Alt M-10

Name: Mara Rae Rutherford

Mentors: Cupid’s LC and Mónica B.W.

Title: Reinventing Dorothy Weil

Genre: YA Contemporary

Word Count: 65,000

 

Pitch: Dorothy moves to London with one goal: overcome her social phobia by impersonating Kenzie, the most popular girl back home. But when a violent protest exposes her identity, Dorothy must finally face her true self. Dorothy stared at the essay question in front of her and laughed.

Q: If you could have any of the following super powers, which would it be and why? A) Invisibility

B) Telepathy

C) The ability to fly

D) Time travel

 

The question was supposed to be fun. It was the freebie at the end of every English test, ten points that guaranteed even the biggest slacker wouldn’t get a zero. She should just pick one, write a quick essay, and turn it in. But for someone who overanalyzed everything, nothing was ever that simple.

Invisibility. Dorothy didn’t need a super power for that; she’d spent most of her life perfecting the art of invisibility. The only benefit to it—aside from avoiding unwanted attention (and for Dorothy, all attention was unwanted)—was that you got to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, which brought her to telepathy. You didn’t need to eavesdrop if you could read minds, and you didn’t need to read minds if you were invisible. People seemed to forget that Dorothy was present most of the time, which meant she overheard more conversations than she wanted to.

She knew the approximate bra size of every girl in the junior class, thanks to her seat next to two football players in History. She knew who’d lost their virginity at Homecoming, who was doing drugs, whose parents were going through a messy divorce, and who had a you-know-what the size of a cocktail weenie.