SHATTER First Pages

I’ve had some requests from LDStorymakers conference attendees wanting to read the winning entry in the First Chapter contest, so I’ve decided to post the first two pages below.  Hope you like it.

SHATTER

by Nikki Trionfo

Kiss a guy?

I’d had sushi once, which felt like eating a pair of lips. I assumed kissing would be similar only without the ginger and wasabi.

Did I want to kiss a guy? Ginger and wasabi were the only good parts of sushi.

Still, I didn’t interrupt my sister as she instructed me over the phone on how to live my life that April morning. I just listened, stretched out on a bench next to busy, gusty tennis courts. I never corrected her when she told me how to live my life, even though she was only a year older than me. Carrie was the one person who thought I would turn out normal. Like, mentally stable. I knew I didn’t act right. I wasn’t certain what that meant about me being normal. But around Carrie it didn’t matter because I could pretend.

Carrie, with her big laugh, and her big plans, and her persuasive ability to see big plans through. She was the lifeline I clung to, floating into touches of normal life, to pajama dance parties and pickle-eating contests and triple dares to run in just our bras around the barn, as if anyone was ever in the peach orchard. We didn’t see anything but an owl.

I didn’t know my lifeline was so fragile.

I never considered there could be people out in the orchard. Sometimes. Dangerous people.

I never thought Carrie was a string that could be cut.

“You need to get out there more. Talk. Kiss a guy,” she was telling me. Dad had decided she was old enough at seventeen to stay home alone for spring break while he went with me to a tennis camp in San Francisco.

Carrie laughed at my silence. “Salem, girl, you can’t get rid of those virgin lips if you never talk.”

“Yes, I can,” I said into my cell over the sound of tennis rackets slicing the air. My hair shifted in the coastal breeze.

“Oh, yeah?” she asked. “You’re just going to grab a guy and plant one on him? So have you picked the lucky f—?”

Those were the last words I ever heard my sister say.

Was she about to say fellow? Fall guy? Was she going to cuss? Do you know how many hours you can lie awake wondering?  Or how much you can hate yourself for not stopping something you never even saw coming?

I know.

I know how tightly you hold on to a lifeline that connects you to nothing.

I know how long you fall.

I fell for four months. Unsupported. Unhinged.

And then I landed.

Shocked.

Shattered.

Trying to figure out what justice could possibly mean when everything I thought I knew about Carrie, everything I knew about that April day, everything I knew about our supposedly empty house in our supposedly empty orchard was wrong.

To find out more about the novel, SHATTER, click here.  To learn how it really feels to win a contest, click here.