Sneak Peek!

We’re delighted to share a never-before-seen excerpt of Jenny Hale’s Out of the Blue! Read on for more!

Chapter One 

Nora Jenkins was not in paradise. She had a view of white cinderblocks, a lukewarm chicken salad sandwich in hand, and another tough week ahead of her.

She tucked her wayward chestnut hair behind her ear and opened the text from her grandmother, June, that had pinged her phone. Under the words “Three weeks to go” was a scene of a white beach and turquoise water, palm trees dotting the edges, their green fanned leaves swaying in the coastal breeze. Nora had never been to the beach, and she had been so looking forward to her tropical honeymoon that hadn’t come to pass.

Gram had been trying to convince Nora to take a summer trip. Her grandmother had even gone so far as to print out pictures of the cottage on the Gulf Coast she wanted to rent, putting them into a folder and sending them with Nora to school. Gram hadn’t needed to text her anything. The glorious images of a clapboard bungalow, sitting on the pearly coastline were out of the folder and spread across her desk, beckoning her.

Nora set down her sandwich, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, imagining the view from the bench swing on that sandy porch of the cottage on the edge of paradise, but instead of salty air, she breathed in the scent of dust and the unique aroma she could only compare to the rubber of a playground ball, even though there wasn’t a single piece of recess equipment in her high-school counseling office.

She opened the text to reply to Gram and deliberated over what to say. Her eighty-five-year-old grandmother wasn’t getting around as easily as she used to, so how could they take a trip of this magnitude? But living in Nora’s cramped apartment wasn’t the best for Gram either. She spent her days cooped up in that little space, waiting for Nora to come home.

Suddenly aware of the heavy tick of the wall clock, Nora stared at her sandwich. Only an hour left before dismissal—thank goodness.

After rolling her head on her shoulders and taking a bite of room-temperature chicken salad, Nora started to reply to the text, but a knock on the doorframe pulled her attention away from her phone.

“Miss Jenkins?”

Nora swallowed her mouthful, the chicken salad souring in her stomach as she took in the sight of Principal Coleman and junior Ivy Ryman.

Ivy scowled and rolled her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped and her head cocked to the side dismissively. Behind them, Nora’s new teacher friend, Kim Bales made a here-we-go-again face as she crossed the hall.

Nora set down her sandwich once more. She’d spent her actual lunch break managing this unruly student, who’d enrolled at Oakland High only two months before the end of the school year. In the couple of months Ivy had been there, she’d run off the premises twice, skipped more classes than Nora could remember, and it was rumored she’d jammed the locks of a bunch of lockers, but no one could prove it.

Yet Nora had a soft spot for Ivy. After the death of the girl’s mother during a routine knee surgery this past December, Ivy had been forced to live with her absent, famous music producer father, Blaze Ryman. She’d already been kicked out of two private schools, so with limited time left in the academic year, she ended up in public school and on Nora’s caseload. She didn’t know the girl’s entire past, but she had learned that her parents divorced many years ago, and Ivy had lived exclusively with her mother in Alabama before the tragedy. The girl had a lot on her plate for a teenager.

Nora understood loss. She’d lost her parents in a car accident when she was in her twenties. Gram and Gramps had stepped in to be her support, and she couldn’t have managed the grief without them. The event was originally what had drawn her to a master’s degree in counseling.

Ivy first showed up in Nora’s office wearing a black sack dress, hemmed higher than it should be, torn fishnet stockings, combat boots, and a scowl that showed her disdain for even having to breathe the same air as Nora. But over time, Ivy began to trust her, and she’d even gotten comfortable enough to open up about her mother, and allude to how frustrated she was with her new living arrangement. While Nora had made some progress with the girl over the last two months, she was nowhere near a breakthrough of any kind, and it wasn’t her job to be the child’s therapist. Nora focused on keeping the peace at school. Every time she thought they were getting somewhere, however, Ivy would act out and land in the principal’s office.

When Ivy got in trouble, she sat in Nora’s office to remove the disruption from the classroom and keep the office staff free to manage their duties. It was the “Best case scenario,” Principal Coleman had said, “given your background in private counseling.” His way of saying he had no idea what to do with the girl.

Since Ivy arrived, Nora had been attempting to connect with Ivy’s father, but they kept playing phone tag. The school principal managed to speak to him once, when he’d called Mr. Ryman to discuss Ivy’s conduct. Her father had asked about collaborating with a family therapist to provide Ivy grief counseling. Though the girl had already met with someone a few times, Mr. Ryman was hoping to get counsel as to how to reach his daughter. But they hadn’t heard from him since, and Ivy had told her they’d already been through a few therapists. Nora often met with the latest one after school. She was nearly ready to give up on the idea of ever getting her father to agree to a time when they could all meet. With only three weeks before summer break, her focus was more on transitioning the girl to the therapist than working through school problems.

Nora stood up, smoothing her skirt and steeling herself for another session with the disorderly teen.

“I’ll let her tell you why she’s here,” Principal Coleman said.

Ivy slinked in and flopped down on the beanbag in the corner of Nora’s office. The girl fiddled with the philodendron hanging in front of the window, the brown-edged leaves revealing Nora’s neglect.

Principal Coleman eyed Nora with a loaded glare. He didn’t have to say anything. It was the same story every time with Ivy. She’d probably been found in the gym’s locker room, skipping sixth period or something similar.

“I’ll take it from here,” Nora said, resigning to her completely inappropriate role. Whether she’d had experience as a private counselor or not, this wasn’t in her job description.

With a restrained shake of his head, Principal Coleman left, and Nora turned around to face Ivy.

“Want to talk?” she asked as she sat down on the small sofa against the wall, opposite the seventeen-year-old.

Ivy blew a loud breath through her black-lined lips and piled her pink hair into a fisted ponytail before it all fell over her face when she leaned forward and hung her head.

Nora’s phone pinged on her desk. Probably Gram with another tantalizing photo.

Ivy righted herself. “You gonna get that?”

“No,” Nora replied. “I want to hear why you’re in my office again.”

“Your house could be burning down,” Ivy countered, squinting at the desk. She stood up.

Typical avoidance behavior.

“If you don’t want to tell me why you’re here, I’ll be happy to walk you back to class.”

Ivy picked up one of the printouts of the cottage and ran a paint-chipped fingernail over the typed description. “Mrs. Sanderson won’t let me back into class.” She tossed the paper onto the pile of folders, but it caught on the movement of air, sailed to the floor, and slid under Nora’s bookshelf.

“Sorry,” she said, eyeing the paper, but not bothering to go over and get it. She picked up Nora’s phone instead and brought it to her.

A push notification from Gram filled the screen. Nora read the first few words of the text.

You know you need a vacation. You said it your—

“It’s just my grandmother sending me another message about the beach that was on that paper. It’s where she insists we vacation,” she said, using a tactic of telling something somewhat personal to bring down Ivy’s guard. She waved the phone in the air and then slid it into her pocket. “No fires.”

Ivy dropped back down into the beanbag, not any more forthcoming than she had been.

“Why don’t you think your teacher will let you back into sixth period?” Nora asked.

“Because I threw her stack of tests out the classroom window, and they’re blowing all over the softball field right now.”

Nora nodded. “And what were you hoping for with that action?”

Ivy sat up and looked Nora straight in the eyes. “I was hoping she would see me.”

Nora cocked her head to the side. “Tell me what you mean by that.”

With a huff, Ivy folded her arms and sunk backward, the beans in the bag under her hissing in response. “She never looks at me. It’s like she’s looking through me.” The teen made eye contact again. “Like she’s already made up her mind who I am.”

“And who do you guess she thinks you are?”

“A delinquent. At least that’s what I thought I heard her say under her breath once.”

Nora felt for the girl. Comments like that could scar someone, and she made a mental note to speak to Mrs. Sanderson after school to see if she remembered making the remark.

“Can you explain how throwing test papers out a window makes you less of a delinquent in her eyes?”

“One of the guys at the back was making jokes about my hair, and it was upsetting me.”

“So you threw tests out the window?”

“I tried to get him to stop, but it just made his teasing worse, so I went up to Mrs. Sanderson’s desk to ask if I could move seats. She kept on grading those tests, looking down at them with an irritated face, like I was the most annoying person on the planet for even coming up to her. I took the tests out of her hand and tossed them out the window to force her to look up so she could see that I had tears in my eyes.”

“I’m sorry that student upset you. Would you like to tell me who it was?”

“It doesn’t matter who it was.”

“Why doesn’t it matter? Shouldn’t he face some repercussion for bullying another student?”

Ivy pursed her lips. “I can handle that guy. He just hit a nerve, that’s all.”

Pushing aside suggestions for all the more appropriate things Ivy could’ve done in response, Nora focused on the girl’s feelings instead. “How did he hit a nerve, exactly?”

“He wouldn’t stop joking about my pink hair. Pink was my mom’s favorite color.” The girl’s eyes filled with tears, and her lips began to wobble. She pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees, her heavy black boots sinking into the beanbag, and hid her face.

A lump formed in Nora’s throat. “I’m so sorry, Ivy.” Nora understood the pain of losing her mother. Seeing that pain in Ivy brought it all back.

The teenager was so closed off, but considering what she’d been through, Nora could understand why. She’d been ripped out of her old school and thrown into a slew of new ones where she didn’t know a soul. And the poor girl’s mother was gone. Not to mention, it was tough to get her father on the phone when they needed him. Ivy had told Nora she went home to an empty house every day. At the very most, she had a person she called a “nanny,” even though she was seventeen.

Nora took the weight of it all home with her every afternoon.

“Your response to Mrs. Sanderson probably wasn’t perfect, but I’ll talk to her, and I’ll explain what was going on,” Nora offered.

“Don’t bother,” Ivy said, her head still buried in her arms.

“It’s important to express these things or change can’t happen.”

Ivy lifted her head. “Anyone who would treat someone like that isn’t worth my effort to change them—Mrs. Sanderson or that guy.”

“I just want to make sure your needs are taken care of,” Nora said honestly.

Ivy squinted at her. “Why?”

“I want you to know there are people in your corner. If you focus on those who lift you up, and let everything else fall away, life will get easier.”

“Thanks,” Ivy said, her tone softening.

Another tiny breakthrough.

The bell rang.

“It’s dismissal,” Nora said. “You made it through the whole day.”

Ivy hoisted herself out of the beanbag. “It’s still going for me. I’ve got after-school detention for pushing that guy’s head into his locker just before class.”

“But didn’t he tease you in sixth period?”

“Yeah. After I pushed his head into his locker.”

“Did he provoke you in some way?”

“Yeah. He told me nobody liked me, so I was just living up to it.”

“Wouldn’t you rather prove him wrong?”

Ivy walked over to the doorway. “No. He doesn’t deserve to know the real me.” She walked out the door.

With a sigh, Nora went over to her desk, dropped down into her chair, and squeezed her eyes shut to ward off a headache that buzzed at her temples. Four more days to go until the weekend.

April 29th, Out of the Blue will be available in all formats: ebook, audiobook, and paperback! Pre-order the ebook now!