Today for Tween Tuesday I have a fantastic guest posts from Tracy Marchini, the author of Hot Ticket - a super fun tween book that I'll be reviewing later today.
"Hot tickets could be awarded for doing something cool, saying something funny, or sometimes even just wearing something the ticket dispenser liked. All authentic hot tickets were two inch by six inch rectangles made from this orange cardboard material, with "HOT TICKET" written in big bold letters at the top. Hot tickets first started becoming popular about a month after school started. Then there was this rash of copycat tickets on regular paper, but people just tossed those in the trash. Everybody could figure out it was one of their friends that made it anyway. But an authentic ticket - that was something you kept. Some people had their lockers decorated in hot and shame tickets. Some people kept their hot tickets at home to prevent theft. If I got a hot ticket, I would definitely keep it taped on the inside door of my locker. Right now my locker only had a locker mirror, a picture of Lucy and I from my birthday party at Six Flags and these annoying cat stickers from the person who had my locker before me. Fifth grade did not prepare me for this at all." Juliet Robinson is the only sixth grader in John Jay Jr. High who hasn't received a "hot ticket" from the mysterious ticket dispenser. When one of the dorkiest kids in school - Crammit Gibson - receives a ticket before she does, Juliet decides that the ticketing system has to stop. With the help of her best friend Lucy, a Daria-esque Madeline and her almost-crush Crammit, Juliet is determined to climb a few rungs on the middle school social ladder and catch the ticket dispenser once and for all!
One of the things my students always wonder about is what were authors like when they were in middle school. They can relate to that! Tracy fantastically gave us a look at her 6th grade self! Oh can I see 6th graders doing this!
Welcome Tracy to The O.W.L.!
When I was in sixth grade…
My character, Juliet, is very concerned about changing her sixth grade reputation. And if I was somebody who was known for ruining school dances, vomiting during assemblies and being incapable of completing the school cheer, I’d be concerned about changing my middle school reputation, too!
My sixth grade experience was completely different from Juliet’s, though. I based John Jay Jr. High (aka Triple J) on the public junior high that my little sister went to. She had a pretty large sixth grade class, who mostly followed her up through eighth grade and into the high school. I went to a parochial school, and we stayed with our homeroom teacher for most of the day. Like Juliet, I wasn’t the most popular girl in sixth grade, but unlike Juliet, my class had only twelve people in it. So if Hot Tickets were introduced in my class, it’d probably take less than a recess period to figure out who was handing them out!
To be honest, my little class of twelve caused a lot of trouble. I was pretty quiet in sixth grade, but if the whole class was throwing their spelling books on top of the closet or declaring an impromptu ‘health class,’ then I joined in, too. I didn’t get sent to the principal’s office nearly as much as Juliet does, but we had many classroom… incidents. Here’s one of my tamer stories from sixth grade:
Our school had a lab for the science classes, which was also at one point the art room. (When it was the art room, and our former art teacher had a headache, we were told to draw our shoe. I happen to be an excellent drawer of Sketchers brown oxfords. We then got a new art teacher, who did all sorts of great things – none of which involved our feet.)
Anyway, one day there was a cage with a live rabbit in the science lab. The girl’s room was right next to the lab, and I happened to take a peek into it on the way to the bathroom.
The rabbit was not in the cage.
I put my nose up to the door’s window. The rabbit was loose, and there were droppings everywhere. On the long wooden tables, on the floor, on the wet sink -- it looked like someone took a ten pound bag of brown M&Ms and shot them out of a cannon in the middle of the room.
I ran back to the classroom, threw open the door and announced, “There’s a rabbit loose in the lab!” Immediately, eleven hysterical sixth graders went rushing out of the classroom.
Our teacher was shouting, “Sit down! Just leave it alone!”
“But it’s pooping everywhere!” I replied.
“It’s going to get hurt!” one of my classmates said, as they left the classroom.
We gathered around the lab door, and after the class had spent a sufficient period of time gawking at the rabbit, the janitor was called to catch it. We eventually shuffled back to the classroom, though nobody ever explained why there was a rabbit in the lab to begin with.
Over the course of our junior high career, our janitor would also be called to clean up a dead bird (not our doing), wipe the baking soda from the lab-room-floor-turned-slip-n-slide (that was us) and figure out what, exactly, was causing that disgusting smell in the coat closet. (It turned out to be a whole carton of eggs, which had clearly gone bad months before. I think there may have also been a bad grapefruit.)
In a major clean-up, we also discovered a ten-year-old jar of chicken fat, which was dumped down the girl’s bathroom sink. (A word to the wise – should you discover a jar of old chicken fat and decide to dump it down the sink, there will be a smell so foul, so raunchy, so indescribably stomach-turning, that you still will not be able to think about it without going a little green fifteen or so years later. Also, that room will become uninhabitable for the next three days.)
I would tell you more about my sixth grade experience, but I’m trying to protect the innocent… and not-so-innocent. Besides, who knows what part I’ll use of it in the next book!
OMGosh that is super funny, and its those kind of memories that I could tell Tracy brought into the feel of Hot Ticket making it so fun and real!
Hot Ticket is available at Amazon US (UK or DE), Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. More information about Tracy can be found at www.tracymarchini.com or on Twitter as @TracyMarchini.
Tween Tuesday was started by GreenBeanTeenQueen.
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