First Pages

Some Tenner authors are posing their first pages, so I thought I'd play. Go here to read more first pages from 2010 debut authors. Here's mine:

Preface

(Or: The Cliff’s Notes Version of My Life Up Until Now)

First off, I’m going to save you from reading seventy-two pages of how I got to a Scottish castle on the Isle of Huracan in the middle of a black churning sea. I need to tell it fast because if you read the long, drawn-out version you’re going to think you’ve heard it all before. It has all the clichés: super-smart, young girl ripped from her cushy life in San Francisco, taken away from her best friend Justine whom she’s known since preschool, relocated to a dreary island castle in Scotland (inherited, of course!) for the summer before her junior year so her parents can see if they want to turn it in to a bed and breakfast, even though they have not made bed nor breakfast for this super-smart girl in years. You’ve heard it a million times, right? Wait, there’s more! The girl finds a secret room attached to her bedroom, because there just has to be a secret room.

            And of course, there’s a monkey. A small monkey that was abandoned at the castle years ago by a Chinese visitor. PETA should give me a medal or something because I convinced Thomas, the whisky-soaked groundskeeper, to move him from the cold little shed behind the castle to the wood cubby by the kitchen fireplace. We lost two cooks over this, but that’s okay. The new cook, Mrs. Findlay, is amazing and she has a beautiful grandson a year older than me that looks like he could be posing for a J. Crew ad every minute of the day. Because there has to be a boy, right? (Thank God!)

Anyway, this monkey knows how to do origami, so his highly original name is Mr. Papers. I know it sounds hard to believe, but he communicates through his origami—kind of like sign language but with paper.

Having a monkey at the castle was a bonus; I would never have been able to get one on my own because Mom is all righteous about caging up animals that live in the wild. You should have seen her face when Thomas first told her about Mr. Papers—I knew the minute she heard the words “monkey” and “origami” she was probably picturing the little guy in a Taiwan sweatshop cranking out origami ornaments for Walmart.