One girl’s daring adventure turns into a
long frightful night lost on the water.
Longing for freedom and adventure, Dannie finds an old rowboat hidden behind the shed and sneaks off on her own to catch up to her new friends. It seems like a simple solution … until everything goes wrong.
Dannie soon discovers this lake is more than just vast. It’s full of danger, family secrets, and ghosts.
Who is Dannie?
Dannie is an almost 15-year-old girl who likes to keep her hair super short so it doesn't get in her face when she goes skate-boarding. Most of her friends are boys back in California, and that's just fine with her. She hasn't grown much of a figure, and she's okay with that, too. She prefers to wear over-sized T-shirts and boys' jeans. They're more comfortable and better for moving around. She thinks staying in a cabin by a lake would be fun if it were with her dad or her friends, where she could go jet-skiing or fishing. However, she's stuck on this lake with her grandma, and she predicts it's going to be a long, boring ten days of doing nothing. She's wrong about that.
Dannie is an almost 15-year-old girl who likes to keep her hair super short so it doesn't get in her face when she goes skate-boarding. Most of her friends are boys back in California, and that's just fine with her. She hasn't grown much of a figure, and she's okay with that, too. She prefers to wear over-sized T-shirts and boys' jeans. They're more comfortable and better for moving around. She thinks staying in a cabin by a lake would be fun if it were with her dad or her friends, where she could go jet-skiing or fishing. However, she's stuck on this lake with her grandma, and she predicts it's going to be a long, boring ten days of doing nothing. She's wrong about that.
From Chapter Two
Mom and Dad gave me some tight hugs and gave Grandma some uncomfortable ones. Shouting a few last-minute rules at me from the car windows, my parents drove off for their two weeks of European bliss. The sun was setting, and shadows covered the yard. What had looked like a huge piece of land in the afternoon now looked small and forbidding. Despite the humidity, I felt a swift cold breeze, and it made me shiver. I went inside.
While Grandma finished the dishes, I moseyed around the house looking at all her dusty knickknacks on the shelves, yellowed Reader’s Digest magazines, and original art on the walls. She had a lot of oil paintings of the lake and surroundings. The scribble at the bottom right corner of each looked like it might have been Hal Garrison, but I only guessed that it was my grandpa’s name because the pictures were in his house. If I’d seen them in a gallery or something, I’d have never figured out what the signature was supposed to be.
I stepped into the bedroom that would be mine for the next ten days. It wasn’t a huge room, but it was nice enough. All the decorations were very boyish, I thought. Pictures of boats had been neatly spaced on the wood-paneled walls. The bedcovers were faded shades of red, white, and navy blue with gold anchors on them. Even the lamp had a sailing theme to it, with a brass base that had a chain and anchor by the switch. I have to admit it didn’t seem to match Grandma’s style. I saw her as more of a lace and soft pastels kind of person. Maybe Grandpa decorated the room when Grandma was living in California, and she hadn’t taken the time to change it yet. Even so, why would Grandpa decorate the room like it was meant for a boy to live in instead of making it girlish for my mom?
My suitcase was on its side under the window. I walked over to it, thinking I’d get out my bag of deodorant and toothpaste and stuff and take it down to the bathroom. As I bent over to unzip the case, something out the window caught my eye. I straightened up, pushed the slightly open curtain all the way to the side, and looked out. My bedroom had a view of the front side of the garage and all the neighboring cabins in the distance. I noticed how the woods came up right behind the garage and then peeled back away to make room for the tourist village. It was getting pretty dark out there, and the shadows between the trees were thick.
My reflection in the window was see-through, and I wondered for a moment if that’s what I would look like if I were a ghost. I stared at myself in the glass and then through my own eyes to the yard beyond. Nothing out there moved at all, so I couldn’t think what had caught my eye in the first place. My right hand let go of the curtain, and the material swung back into place.
But I swear, for a split-second, before that curtain covered the window, my reflection changed. It was higher up, like I’d grown an inch or two. The hair was longer. The shoulders wider, like a teenage boy’s. My reflection was grinning, and I didn’t think that I was. What on earth would I be smiling about?
Quickly, I swiped the curtain aside again. Silly, really. That reflection showed plain old me, looking as dorky as I usually do. I wasn’t smiling.
Pretending that my neck hadn’t stiffened up as much as it just had, I pulled the curtains closed so tight, they overlapped. Forgetting all about my suitcase, I backed away from the window and right out the bedroom door.
About the Author
Books.
I've always liked writing, but what I really wanted to be when I was younger was a performer. I grew up in Southern California and got my degree in Theater Arts from U.C. Irvine. I wrote a lot, but it was just a hobby. Well, a time-consuming hobby. While in college, thanks to a summer of ghost-hunting with a group of friends after graduating from high school, I spent every Winter Break, Spring Break, and Summer writing a horror novel on a laptop my dad would bring home from work. Technically, this was my first YA novel, as all the main characters were teenagers. Alas, it pretty much stinks, so I never did anything with it. Plus, as you recall, I wanted to be an actress/singer, so I was doing back-to-back shows all through this time and never put much thought into how to fix the darn thing up and get it published. It’s still in a box. Maybe someday I’ll come back to it.
After the horror novel, I began writing a series of original fairy tales and a couple grown-up fantasy novels. I slowly discovered that I liked writing more than acting. In 1994 my first story was published in Catalyst Magazine, and my first original play (a children's musical) was produced in Los Angeles. From that point forward I was hooked and stopped writing as a hobby but with purpose. I did act professionally for a long time, and now I do community theater in Nashville with my family for fun. I joined SCBWI Midsouth in 2004, and it’s because of a couple revision workshops I took with them that I decided to rewrite my fledgling mermaid novel into something a publisher decided to put into print: Cry of the Sea. I’m a big fan of looking back into that box full of poorly written ideas and trying again. That is the main theme of my blog Write and Rewrite.
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