Jennifer McMahon

"Dreamy, even quasi-mystical nonconformity" - Kirkus

"In this emotionally powerful and realistic story... readers are swept along with Maggie’s swirling feelings, making it easy to understand how easily this fragile, sensitive girl could lose herself... a well-written tale of self-discovery."
- School Library Journal

"McMahon has a talent for successfully getting into the psyches of her teenage characters' heads, providing them with both the wisdom and the innocence to make them believable." - Curve

"Maggie’s narrative voice is compelling, dreamy and intense in a way that recalls Angela Chase’s voiceovers for My So-Called Life... and the book is poignant in depicting the contrast between her self-image as “Frankenstein girl” and the heated, fantasy-tinged intimacy she experiences in her affair with Dahlia.... readers will have no trouble recognizing the combination of disaster and glory that so often marks first love."
- Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books

"The outrageous journey of Maggie and Dahlia's friendship turned love relationship leaves them and the world around them eternally altered. This coming-of-age story of heartache and hope takes the reader on Maggie's journey to discover her true self and demonstrates how one can be transformed by the power of a first love." - Children's Literature

Fifteen year old Maggie Keller was once a popular girl, the star of school plays. When a car accident kills her mother and leaves Maggie with a limp, she turns into Freak Frankenstein Girl, who just wants to be left alone.

When the new girl at school, Dahlia Wainwright, asks Maggie to be in her band, Maggie knows right away she's found a kindred spirit. Everyone thinks Dahlia’s a witch and a freak, but Maggie is captivated.

Dahlia's unconventional family soon becomes Maggie's new world -- a world where everyone has an alternate personality, and dolls have the power to control fate. What begins as a peculiar friendship soon develops into something much stronger… and perhaps more dangerous for both girls.

CHAPTER ONE

All the girls in tenth grade hate Dahlia Wainwright. They say she's a witch and that if you touch her, you're cursed. They say she’s so fugly the boys have to put a bag over her head to bone her. But as far as I can tell, Dahlia doesn't waste her time with boys. And the truth is, the girls hate her because she's prettier than any of them and it's not that all dressed up with blue mascara kind of pretty like Sukie Schwartz or Heather Tomasi. It's the kind where she could be covered in mud or stung from head to toe with bees and her beauty would still turn heads. The girls hate her because the boys all want her. The boys hate her because they can't have her. So Dahlia hangs out alone between classes, sneaking out to the soccer field to rest her back against the goal and smoke. Today, during lunch period, she’s right where I knew she’d be: braced against the white goal frame, the net behind her like a spider web, while she watches to see who might wander in.

I had walked into the cafeteria and the first thing I saw was Sukie Schwartz holding court at a long, rectangular table. I heard the buzz of their talking, laughing, teasing, and it mixed together in this sickening way with the gray meat smell of overdone hamburgers, perfume, sweat, new sneakers and floor wax. I hurried to the nearest exit before Sukie could catch my eye, and now I’m hobbling my way out to the soccer field where a single girl stands smoking and reading.

I say hobbling because I am a Frankenstein girl. The bones in my right leg are held together with screws and a metal rod. I walk with a stiff-legged limp. I used to use a cane, but don't anymore. My father says I still should, that I haven't healed completely from my last surgery, but he’s not the one who has to deal at school. I mean, the movie monster limp is bad enough, right?

Dahlia, I’ve learned from the gossip, just moved from Delaware. I've here lived in Sutterville, Connecticut my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident.

Sometimes it seems like my life is divided into two halves. I call them BTA (before the accident) and ATA (after the accident). I don't say this out loud or anything, but it's how I've got things arranged in the file cabinet inside my brain. It's been less than two years since the accident so the ATA file is pretty small.

If I was giving you a tour of my Sutterville, I’d show you the Elff soda factory where my dad is sales manager, the big blue Colonial house we live in, the town pool where I used to go to swim and flirt with boys with my ex-best friend Sukie Schwartz, the Paramount Theater where I had my first kiss with Albert Finch during some sci-fi movie, and the bench in front of Tip of the Cone where my mother and I would sit and eat our brownie sundaes with mint chocolate chip ice cream and extra nuts whenever we had something to celebrate.

I’d also show you an intersection three blocks from the junior high and it would look like any regular four-way stop to you, traffic moving north and south, east and west. But it’s not just any old intersection. It’s where my mother died.

"Hey," I say to Dahlia as I limp straight back towards the net. She keeps reading and smoking her sweet-smelling, crackling cigarette all the way down to the filter before crushing it out under one of her worn combat boots.

The truth is, in my old life, my best-friends-with-Sukie life, I would have thought a girl like Dahlia was a total freak and probably made fun of her behind her back, rolling my eyes at her clunky boots, Salvation Army wardrobe and pin-up girl lipstick which is way too dark for her complexion. But in my new ATA life, things are different. I have no friends. Not real ones anyway. No one gets me. I spent all last year being the freakiest girl in our class and everyone walked around me carefully, holding their breath like I was made of smoke -- one wrong puff and I would disintegrate.

I want tenth grade to be different. I want someone to get me, not just pretend to out of pity, but to really get me. I’ve been watching Dahlia Wainwright for two weeks now -- long enough to think that maybe she’s the one.