Team Krista #1: FACE THE MUSIC

Title: FACE THE MUSIC
Genre: YA contemporary romance
Word count: 75,000

Query:

Tate's dad used to say when words fail, music speaks. It's the one language she could always hear. Not with her ears, which hadn't worked since birth, but with her heart. To the faculty at Ravenswood Fine Arts Academy, she's a cello prodigy. To her peers...let's just say they don't call her Beethoven because they like her.

Through three years of concerts and solos and duels for chair placements, Tate has always been defined by what she lacks instead of what she has. But this year is different. This year she has Silverton. The prospect of a full ride to the most prestigious music college on the West Coast is enough to make the daily torture known as high school worth it. She will win that scholarship and finally find the one place where music overrides her disability. All she has to do is practice really hard, be nothing less than perfect and--duet with pianist Jared Lynch?

In a stunning twist, Silverton decides on a theme competition this year, partnering Tate with the one boy who both frustrates and fascinates her. Jared's rich, he's popular, and he's dating the she-devil rival cellist who crowned Tate Grand Marshal of the freak parade. He also has a passion for music that she yearns to understand and secrets as complicated as Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante. But as they clash over their duet--she wants to play it safe; he wants to risk everything--it's clear he has the power to see through the deafness Tate brandishes like a shield.

First page:

Most of the students at Ravenswood Fine Arts Academy knew one word in sign language. Beethoven. It’s what they called me. And it wasn’t meant as a compliment. I was the mad cellist, and whispers circulated about how I must have sold my soul to be able to play cello “like that” when I couldn’t even hear the music.

It didn’t matter that I’d earned my place at the exclusive high school instead of having Mommy and Daddy pay my way. It only mattered that my talent was unnatural. I was unnatural. And I did everything in my power to make sure they all continued to think so.

My fingers slipped on the C string, bending the illusion of perfection I tried so hard to maintain. The second movement of Dvorak’s "Cello Concerto in B Minor" was supposed to be lyrical and romantic, and damn it all, I couldn’t feel it under the muddled vibrations that swirled around me.

I glanced up to see Cassie, my one and only ally in Ravenswood hell, making faces at me on the other side of the practice room glass. I motioned her inside with a wave of my bow, and she bounced in, tossing her black curly hair out of her eyes.

“Party at Melanie’s house tonight. You coming?”

Absolutely not.

Melanie was second chair to my first. She’d hated my guts ever since I’d beaten her out of the top spot in the orchestra’s cello section my freshman year.