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Chloe Rand's life is great. She has a serious boyfriend, she's about to start her junior year of high school, and she has a tight group of girlfriends. But when her boyfriend moves cross country, he dumps her cold right in the airport terminal. Chloe's devastated, and soon learns that when you're the prettiest girl in school and totally unattached, everyone starts treating you differently. Girls don't trust you, guys don't know what to make of you, and everyone assumes you're spoiled, dumb, or both.
Chloe realizes she's been living the last few years in a bubble and decides to do something about it. But when she falls for Billy, a total geek, will it make her situation better...or worse?
Scary Beautiful...a romantic comedy for every girl who has fallen for the wrong guy.
Scary Beautiful
Simon Pulse
December 2005
ISBN: 068987619X
Niki's originally from Colorado and has been dying to set a story there. Though Scary Beautiful is Niki's tenth book (the first six were romance novels written under the name Nicole Burnham), this is the first one set in Colorado. The town of Vista Verde doesn't really exist, though there is a large ranch called Vista Verde near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Niki put her fictional town of Vista Verde next to the real town of Boulder.
"(a) humorous and delightful story...a definite purchase for Burnham fans."
—Kliatt
Chapter One
No one will admit it, but the first day of school rocks. Not the starting classes or getting loaded with homework part of it (duh). It's the seeing everyone again part. It's getting all the gossip on who hooked up or broke up, who went on cool vacations to Maui (preferably sans parents) or had catfights at sports camp. And—best of all—it's trying to predict which of the quiet, semi-invisible girls got a dye job, lost weight, or nabbed some fantastic summer job in Paris and will therefore be angling to move into the 'in' crowd.
My friends and I are always as hot to guess who'll be the year's surprise social superstar as my dad is to bet his retirement fund on whatever new-ish company he thinks will be the next Big Thing on Wall Street.
Conversely, my friends and I also like to speculate about who'll fall on their face, becoming the pariah of the year. It's never a nice thing to see happen, but such is life.
This year, though, I'm too depressed to notice any of the usual first day of school maneuvering, even though everyone around me seems electrified with the possibilities of the year ahead.
The reason why is simple. Sean's not here.
Sean Norcross and I have been together since roughly halfway through eighth grade (okay, there's no "roughly" about it—it's been ever since he kissed me at exactly 7:48 pm on January 10, while standing in the snowin the parking lot after the school talent show.) So starting junior year with him all the way across the country sucks.
I mean, who in their right minds moves from Vista Verde, Colorado, all the way to New Haven, Connecticut, when they have three kids in high school? Well, that's just what Professor and Mrs. Norcross did. Sean's dad accepted a job teaching at Yale, since apparently the Ivy League's more fulfilling professionally than the University of Colorado. The Allied van left a month ago, headed east on I-70 with all the Norcross's furniture and at least a dozen boxes full of Professor Norcross's books on Molecular Biology. However, Sean, his younger brother, Joe, and his older sister, Darcy, were allowed to stay behind with their next door neighbors for a couple weeks to finish up their summer jobs and tell everyone goodbye before they started at their uppity new East coast private high school.
It sucked, seeing his house standing empty like that, knowing Sean was down to his last few days and would be following that bright orange moving van out of town.
Three days before he had to leave, Sean and I looked up New Haven on Mapquest and printed off the driving directions, just for kicks and giggles. I didn't tell Sean, but I wanted to do it just so I could mentally find my way there when I'm trying to go to sleep at night. It's exactly 1,867 miles from Vista Verde to New Haven, which Mapquest says should take only 28 hours and 10 minutes to drive. Even if that time includes bathroom breaks and stops for gas, it's a long haul.
While counting miles is probably as good as counting sheep when I need to get myself to sleep, seeing that distance all plotted out on paper made me feel like I wasn't about to lose an appendage. Like I could draw a line from Point A to Point B and still connect with Sean.
Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to think that Sean would want to try to make it work across that long distance, too.
But no. Even if I could make that drive to New Haven, there wouldn't be a point. Because when Sean saw that map, it was like a switch flipped in his brain that said, "Babycakes, this relationship is soover." Our funky, cool connection, the one that enabled us to find each other instantly on a crowded football field or during a school assembly, no matter what else was happening around us, snapped just like that.
Only I didn't know it.
So this morning, instead of doing my usual people watching while I stand in junior hall, making mental notes about who's likely to make the cheerleading squad out of nowhere and who's going to wish they were invisible by the end of the month, I'm facing my new locker, messing with a combination lock that doesn't want to work, and I'm about two deep breaths away from tears. Everyone's staring at me as they walk past, and even though I'm used to people staring at me because of how I look, today I just don't want to deal.
I glance at the card with my new locker combo on it again, then try to dial the numbers once more, wishing I could disappear inside my locker, just for a few hours, and stare at nothing but the cold, dark metal.
Then I realize that even doing that won't give me peace. If I get the stupid lock open, it's not like I can put Sean's picture in the back anymore without looking totally pathetic. At least, not once everyone learns that he dumped me cold while having breakfast at Pour La France in the main terminal of DIA, less than an hour before he hopped on the plane.
Who ends a relationship of two and a half years in an airport over scrambled eggs and French toast?
I feel Amy Bellhorn approaching before she speaks, and I will myself not to exude the aura of a red-eyed, horribly depressed dumpee.
"Chloe!"
"Hey!" I turn toward her, trying to sound equally excited. Since she's my best friend, I know how much she loves the first day of school—even more than I usually do. I give her a big, happy-first-day-of-junior-year smile before focusing on my locker again. "What do you have first period?" I ask, sounding chipper enough to deserve an Oscar, given how I feel. "I'm in Honors English."
"Mr. Whiddicomb or Mrs. Gervase?"
"Whiddicomb. You too?"
"Yep! This rocks...we can catch up. So how'd things go with Sean before he left? Did Darcy and Joe give you any time alone together at the airport? God, you must be missing him like crazy already. I'd have called when I got my class schedule, but I knew you two wanted to spend as much time together as possible and then I was clothes shopping to get ready—"
"Thanks." I haven't told anyone about the breakup yet, not even Amy. I know I'll probably tear up the minute I say Sean's name, and I definitely will once anyone asks the how did it happen? question. No way do I want to go on a sniffly, ugly-ass crying jag on the first day of school.
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