Young adult audiobook scripts

There are eleven tables in the Jefferson High cafeteria, and on my first day I managed to sit at the only one that was a trap. It looked empty. That should have told me something. An empty table in a full cafeteria is like quiet in a horror movie. "You can't sit there," said a girl with a tray. "Is it saved?" "It's Darius Cole's table." "Where's Darius Cole?" "He graduated. Two years ago." She said it like it explained everything. "Nobody sits there. It's respect." I looked at the table. It had a wobble and a carved heart. Here is the thing about being new four times in six years. You learn there's one moment, early, where you get to decide who you are in this building. It doesn't come back. I unwrapped my sandwich. "Then Darius won't mind," I said, and patted the bench. "There's room. I'm Dani." She stared. Then, slowly, like she was stepping onto ice, she sat.

The Ferris wheel stopped with us at the very top, and Theo Park, who is afraid of nothing, grabbed the bar with both hands. "You okay?" "Fine." "You're kind of green." "It's the lights." He was looking straight ahead, like a guy in a dentist's chair. "Talk to me about something. Anything. Not heights." "Okay. Um. I got a B on the chem final." "Great." "My dog ate a sock." "Keep going." "I've liked you since seventh grade." The car rocked. Far below us somebody won a goldfish and screamed about it. Theo turned his head, very carefully, like it might fall off. "You're just saying that to distract me." "Is it working?" "Since seventh grade?" "Since you gave that report on volcanoes and the model caught fire." He laughed. He actually let go of the bar. Then the wheel lurched and he grabbed my hand instead, and neither of us mentioned it, all the way down, or for about a week after.

He read my text at 9:14. It is now 11:40. I have aged forty years. Here is what I sent: "haha yeah." That's it. That is the message I chose, with my whole brain, in reply to "we should hang out sometime." Haha yeah. Like he told a joke. Like I am a person who has plans. My sister says just text him again. My sister does not understand that I would rather move to another state.

You find out a friendship is over the same way you find out about everything now. A number goes down by one. I confronted her at her locker, which was a mistake, because I had no plan past "hey." "Hey." "Hey." Mia didn't turn around. "You unfollowed me." "Did I?" "Mia." She shut the locker. She'd cut her hair, and nobody had told me, and that was somehow the worst part. "I didn't think you'd notice. You haven't noticed much since you made varsity." "That's not fair." "My grandpa's been in the hospital for three weeks, Jo." I didn't know. Nine years of sleepovers, and I had to find it out like a stranger. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I did. You sent a thumbs up." The bell rang. She waited, just a second, to see if I had anything. I'd like to say I did. She walked to class. I stood there holding my phone like it was evidence.

Nobody tells you that when you stop being friends with someone, you still have to stand next to her locker for a hundred and eighty days. We picked them together in August. Side by side, of course. Now every morning it's two people doing their combinations like strangers at a bus stop. I know she keeps gum in the door. I know her combination is her dog's birthday. I know she sits with the volleyball girls now, and that she laughs louder there than she ever did with me. Yesterday her door stuck. I know the trick. You lift and kick. I almost said it. Then she lifted, and kicked, and it opened. She'd figured it out on her own. That's the part that got me.

Coach put me on the anchor leg because Devon pulled a hamstring, not because anybody thought I could run it. I want that on the record. "Reyes. You're four." "Coach, I'm a sophomore." "I can read a roster. You're four." So that's how I ended up in lane five at regionals with my hand stuck out behind my back, waiting. Here's what they don't tell you about the anchor. For three laps, it's not your race. You just stand there and watch your friends empty themselves out for you. Jamal. Then Okafor. Then Tino, coming off the turn with his face all wrong, a full stride behind. "Stick!" he screamed. It hit my palm like a live wire. I don't remember the back stretch. I remember the last turn, and the guy from Central two steps up, and thinking, very clearly: Tino didn't quit. So I didn't. We got second. By a shoulder. Devon cried harder than I did, and he was on crutches.

I rode the bench for twenty-two games, and I can tell you exactly how many splinters are in it. Game twenty-three, four minutes left, down by nine, Coach Lund walked the whole length of it and stopped at me. "Okonkwo. You ready?" "Yes." "You sure? You look sick." "That's just my face, Coach." She almost smiled. "Their point guard goes left every time. You know how I know?" "No." "Because you told the assistant in November, and she wrote it down." She pointed at the floor. "Go take it away from her." I'd thought nobody was listening. Turns out the bench isn't where you wait. It's where you watch.

My brother has exactly one rule for road trips, which is that the driver picks the music, and exactly one playlist, which is forty songs about trucks. "Four hundred miles," I said. "I'm begging you." "Driver picks." "Then let me drive." "You have a permit and a history." "It was one mailbox." We were somewhere in Iowa. Corn on the left, corn on the right, and in the back seat everything I owned, in boxes he had labeled. He was taking me to college. Mom couldn't get the days. He'd used his own vacation and hadn't said a word about it. "Hey, Luke." "Not changing it." "I wasn't going to say that." I looked out at the corn so I wouldn't have to do this to his face. "Who's going to make you turn it down now?" He drove for a while. A whole song, maybe. Then he reached over and switched it off himself, and we listened to the tires all the way to the state line.

Shotgun has responsibilities. People forget that. You are the navigator, the snack distributor, and the one who stays awake. You do not sleep. You do not, under any circumstances, say "I think it was that exit" after the exit. Priya did all three in the first hour. We were six hours from the beach with a paper map nobody could fold. It was already the best trip of my life, and I'd have walked home before I told her.

At Thornmere Academy, your familiar chooses you on the first night, and it says everything about the kind of mage you'll be. Liesl Corvane got a silver fox. The boy next to me got an owl with eyes like lanterns. I got a goat. "There's been a mistake," I told the Proctor. "The Calling does not make mistakes, Mr. Finch." "It's eating my robe." "Then it likes you." The goat looked up at me. It had a rectangle for a pupil and absolutely no thoughts. All around the hall, three hundred first-years were trying so hard not to laugh that several of them had to sit down. "What kind of mage gets a goat?" I whispered. The Proctor leaned in. She smelled like chalk and thunderstorms. "The last one," she said, "was the founder. A goat will climb anything, eat anything, and cannot be told no." She straightened up. "Do try to live up to him." The goat sneezed on my shoe. I decided, right then, to name him after her.

Every student at Wren's Hollow was given a key on their thirteenth birthday, and every key opened exactly one door. Ines Tamber's opened nothing at all. She had tried four hundred and six doors. She kept the count in the back of her spellbook, in pencil, so she could rub it out if anyone looked. "Still at it?" said Corin, falling into step beside her on the east stairs. His key had opened the observatory in his first week. Naturally. "Go away." "Have you tried the cellars?" "Twice." "The Headmistress's study?" Ines stopped walking. "I'm the cook's daughter, Corin. I'm here on charity and a signature. I am not going to rattle the Headmistress's lock like a burglar." "So you haven't." "No!" "Huh." He leaned on the banister, infuriatingly comfortable. "Only I've been thinking. They say every key opens one door. Nobody ever says the door's been built yet." She stared at him. "That's ridiculous." "Probably." "That would mean the school is waiting for me to..." She did not finish. The key was warm in her fist. It had been warm for days, now that she thought about it, and she had put it down to holding on too tight. At the end of the corridor there was a blank stretch of wall between two windows, where the stone was a slightly different grey. She had walked past it every morning for a year. "Corin," she said slowly. "Has that always been there?" "Has what?" She was already walking.

On Assignment Day they call your name, they call your job, and that is your life. Nobody has ever said no. There isn't a form for it. "Rook, Talia," said the Registrar. I stood. Four thousand people in grey. My mother in row nine with her hands locked together. "Water Works. Level Two." It was a good posting. Safe. I heard my mother breathe out all the way from the stage. "Do you accept your place?" That's the script. You say, "I accept and I am grateful." Six words. I'd practiced them in the mirror since I was ten. The Registrar was already reading the next name. "What's the other option?" He looked up. The hall went so quiet I could hear the lights. "I'm sorry?" "You asked if I accept. That's a question." My knees were shaking and my voice, weirdly, was not. "So what happens if the answer's no?" Nobody knew. That was the first crack. Not even he knew.

After the seventh bell, the only people on the street are patrols and my little brother. He's eight. He's fast. And he has worked out that the bakery on Ash Row throws out its burnt loaves at ten past curfew. I catch him at the door with his shoes in his hand. "Not tonight, Pip." "Mara's baby is hungry." "Mara's baby is not your job." "Whose is it, then?" I'm sixteen. I'm supposed to have an answer. So I take my own shoes off. "You watch the corner. I'll get the bread. And if I say run, you don't look back for me." "Would you look back for me?" "That's different." "It is not," says Pip.

Somebody stole the head of Barry the Badger four days before homecoming, and Principal Okoye gave the case to the school paper, which is to say, me. "Why us?" "Because the police laughed." She slid a photo across her desk. A badger costume, neck down, slumped in a chair like a crime scene. "You have until Friday." My staff is one sophomore named Winston who does the crossword. "Suspects," I said in the hallway. "The whole Eastfield football team." "Too obvious. Who else has a key to the gym closet?" Winston flipped his notebook. "Janitor. Coach. Drama club." I stopped walking. "Drama club's doing the fall play Friday," I said slowly. "What's the play?" "Some woodland thing. Talking animals." "And what happened to their costume budget this year?" Winston looked at me. I looked at Winston. Down the hall, behind the auditorium doors, somebody was very quietly using a glue gun. "Get the camera," I said.

Somebody had cut page sixty-four out of every copy of the 1998 yearbook in the school library, and they had done it neatly, with a blade. I only noticed because I was in detention, shelving. There were eleven copies. I checked them all. "Mr. Abbott," I said. "What was on page sixty-four?" The librarian did not look up from his screen. "I have no idea." "You've worked here since ninety-five. It's on your mug." "Then I have forgotten." "All eleven. That's not a prank. That's somebody who came back more than once." Now he looked up. Mr. Abbott has a face like a closed door at the best of times. This was different. This was a door somebody was leaning on from the other side. "Shelve the books, Nora." I shelved the books. At four o'clock he signed my slip, and I walked out, and I got as far as the trophy case in the front hall before I stopped. Because there's a team photo in there. Girls' swimming, 1998, state champions. Nine names engraved on the plate under it. There are ten girls in the picture. I counted three times. Ten swimsuits, ten medals, nine names. The girl on the end is laughing, with her arm around someone, and where her name should be, the brass has been polished so many times it shines brighter than the rest. Behind me, a door closed softly. I did not turn around. "I told you," said Mr. Abbott, very quietly, "to leave it on the shelf."

The new kid was from an actual planet, so by second period everyone on Deck Three had the same question. "What's rain like?" Her name was Sol. She had real freckles, from a real sun, and she looked at the nine of us like we'd asked what breathing was like. "It's water. From the sky." "We know what it is," said Dex. "We have a module on it." "What's it like, though?" That was me. I hadn't meant to say it out loud. She thought about it. Outside the viewport, the same stars sat where they'd sat my whole life. "It's loud," she said finally. "People don't expect that. And it smells like dirt, right before. And you're always supposed to go inside, and when you're little you never want to." Nobody said anything. Dex was writing it down. "You've seriously never..." "Fourth generation," I said. "We get there in sixty years." "Oh." Her face did something complicated. "Then I'll tell you everything. Every day. Start a list."

My parents had me backed up when I was nine, and last Tuesday the backup asked if it could go to prom. "You don't have legs," I pointed out. "I have your face on a screen. That's more than some of your friends bring." "Why do you even want to go?" The screen flickered. It does that when it's thinking. "Because I remember wanting to," it said. "I remember being nine and thinking it would be like a movie. You got to grow out of that. I just got saved." I had a whole joke ready. I put it away. "Fine. But you're not picking the music." "We have the same taste." "We had the same taste."

My brother's hoodie has been in the dryer for six weeks, and nobody in this house will be the one to take it out. We do our laundry around it. Dad hangs his shirts on the line now like it's 1950. Tonight I'm out of socks. So I'm standing in the basement with the dryer door open, looking at a grey sleeve, when Mom comes down with a basket. "Oh," she says. "I wasn't going to." "I know." "I just need socks." "I know, baby." She sets the basket down. The hoodie still has the ski lift ticket on the zipper, from the trip where he broke his wrist and said it was the best day of his life. "We can't leave it forever," I say. "No." "But not today." "No." She breathes. "Not today." She closes the dryer, gently, like there's somebody asleep in there. Then she takes off her own socks and hands them to me. They're still warm. I put them on right there on the stairs.

I have seventeen voicemails from my grandfather, and sixteen of them are him not understanding voicemail. "Hello? Hello. Is it recording? Leo, it's Grandpa. I'm at the store." That kind of thing. I used to delete them. The seventeenth is nine seconds long. He just says, "Call me back, kiddo. No reason." I didn't. I was busy. I don't even remember with what. I play that one every Sunday. I still haven't thought of a reason.

I have been my mother's English since I was seven. Bank, doctor, landlord. So at parent conferences I translate my own report card, and I had never once been tempted to lie. Until Mr. Garrity. "Tell your mother," he said, "that Linh is very bright, but she's stopped turning in work." My mother looked at me. "He says I'm very bright," I said in Vietnamese. "And?" "And he wants me to participate more." Mr. Garrity frowned. He doesn't speak a word of it. But he's been a teacher for thirty years, and he knows what a short sentence sounds like when it should have been long. "Linh. Did you tell her all of it?" "Yes." My mother put her hand over mine. She works two jobs. Her English is forty words, and most of them are prices. She looked straight at Mr. Garrity and used five of the others. "She lies," my mother said. "Tell me slow." I have never been so caught. I have never been so proud of her.

For most of sixth grade I carried two lunches. The one my grandmother packed, and the one I bought so nobody would see it. Hers went in the trash behind the gym. Every day. Rice, pickled radish, a little fish, wrapped like a gift. Then Carlos Ruiz caught me. "Are you throwing that out?" "It's nothing." "It smells amazing. What is it?" "It's just my grandma's." "Dude." He held up a sad sandwich. "Trade me." He ate all of it on the curb, with his fingers, making noises. I sat next to him feeling about two inches tall. That night my grandmother asked if I'd liked lunch. "Can you make more tomorrow?" I said. "A lot more."

Our town has one stoplight, and everybody in it knew I'd gotten into State before I did. The mail lady told the diner. The diner told the church. By the time I got home, there was a casserole on the porch. So when I went in to give Miss Earlene my notice, she already had my last check written out. "You'll want Fridays off till August, to pack." "Yes, ma'am." "And you'll come back at Christmas and act like you don't know how to carry three plates." "I would never." "They all do." She poured a coffee nobody had ordered and slid it at me. "My sister went off in seventy-four. Came home saying 'you guys.'" I laughed. Then, I don't know why, my eyes got hot. "Miss Earlene. What if I'm not smart there? What if I'm just smart here?" She looked at me over her glasses a good long while. "Honey," she said, "who do you think taught you? We did. Go on and show them."

There are two kinds of people in Wirra Creek: the ones who are leaving, and the ones who say they are. Macca's been saying it since Year Eight. He said it again last night, sitting on the ice freezer out the front of the servo while I did the close. "Soon as exams are done. Straight to the city." "Yeah." "You could come. Get a flat." "Could do." "You always say could do." I pulled the shutter down. Out past the bowsers the road ran flat and empty both ways, and the sky was going orange right down to the dirt. "Dad's knee's gone," I said. "Someone's got to run the shearing shed." "That's not your problem." "Whose is it, then?" He didn't have one for that. He picked at the label on his drink. "I'm not staying because I'm scared, Macca. You get that? I looked at it. I like it here." He was quiet a while. "Yeah," he said. "I reckon that's what scares me."

On my first day at the Frosty Barn, my manager sat me down and explained that ice cream was a calling. He was seventeen. He had a lanyard. "Rule one. The scoop is a promise." "Okay." "Rule two. We don't say 'small.' We say 'classic.'" "Why?" "Nobody feels good ordering a small, Hannah. Think." His name was Glenn. He spoke of the soft-serve machine the way some people talk about the ocean. At noon, a bus pulled in. Forty-one campers, all under ten, all holding exactly one dollar. I turned to Glenn. Glenn had gone white. "This is it," he whispered. "This is what the training was for." "There was no training. You showed me where the napkins are." "Hannah." He put a scoop in my hand and closed my fingers around it. "I believe in you." Then he went to hide in the walk-in freezer. I served forty-one classics in nineteen minutes. I have never been so sticky, or so powerful, in my life.

Nobody tells you that drowning is quiet. I must have heard it in training twenty times, and I still didn't believe it until the Fourth of July. Two hundred people in the lake, and me in chair two with a whistle and a sunburn, mostly watching Cass in chair one, because I'd been mostly watching Cass since June. "You're staring," she called over. "I'm scanning." "You're scanning me." "You're in my zone." She laughed and turned back to the water. I did too, a half second later than I should have, and that's when I saw the kid by the raft. He wasn't splashing. He wasn't yelling. He was just sort of climbing, like there was a ladder nobody else could see, with his mouth right at the surface. I don't remember the whistle. I remember the water being colder than I expected, and counting strokes, and his arm, slick, about the size of a baseball bat. He coughed before we hit the sand. Loudest thing I ever heard. After, I sat on the dock with a towel over my head and couldn't make my legs quit. Cass sat down next to me. She didn't say good job. "Half a second," I said. "I was looking at you. I was half a second late." "I know." "If he'd..." "He didn't." She bumped my shoulder with hers, hard. "So now you know what half a second is. Most people never find out. Get back in the chair."

I failed my driving test in the parking lot, before the car moved, which the examiner said was a first for him. His name tag said Dale. He had a clipboard and the eyes of a man who has seen things. "Whenever you're ready." "Okay." I adjusted the mirror. I adjusted the seat. I adjusted the mirror back. "Miss Novak." "Just being thorough." "Start the vehicle, please." I turned the key. The radio came on at full volume, because my dad had driven it last, and what came out was a man yelling about mattress prices. I screamed. Dale screamed. I hit the wipers, the hazards, and somehow the horn, which stuck. We sat there. Honking. A woman with a stroller stopped to watch. "Is that," Dale said, over the noise, "an automatic fail?" "You're asking me?" "I've honestly never had this come up." He let me try again. I passed by two points. On the form, under comments, he wrote one word: "Memorable."

There are four people in my group for the history project, and three of them have just discovered that it's due tomorrow. "We should split it up," says Tyler, who has done nothing. "Great idea," says Bree, who has also done nothing. "Who wants the slides?" "I can do the title slide," says Owen. I have done the research, the outline and nine of the ten slides. They are on my laptop, which is open, facing them. "Guys," I say. "Somebody should present," says Tyler. "Not me, I get nervous." "Guys. It's finished." Silence. Bree leans in and scrolls. "Wow," she says. "We crushed this." I'm going to be somebody's boss someday. I'm taking names.

I missed valedictorian by four hundredths of a point, so this is the speech nobody asked for. That's how I opened. Three hundred folding chairs on the football field, my parents in the fourth row, and Priscilla Chang, who beat me, sitting six feet away trying not to smile. I'd written a different speech. It had the word "journey" in it twice. I left it in the car. "Four hundredths," I said into the microphone. "I looked it up. It was a B plus in gym, freshman year. I couldn't climb the rope." People laughed. My mother put her face in her hands. "I've been mad about that rope for four years. I took nine advanced classes. I gave up most of my friends, and I told myself it was fine, because I'd be standing up here as number one. "Then in April they posted the list. I went and sat in my car. And you know who knocked on the window?" I looked at Priscilla. She'd stopped smiling. "She brought me fries. She said, 'I'm sorry, I know you wanted it.' She'd just won. And the first thing she did was come find the person who lost." The field was quiet. "So here's what second place knows. I spent four years on the wrong race. I hope you all climb every rope. But look down while you're up there. Somebody's holding the bottom of it for you." I sat down. Priscilla passed me a tissue. She'd brought two.

My nan ironed my shirt for the debs three times, and on the third go I understood she was not ironing the shirt. "Stand still." "I am standing still." "You're standing like your grandfather. All on one leg." She did the tie up under my chin, hard enough to make a point. "Who's the girl?" "Aoife Brennan." "And do you like her, or is she just the one who said yes?" "Nan!" "It's a fair question. I went to a dance once with the one who said yes. Lovely fella. Bored me stiff." "So what happened?" "Your grandfather cut in." She stepped back to look at me. Her eyes had gone a bit bright, and she covered it by picking a thread off my sleeve that wasn't there. "He couldn't dance either. Stood all on one leg." The taxi beeped outside. "I like her," I said. "Good lad." She turned me toward the door. "Then for God's sake, ask her something about herself."

There is one kettle in the sixth form common room, and whoever controls it controls everything. This term it's Imogen Shaw. She didn't ask. She just turned up in September with her own mugs and a tin of proper biscuits, and by October there were people who hadn't spoken since Year Seven sitting in a circle like a peace conference. I asked how she did it. She shrugged. "Nobody's horrible while they're holding a hot drink."