Team Mónica # 9 SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW

SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW
Contemporary YA
50,000 words

QUERY

Although it’s been five years since sixteen-year-old Quinn Hardwick last saw Wesley Boyle, she hasn’t forgotten her former childhood friend. Or how he ruined her life.

After all, it’s thanks to Wesley that her parents divorced. Without her mom to keep him in line, her dad’s gambling addiction has spun out of control. And Quinn is convinced that all of her family’s problems can be traced back to the night Wesley opened his big mouth.

When he’s hired to work alongside Quinn at Tudor Tymes, a cheesy medieval restaurant, she’s determined to get him out of her life and even out the score in the best way she can think of:  get him fired.

Unfortunately, getting rid of Wesley isn’t as easy as she’d hoped. He infiltrates her social circle, joins the school band and hijacks her dream trip to England — a trip that is suddenly in jeopardy when her dad needs help paying off his bookie.

But when Quinn finds herself falling for Wesley, she has to figure out whether getting revenge is worth it, or if letting go is really the key to getting over the past. 

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King Henry VIII won’t shut up.

Not the real King Henry VIII, obviously. That would be crazy, since the dude’s been dead for about six hundred years. My King Henry VIII is really Alan Rickles, retired weatherman/local dinner theatre actor.

He’s been talking to me for the past five minutes, even though it should be clear from the platters of food I’m holding that I’m on my way to a table. My arms ache from trying to keep the heavy silver trays balanced—each one is weighted down with a rapidly-cooling turkey leg, tiny potatoes and butter-glazed carrots, long green stems still attached. All of which our customers are invited to enjoy with their fingers instead of silverware, because knives and forks weren’t used in the fifteenth century. At least not in King Henry’s court.

Tudor Tymes management insists we hold true to the little details, even though it means we go through, like, five thousand paper napkins a night. Somehow the fact that paper napkins didn’t exist in the Middle Ages is overlooked.

“Anne. Everyone always blames me for what happened to Anne,” Alan booms theatrically.  “That’s all anyone remembers me for.” 

Of course that’s what we remember him for. Henry had two of his wives beheaded. Not something people easily forget, even five hundred years later.

“What about all the good I did for England?”  Alan strokes his thick brown beard. I’m convinced it’s the reason he got the gig in the first place. That and the thirty extra pounds he gained for the role.