Excerpt from A Step Toward Falling by Cammie McGovern, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I learned this from other movies about exciting but undependable boys. You have to be careful with them because a lot of times they're handsome, too. So that's confusing.

"I get around some of those men—they're so handsome, I can't talk," Mom says. "I mean it. My tongue gets all dry. It's like someone put glue in my mouth."

I know this feeling. I have it every time I watch Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. I can't talk at all. Sometimes I try to watch without blinking and I can't do that either. I get light-headed which my mom says happened to her once on a date. When she stood up to go to the ladies' room, she fell back into her chair and felt embarrassed.

"That's what happens when I like the man," Mom says. "I don't act very likeable."

I know how this is. I've had it in real life, too, not just watching Colin Firth. I felt it every time I was around Ron Moody. Sometimes, just being near him, I felt like I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Or my heart might explode. I didn't feel like myself. I felt like someone having a heart attack. Except it happened every time I saw him so it wasn't a real heart attack. It was love. That's what Mom said when I told her about him. "You're in love, Belinda,

and that's a wonderful, special feeling ..."

She didn't say it was bad to feel that way, or wrong. She didn't even say, "Be careful, Belinda," which she probably should have. She said, "You deserve love as much as anyone else," which got me confused for a while. It made me think maybe Ron loved me, too.



EMILY

The truth about Lucas—and why we're being punished—is a little more complicated than I want to admit to anyone, especially Richard, who loves to hate what he calls "the heteronormative class structure embodied by the football team." I'm not sure exactly what he means by this, except for the obvious part. Football players have too much power at our school, especially this year with their winning record. I've seen lunch ladies wave them through the line without paying a dime for a full tray of food. I've seen kids they don't know buy them sodas and carry their backpacks; anything to win three seconds of a football player's approval.

Richard thinks our group of friends is different but we aren't really. We might not prostrate ourselves to win the football team's attention, but we still spend some amount of time every lunch period staring over at their table. Just because we can see the problem doesn't mean we aren't part of it.

Lucas and I have never talked about what happened with Belinda, so I have no idea if he feels guilty the way I do or if he feels like he's being unfairly punished. I assume it's the latter—that he thinks what happened was terrible, of course, but not his fault. At the very least, he probably thinks it's more my fault than his, which—though I don't admit this to anyone—might be true.

It's still hard for me to understand what happened.

On the surface, it's a simple story. Three weeks ago, I was at a home game with my four best friends: Richard, Barry, Weilin, and Candace. Ordinarily we aren't big football fans, but this year everyone goes to home games. Every week, with every victory, the crowds get bigger.

That night, I was in a terrible mood, though I feel stu- pid admitting it now. Toby Schulz, a boy I thought I'd been f lirting with for the last two weeks with funny texts and Facebook messages, was sitting two rows down from us, on a clear and obvious date with Jenny Birdwell, a cute sophomore with a blond ponytail. Three days earlier he'd sent me a message saying, "We should do something some time," which I had stupidly thought meant with each other. Apparently it didn't. Apparently it meant we should sit near each other at a football game and wave hi while I'm on a date with someone else.

Excerpted from the book A Step Towards Falling by Cammie McGovern. Copyright © 2015 by Cammie McGovern. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins.