QK Round 2: Supergeeker vs. Alien Prep School Conspiracy

Entry Nickname: Supergeeker
Title: SUPERGEEK
Word Count: 60,000 words
Genre: YA Fantasy

Query:

Fifteen-year-old Talis Brooks knows she’s a socially irrelevant, puberty challenged dork. The closest she’s ever come to physical activity is being a Mathlete. But when puberty kicks in overnight, Talis doesn’t just go up a cup size, she gains the strength and agility of a superhero. Suddenly she can toss around 250-pound bullies, fight like a ninja and her butt totally fills out her jeans.

Talis has seen enough movies to know she has to keep her powers a secret. But when pretty boy Cole is brutally attacked by band geeks, Talis is the only one who steps up to save him. With her school in danger, and a hooded gang out to get her popular classmates, she forms a secret identity to protect them. Now there’s a blog tracking her every superhero move, the mean girls are out for her blood and she’s stuck in a love triangle with Cole and her superhero alter ego. Plus there’s that whole psychotic gang situation.

As the attacks spiral out of control, Talis must find the mastermind behind them, and figure out how to stop them, before her superhero secret is exposed.

First 250:

I just don’t want to die. Of humiliation. Besides getting straight A’s, that’s pretty much my only goal this year.

Coach Marshall, evil fiend in tiny man shorts, is out to thwart my plans. When he divides us up for volleyball, he puts me with the people voted “Much Cooler Than You.” This is not where I belong.

Marshall busts me sneaking onto my usual court—the one with my asthmatic friend Jane, Weird Cape Billy and the kid wearing a back brace. My people. He waves me over to the last court. “Talis, I told you, you’re over there today.”

“Coach—” I say, but he’s already moved on, yelling at two freshmen beating each other with the soft baseball bats.

Obviously whoever made PE mandatory isn’t an easy bleeder with little to no physical coordination. I put it off until sophomore year, hoping I’d get breasts before having to engage in the horror of group showers. Unfortunately, puberty is eluding me.

I take my time walking over. Standing on the edge of the group, I try to look busy, pretending to read the safety guidelines listed on the wall. I firmly knot my shoes. I pull up my gym shorts, which are always sliding down, even with the top rolled.

When I look up the Trifecta are only a few feet away.

Versus

Entry Nickname: Alien Prep School Conspiracy
Title: BETTER LIVES
Word Count: 94,000
Genre: YA Sci-fi

Query:

Seventeen year-old Marc Andrews attends an exclusive prep school, but he should be in reform school. He’s stolen a test, blackmailed a teacher, and taken advantage of more girls than he can remember…and that’s just this semester. Then he meets Bethany. Not only hot, she calls him on his usual shit. He respects that. And he’s shocked to realize he genuinely likes her. But after their first date, Marc wakes up in a mental institution. He’s told he killed Bethany after passing out while driving drunk. Marc imagines life can’t get any more messed up…until he discovers the loony bin’s a fake and he’s been kidnapped by aliens.

The aliens can see the future where Marc’s the President who starts World War III. Because he proved himself unable to become a better person, they’ve replaced him to prevent Earth’s destruction. Being an accidental murderer is bad enough, but Marc’s shocked that he attains a Hitler-Stalin level of evil. And with the aliens’ empathy machine, he’s forced to experience his victims’ suffering from the averted future.

Marc’s initially grateful to his captors for preventing him from becoming a monster. That is, until he learns an alien faction, that includes the doppelgänger who replaced him, want Earth for themselves. And they’re conspiring to kick off Armageddon as previously scheduled. Marc can’t let the horrors he’s experienced happen for real. It’s up to him, with help from Bethany (apparently an alien and not dead), to escape, save the planet, and maybe even become a decent human being in the process.

First 250 Words:

When Gil and Lew came to my dorm room with the idea of stealing the physics final, I normally wouldn’t have considered such a dumbass move. It wasn’t that I had any moral objections to cheating or stealing. An “A” in one class, even Jeffrey Taylor’s, just wasn’t worth the risk of getting kicked out of prep school.

But these were special circumstances. I had opportunity, thanks to Gil and Lew. I had motive, thanks to a shitty semester with Mr. Taylor. And I had an ace-in-the-hole, thanks to hooking up with fifteen year-old Heather in Mr. Taylor’s classroom.

It was snowing by the time I reached Maple Street with its tidy cottages. The white stuff powdering the sidewalks and clinging to the branches sweetened the street’s already cloying New England charm and made me want to puke.

I slipped to the back of Mr. Taylor’s small Cape Cod. Gil was waiting for me.

“Door’s locked.” His breath was visible in the cold.

“I’ll open it,” I said.

Gil gave me a classic Gilbert and Lewis vacant look. The two of them might as well have been brothers, both with Nordic good looks, several inches over six feet…and not too bright.

I took out my tension wrench and wide-tipped pick.

Gil’s jaw went slack. “I’ve seen this shit on TV, Marc. You’re going to pick it?”

“Yeah, if you shut up and let me concentrate for a minute.”

The doorknob turned loosely in my hand. Broken, so, I’d only the deadbolt to deal with.