An Agent's Inbox #25

Dear Agent:

During the first few weeks of her freshman year, the dead just won’t leave Becky alone.

She’s always seen them, and has managed to tune them out, or at least hide from them. Since she started high school, though, they’ve been more insistent--appearing repeatedly and unexpectedly, making eye contact, asking questions.

It’s bad enough that Becky’s only friend has lost interest in her, leaving her to fend for herself against a dismissive mother and abusive brother, and that her name has been scrawled in a bathroom stall on a list of “Ugly Freshmen.” So, when a spirit pounds Becky’s bedroom door, calling her name, demanding she come out, she breaks, realizing that the dead have conspired with the living to hijack her sense of safety and self-worth.

Becky is only one of the desperate souls who have called this house home during its one hundred-year existence--souls like Charles, who isolates the family he builds the house for at the beginning of the century, and Barbara, whose husband is taken prisoner during the war in the Pacific; like Lester, an unemployed loser who prefers MTV to social interaction, and Preston, an unfulfilled public employee who hosts punk-rock shows in the house’s basement. They can help Becky reclaim her life and correct her trajectory, but only if Becky is willing to face her fears of both the living and dead and take back her sense of self.

Alternating between five perspectives and time periods, FRIDAY NIGHT AT HUMBLE HOUSE (literary fiction, 104,000 words) tells the story of these characters and the house that shaped them. As they search for meaning in their tangled lives, they will affect each other in ways they could never understand--and will never know.

For twelve years, my nonfiction has appeared in several print and online music magazines. Since earning my bachelor’s degree from Lake Forest College, I have taught literature, writing, and journalism to high school students in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. I received my master’s degree in 2014 from DePaul University’s School of New Learning, where I studied writing, editing, and publishing, and have applied what I learned to my classroom ever since.

As requested, I have pasted 250 words of my manuscript below. Thank you for this opportunity and I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

D.E.

FRIDAY NIGHT AT HUMBLE HOUSE

Becky McLaughlin – September 21st, 2011

“Sir,” it invaded her subconscious, a voice like a blade of grass tickling her ear. "Sir, you're not allowed to sleep in study hall."

Becky emerged from limbs that crissed across her desk and rested her chin on a bare, freckled wrist. It took two seconds for her to identify the blurry silhouette hovering above her as Mr. Stucor, her study hall teacher. "Sorry," she said, unable to correct his mistake, uncertain how.

"Sir?" someone whispered behind her. "Oh my g**, did he just call her sir?" One snicker sparked another until laughter bubbled all around Becky, circled her until she swore she heard someone say, "Well, she does sort of look like a guy."

The laughter echoed in her mind, disrupting the small, unprotected piles of self-confidence she had been storing there. Did he really think I was a boy? she wondered. Am I dressed like a boy today or something? To distract herself, she fixed her gaze on the shallow trough on her desk where a pencil or pen is supposed to sit; some artist, who had carved "F** U" into the resin, said what she couldn't.

She felt her phone purr silently in the thigh pocket of her pants. With a sly, subconscious motion, she crammed her hand into her pocket and tucked her phone in the nook of her palm. After poking the touch screen a couple of times, she read a triptych of texts from Frances:

"someone wrote something in the c hall bathroom about u”