The original first page, it changed in subsequent drafts…
Chapter 1
Arrivals
The day Mark Knightly transferred to Sunrise High from some snooty boarding school in England was the day Mouche and I began the Boy-Rating Diaries. They weren’t written in the traditional manner although they started that way. We wrote our thoughts on pink notepaper and used a feathered pen popular with countless teenage girls from previous generations. Suddenly, the secret diary became a blog that ended up as a how-to-guide to dating within the hallowed halls of our Performing Arts School. We went from social wallflowers to social winners in under a month all because our fantasy men walked the halls one surprising day in September and stopped to ask my best friend Mouche directions to home room. ‘And not a minute too soon,’ Mouche noted, ‘I was beginning to think high school could only be fun in movies.’
It was our junior year and from the instant we took Mark’s photo, blogged and tagged him, the meanest girls in school, Teegan, Freya, Brooke and Tory (the Princesses), sat up and started to take notice of all the great advice we shared about boys in our weekly column, The Sunrise High Newsfest. Of course, Mouche (pronounced in the French way – Moosh) never really planned to let love into the picture but that was before Mark Knightly entered our world and we hit on the idea of dating twelve different boys, one for each month.
Mark was the first month, his friend Jet the next. Thoughts of them filled our every waking moment but that’s not what I’m meant to say and certainly not how it seemed to others at the time. Neither Mouche nor I realized that the start of the new school year would result in us both scribbling ‘I heart Mark’ and ‘I heart Jet’ in the spaces of our play scripts. But I digress.
