Name: Hannah Contois
Genre: YA Magical Realism
Title: WISHING ON STARS AND OTHER INTANGIBLE
OBJECTS
PITCH:
17-year old Ellena
wholeheartedly believes that she has only one future: get into music school.
She also believes The Fates are plotting to keep her from doing exactly that.
There is Helena the Heinous, the world’s worst foster mother. Then, the world’s
worst composer’s constipation. Finally, Ares, the world’s worst Greek God
trapped in her hometown.
Ellena has a gift. She can play the music that lives in everyone and
everything. When she uses her gift to complete what she thinks is an
ordinary high school assignment, Ares is accidentally summoned and trapped in
her hometown. With him threatening not only her life, but her carefully
planned future, Ellena has to send him back to Olympus before she misses
audition deadlines, or dies at the end of his spear.
Ellena manages - barely - to get help from the other Greek gods who have made
new lives for themselves in the modern world. She discovers that the only
way to return Ares is by completing a quest from the past that once ended in
tragedy. The journey will test her gift, what Ellena knows about herself,
and will force her to examine who she is and what she really wants in
life.
PAGES:
Stillwater High, stale with teenage angst and
an overabundance of cologne and dry shampoo, pulses with sound. The murmur of
students melds into a song so vivacious and alive, it’s a shame I’m the only
one who hears it. My feet set the beat while my mind takes a small sound bite
from every soul, assembling and reassembling them like puzzle pieces of a grand
symphony puzzle. Though I’m missing the bright bobble of a piano from my tiny
emo bestie, who - fingers crossed - should be waiting for me at our lunch table.
Frustration eats away at me like termites
through a house made of popsicle sticks. Writing this audition piece
should be a cakewalk, but it’s turning into a nightmare to finish. Such a
nightmare that I’m on the brink of shredding it into confetti and feeding it to
the lab rats fifth period.
I throw myself into my chair next to Mari, who
eyes the Jock Joint table and their fawning cheerleaders like they are a
science experiment gone wrong. “That’s it," I declare. "I’m
going to die here, stuck in Helena the Heinous’s attic.” I slap the half
empty pages of my audition piece onto the table, my fingers wrinkling the
edges, while setting Darcy, my violin, more carefully at my
feet. “The Fates are making sure that I will never finish this piece in time. I’m
bound to live a pointless life, never playing music again and watching as
my soul withers away. I will float through my silent life, until one
day I’m smothered to death by my forty-two cats.” I huff hard enough my bangs
that Mari cut herself fluff off my forehead.
Mari doesn’t even blink at my declaration.
“You’re allergic to cats, Ellena. Why would you have forty-two of them?” Her
expression never shifts from her perfectly crafted expression of nothingness, a
talent she'd perfected under the tutelage of her mother. Her eyes flick to my
papers, assessing the angry scribbles, like bruises, on the sheet music.
“Music is going well, I take it.” She offers me her small baggie of carrot
sticks.
I snag one, snapping it between my teeth.
“It’s been weeks. Weeks!” I wail, feeling eyes on the back of my head, like a
spider’s web caught in my hair. “And Mr. Michals wants to start recording
soon.” I collapse my forehead onto the pages. “I’m Sisyphus pushing his stupid
rock up the hill for an eternity.” I roll my forehead across the pages sending
up a belated prayer that the ink is dry. “If I don’t get in, I will never
leave. If I never leave, the music will wither up inside me. Who will I be
then, Mari?”
“The same violin-obsessed freak you’ve always
been, just less famous.” She pats the back of my head. “Don’t you think you’re
being a little dramatic?”
“No!” I snap defensively, but sit up and stare
at her, wide-eyed and a touch manic. “I’m not in it for the fame. It’s
something I have to do. Music has been the only thing that has been mine. It’s
what keeps me going. I should just kiss my future goodbye.”
“Most action you’ll have had in years,” she
quips.
I stab a carrot in her direction. “First, shut
up. Second, what good is having a musical gift if I can’t share it?” Though I
don’t really know if it is a gift or curse. Where the rest the world hears
noise - the honking of a car, a woman crying at a bus stop - I hear emotions;
music. Rain on my rooftop is a lonely cello crying to return to the sky. The
wind through my wheezing bedroom window is an inquisitive piano, seeking an ear
to keep awake and spill the secrets of the shadows into. A playground of
children is an entire orchestra piece currently stuffed in my bag I wrote two
weeks ago.
She sighs in exasperation. “This is a
thoroughly beaten dead horse. My parents have a trust or whatever. I’m sure
they would help you. It’ll be a great tax write-off.”
I pause mid-chew. “You’re parents would do no
such thing. They are all for academics - science supporters and mathematicians
- not the arts. They think my dream is as silly as Helena does.” I pop the rest
of the carrot in my mouth. “I’ve been doing nothing but writing the stupid
thing in every spare minute I have, wishing on every stupid star that something
will happen to break through my writer’s constipation. Still nothing.”
“Don’t strain too hard or you’ll hurt
yourself. Is that why you are late for lunch?” She glances over her shoulder at
the clock on the wall. “Very late. Here,” she tosses the rest of the carrots at
me. “Eat and walk.”
The bell overhead rings as I catch them. “I’ll
get you a gold star for your act of kindness for the day.”
“I like gold stars.” Mari stands, adjusting
her overly large sweatshirt and t-shirt that says ‘Who needs a heart when you
can have donuts?’ I snort. She has the best sarcastic clothes and they match
perfectly with her pitch black hair and kohl-rimmed eyes.
“Great, I’ll steal some from Mr. Michals’
office for you.”
She starts leading us out of the cafeteria,
power plowing her five foot frame through the crowd. “He wouldn’t know a gold
star if someone stuck one to his forehead.” Mari stuffs her hand into her
sweatshirt pocket. “I don’t get it. Why don’t you just pick something else that
you’ve written? What about the ones all over your wall? Some aren’t even half
bad.”
I give her the side eye. “Thanks,” I say
drolly. “But I need more than ‘not half bad.' I need soul baring greatness. I
can’t get a full ride with ‘not half bad.’” I sigh. “You don’t get it. You
could get into any school you want. Yale and Princeton have been begging for
you since before you got out of diapers.”
She twists the end of a braided pigtail around
her finger and adopts an air-headed, open-mouthed gape. “Gag me, right?”
I shake my head. “Music school is my only
option. Music is-.”
“I know, I know,” she interrupts, staring at
the ceiling and holding a hand high as though reciting Shakespeare. “Your
destiny. Like it was written in the stars.”
I roll my eyes. “You think I’m being
ridiculous.”
“No,” she shakes her head slowly, drawing out
the word like warm taffy. “I know you’re being
ridiculous. You aren’t alone. We can figure it out together.”
I tug her close, my heart in my throat. Mari
is the best of friends; viciously loyal and genuinely concerned despite her
cool outward appearance. “Thanks, Mari.”
She changes the subject, linking her arm in
mine. “Ready for Ms. Ora’s class?”
I wince. Ms. Ora is a lot on the eccentric
side with at least three different personalities, one of which speaks in a
strange language when she doesn’t think we are paying attention. All last
class, she’d randomly burst into sobbing fits, weeping into a roll of toilet
paper because of a breakup she was - or wasn’t - getting over. Her sadness had
been a great symphony of pain, with peals of string instruments and
soft hiccups of the piano to create an emotional rollercoaster that only she
and I had been trapped on. “Not even a little. Mr. Michals gave me the key for
the studio. Maybe I’ll ditch and write instead.”
