Sami's Christmas Wish List: A Girls of Thompson Lake Novella

By PJ Sharon

All seventeen-year-old Samantha Owens wants for Christmas is a working car, a miraculous improvement in her grades, and a boyfriend who sees her as more than just a friend with benefits. But with a single mom who’s struggling to make ends meet, presents seem unlikely, and with legal troubles looming over her head, she’ll be lucky not to be spending the holiday in juvenile detention. When she’s forced to do community service at the local church, she finds that wishing her life was different won’t make it so, and that avoiding her past may be what’s standing in the way of her future.

It doesn’t help that Travis Vance, a freshman in college and intern for a teen drug and alcohol treatment program, is hanging around and pushing her buttons at every turn. Or that her friends are all going through their own dramas—most of which seem far worse than her own. Can Sami bring everyone together to save the church in time for Christmas? Or is hoping for a happy ending one more wish that will never be granted?

• Language: English
• Publisher: PJ Sharon
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540164582

PJ Sharon

In addition to her day job as a Massage Therapist, Personal Trainer, and Yoga Instructor, PJ Sharon is an award-winning author of young adult books, including PIECES of LOVE, HEAVEN is for HEROES, ON THIN ICE, and Holt Medallion winner SAVAGE CINDERELLA. Follow the Savage Cinderella Novella Series with FINDING HOPE, LOST BOYS, and SACRED GROUND. HEALING WATERS completes her YA dystopian trilogy, The Chronicles of Lily Carmichael, which RT Book Reviews calls “An action-packed read with a strong female lead.” Her debut non-fiction title Overcome Your Sedentary Lifestyle (A Practical Guide to Improving Health, Fitness, and Well-being for Desk Dwellers and Couch Potatoes) is a holistic living, self-help guide packed with easy to implement tips sure to motivate today’s sedentary masses toward a more balanced and active lifestyle. For more info on PJ’s books and updates on new releases, sign up for her newsletter or visit her website.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Samantha Jean, you get down here right now!

My last Christmas break before graduating and being catapulted into the real world, and I was about to be grounded...again. I blew out a sigh as I heard my mother’s footsteps pound up the stairs. Annoyed, I turned off the music right in the middle of an awesome drum solo and waded through the piles of dirty clothes, prepared for another lecture about the evils of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. A smirk lifted the corner of my mouth as the sound of Julie Andrews singing her Christmas classic, These are a few of my favorite things... popped into my head. I yanked open the door to meet my mother’s furious expression, which turned to all-out rage when she caught me smiling.

Do you think this is funny? She shoved my recent report card in my face. I took the piece of paper and glanced at it before folding it and stuffing it into my back pocket. Her arms squeezed across her chest, making her boobs look enormous in the low-cut sweater she wore. Mine were big, but hers needed their own zip code. I only hoped I was less obvious. I buttoned my flannel shirt one more notch and rolled up the sleeves. A slew of bracelets dangled in a long row, covering each forearm.

My gaze came up to meet hers—currently dark and menacing. I blinked, cleared my throat, and stared at my feet as I pulled my T-shirt down and tied the tails of my flannel at my waist. Jeans hung loose on my hips, clearly a size too big, but infinitely easier to breathe in than the skinny jeans Mom sported. The pant legs of the ratty denims pooled in folds around my ankles, all but engulfing the black combat boots I’d found at the Thrift shop last fall. The look suited my mood.

I know I need to do better, but I still have one semester to pick up my grades. Before she cut in with what would likely be an hour-long tirade and an effort to ground me for the rest of vacation, I brushed past her. Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll graduate. I promise. Right now, I have to get to the church. I’m practicing with the kids for the Christmas pageant, and then I’m working at the rink tonight. Penny’s going to pick me up and drop me off.

I thumped down the stairs with only a cursory look back to see her staring disgustedly from me to my room. We are not done here, young lady! And this room...

I’ll be home around ten. Bye, Mom. Love you! I ran through the kitchen, grabbed a bruised apple from the fruit bowl, and escaped out the back door. No way was I going to let my mother—or my lame grades—keep me from enjoying a sunny, fifty-degree day in December. I had the next two weeks of relative freedom, and I wasn’t going to waste a minute.

Global warming be damned, the sun on my face felt like a little piece of heaven, even if the ground was snow covered and soggy, and the weather seemed more like Easter than Christmas. The few inches we’d had over the weekend had melted down from a fluffy blanket of pure white crystals to an inch of brown crusty mud.

I bit into the apple and savored the sweet tang. As I rounded the side of our building, the smell of manure hit my nostrils. Despite being late already, I took a slight detour, traversing the small patch of land that divided the Woodland Hills Condos from Harper’s Farm. There, I leaned against the fence to admire the horses. Iris, a chestnut mare, trotted over. I’d worked the farm during hay season in exchange for a few bucks and a chance to ride the horses. Other than the backbreaking work of cleaning stalls and lifting forty-pound bales of hay, the trade wasn’t too bad. The horses made it all worthwhile. One horse in particular had stolen my heart.

My fingers followed the white blaze stripe running between Misty’s eyes down to the tip of her plush nose. I whispered softly, You want the rest? I took one more bite of the apple and tucked the remaining half, flat-handed, into her mouth. She chomped the apple down, core and all, in a matter of seconds. I’ll bring you some carrots next time, I said as I pushed off the fence and trudged back around the building. Although I had no objection to having horses for neighbors—and preferred them to the busy bodies in my building—I missed the days of having our own house.

When I’d lived on Thompson Lake, I’d had my own rowboat, a bedroom overlooking the lake, and a tree swing hanging from a sturdy oak in the back yard. It wasn’t much more than a cottage, but it was ours.

Those days were long gone, leaving me with yet one more loss to contend with in life. Once Mom was laid off from her job at the insurance company and the unemployment ran out, she’d had to take temp work just to make ends meet. Still, we lost the house. Even when she took on hours as a waitress at Joey’s Pub, there never seemed to be enough beyond groceries, rent, and the car payment she owed on a beat-up Toyota.

I resisted the desire to feel sorry for myself, or my mother. We got by just fine, and now that I had the job at the rink, I’d start helping out a little—even if it only meant paying for my own school lunches and buying a bag of groceries once in a while. I passed Mom’s blue Camry parked beside my dad’s old pick-up—now mine and currently dead as a doornail, awaiting a new starter. Even if I had money to fix it, I’d have to pay for my own insurance and registration. My Christmas wish list was growing longer by the minute.

1)  A car—preferably not a piece of junk.

2)  A miraculous improvement in my grades with the assurance of graduation—not likely in this lifetime since my final semester’s courses included economics, trig, and a slew of other classes I needed to make up for the credits I’d failed to procure last spring.

3)  A decent paying job—since I clearly was not cut out for academic life.

4)  A boyfriend who didn’t expect me to put out for him on a first—or even a second date.

5)  And a real family—which had been on my list for several Christmases and continued to elude me.

My mother’s dating history was as shoddy as mine, and she’d been on a man hiatus for some time, complaining she couldn’t find anyone resembling Mr. Right. According to her, there were far too many Mr. Wrongs to weed through.

I hit the sidewalk, already cleared of snow thanks to the hunky guy who worked maintenance for the condo association. I got a perfect view of him from my bedroom window. Admittedly I preferred to watch him mowing the grounds in warmer weather. He totally rocked the sexy shorts, work boots, and shirtless look, but even covered in winter layers, he was hot. Since he was in his thirties, married, and had two kids, ogling was as much as I could do about it.

I added my attraction to older men to my list of daddy issues and tried not to analyze it too closely. Some older guys totally went for the high school bad girl thing, but Mr. Handyman wasn’t biting. Oh, he was polite and let my little flirtations/stalking rituals pass, but I could see he wasn’t interested in a seventeen-year-old Goth chick with an attitude. Nor were most of the boys at Somerville High. My sights had inevitably turned to college guys.

Of course, that had led to nothing but trouble in the past year. Thoughts of my recent breakup slapped me back to reality. Bull, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, had ended our summer romance in the worst way possible—and right before the holidays. I guess he was more interested in football and cheerleaders than working out a relationship with a high school senior who was in danger of not only flunking out, but one who seemed destined to remain in Somerville forever, working some dead-end job and growing old before her time.

I thought of my mother again—who, at