Excerpt from Saving Hamlet by Molly Booth, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I touched it gently. No more than a couple inches long on top and less than that on the sides and the back—way shorter than the model's hair. My bangs had been cut stylishly small and jagged. Little pieces near my ears were longer, and wispy. Suddenly, my freckles and slightly upturned nose worked: I looked like a supermodel. A fairy supermodel—Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a terrifyingly great haircut.

I slid my vision to the left and eyed the scissors: normal scissors couldn't have done this. But they had black handles and pointy ends. Nothing mysterious about them.

"What do you think?"

We made eye contact in the mirror. Instinctively, I tried to sink back into the folds of my hair, but realized that wasn't an option anymore. Human interaction was going to change for me, clearly—this haircut meant no way to hide.

"I love it."

Last year, my wardrobe had slowly transitioned to all black. Not glamorous black, but normal black. Theatre techies were required to wear black for the shows so the audience couldn't see us working behind-the-scenes magic. Thanks to my theatre work, I had learned to be invisible: techies were swift, dark, silent.

My new hair wasn't silent—it shouted. Or screamed. So when I picked my first-day-of-school outfit, the black jeans and T-shirt were comforting. Even if my hair was loud, the rest of me would be quiet. Only one part of my outfit really made a fashion statement, and the one it made was the ultimate whisper:

Shoes. They were the shoes: black-on-black high-top sneakers, the supreme theatre-techie footwear. I had wanted them since last year when I joined stage crew, but I hadn't felt qualified. After my epic backstage blunder over the summer, I still didn't feel qualified, but I had bought them with my Oklahoma! stipend to console myself.

2

Monday morning, I took my time putting them on, and when I finished I admired my feet, wholly satisfied. Hot damn, I thought. These shoes are the complete and total essence of cool. A quick glance in the mirror made me grin: I looked nothing like First-Day-of-School Emma from last year.

I grabbed my backpack (carefully organized the night before) and thumped down into the kitchen. My cell phone buzzed with a text from Lulu:

Be there in 5

I exhaled a whoosh of relief. Lulu had been on lockdown for weeks—no friends, no phone, no computer. About a month ago, after the opening-night performance of Oklahoma!, Lulu's girlfriend, Megan—one of the actors from the chorus—had kissed Lulu when she came out of the dressing room. Lulu's parents saw, and all hell broke loose. The Parkses were strict and narrow-minded, and not knowing what to do with their recently outed bisexual teenage daughter, their obvious solu¬tion was to cut her off from her friends and keep her from leaving the house.

I was looking forward to school starting for lots of reasons: not being the weird new freshman anymore, assistant stage-managing the fall production of Hamlet, seeing Brandon, and a class schedule that included Pre-Calc and Honors English II. But I was really looking forward to seeing my best friend every day again.

I grabbed a banana and was about to leave when Mom appeared.

"You look great, sweetie!" She set her briefcase on the island and fastened an earring.

"Thanks," I paused at the doorway. "So do you."

Mom was dressed all professor-y. Which made sense, because she was a professor. That's why we'd moved to Mass right before my freshman year: she had been offered a tenure track position at the local state college.

"Do you need a ride?"

"Lulu's picking me up," I said. "Any minute now, actually. I'll see you tonight."

Excerpted from Saving Hamlet by Molly Booth. Copyright © 2016 by Molly Booth. Excerpted by permission of Disney-Hyperion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.