAYS I SHOULDN’T LEAVE YOU WITHOUT A GIVEAWAY:
Okay, I won’t. Do you want to win a signed hardcover of 17 & Gone, some swag, and a hardcover of Imaginary Girls to keep it company? Every commenter on the “Haunted at 17” guest posts here on this site this week will be entered to win.
The giveaway is international. The giveaway opens right now, this second, and closes 11:59 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 28. I’ll pick two winners from among the commenters and the form entries.
MORE 17 & GONE NEWS:
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
The YA blog WORD for Teens has interviewed me about 17 & Gone. Here’s what I think about blogging as an author, why boy characters are so tricky for me to name, and moving to Mars (random, but I really do think about it).
I shared the places where I wrote 17 & Gone—with photos!—including a cluttered corner of my apartment, two artist colonies, my favorite café, and my beautiful writing space overlooking lower Broadway. Check out my In Search of the Write Space post on Meagan Spooner’s site, and be sure to enter the giveaway… I think you have just one day left to enter!
I’m touched and honored to say that Courtney Summers is holding a giveaway for 17 & Goneright now—she’s been so kind and supportive, which means extra-much to me because I admire her like whoa! She’s giving away 17 & Gone (along with an ARC of the anthology Defy the Dark). Enter her Facebook giveaway.
If you’ve pre-ordered 17 & Gone or plan to buy it this week (thank you so much for your support! it means the world to me!) and can’t be in New York City to get it signed, I have a way to sign your book from afar. Leave a comment on this photo on my Facebook author page and I may just mail you a signed and personalized bookplate.
Melissa Walker has worked as ELLEgirl Features Editor and Seventeen Prom Editor. She is the author of Small Town Sinners, the Violet on the Runway series, and Lovestruck Summer. Melissa manages the daily e-newsletter, iheartdaily.com and handles blogging for readergirlz.com.
If you’ll be in New York City for the NYC Teen Author Festival, come see me and get a signed copy of the book! Full schedule here—look out for me on Friday, March 22 at the Union Square Barnes & Noble or Saturday, March 23 at McNally Jackson or Sunday, March 24 at Books of Wonder!
distraction no.99 