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Three On a Match: Chapter 1

Chapter preview below the cut.

August, 1994

Frances ***

If anyone had terrible luck, it was Frances Murphy. Not just bad luck, not merely a haphazard pile of unfortunate circumstances jumbled together like a badly tossed salad of crappy events. Honest to God, unequivocally terrible luck. If something were going to happen to Frances Murphy, putting money on it going poorly was a safe bet.

The alarm blasted a deafening shriek. Before Frances could even gather herself enough to groan in an appropriate manner to the jarring jolt back into consciousness from a dream which wasn’t a gargantuan pile of suck, she was hit square in the face by a down pillow with unfairly sharp corners, one of which caught her in the eye. “Get up, fuckwit!”

Frances blinked sluggishly, slamming her fist down on the clock radio to silence the racket.

Margot carried on shouting, “If you make me late, I swear to god I will circulate as many copies of that picture of you running around in your first training bra as I can afford to print. And I babysat. All summer!”

Frances frowned at her sister, the foul-mouthed pillow flinger who had taken it upon herself to ensure Frances’s misery over the last three months. It appeared she was to be unwavering in her efforts at the dawn of the school year. “It’s only 5:45. Did you change my alarm?”

Margot rolled her eyes. “Oh my God, Frances, it’s like you’re trying to be a dipshit.” Her little sister’s angelic and impeccably made up face contorted to something horrible and ugly when she swore. The pure, unabashed disdain matched Margot’s dark red and gray cheerleading uniform incredibly well. “I have to be there early. Melanie and Courtney want to show me my locker and where all the other cheerleaders meet before school starts, so I need to be early. Super early. I told you this, like, four times!”

Margot had spent the entire summer bragging to Frances about the apparently impressive feat of making the J.V. Cheer Squad as an incoming “freshie.” According to Melanie-and-Courtney, the two-headed conventionally attractive cheerleading monster that had apparently adopted Margot, her achievement was something akin to walking on water, raising the dead, and curing acne with the wave of a single pom. Before Frances moved back home, Margot hadn’t expressed an interest in cheerleading but after Melanie-and-Courtney’s prescribed diet of regurgitated jock cock or something, Margot was a total convert to the teenage cult of popularity.

“Christ, Frankie! I do not have time for your dipshitery! I would like to make a decent impression at this school even if you don’t. Get up right now!”

Frances cast a withering look at her sister, and then rolled out of bed before another down pillow in a pastel case could make contact with her already sore face. She slouched past her teeny tiny cute baby sister and tried to remember a time when she didn’t look at Perfect Margot without her guts twisting in dislike. She and Margot had never been braid-each-other’s-hair besties, but they had once upon a time existed a bit more peacefully. Or so Frances thought she remembered. Her mind was awfully cluttered with other garbage these days; it was hard to keep track of the minute details of whether or not she had ever gotten along with her Precious Baby Sister.

Once she was locked in the bathroom, Frances raked a hand through her long, colorless hair and dropped the boxer shorts she had worn to sleep on the floor. She bent over the tub, twisting the taps to turn on the shower, and then pulled her massive, sleeveless “WORLD’S GREATEST DAD” shirt over her head. She quickly peed while squatting over the toilet, and then stepped into the shower spray before she got any wise ideas about slinking back to bed.

Last year before the first day of school, she had climbed up the drain pipe and through her bedroom window at five in the morning. She’d hidden her clothes in a garbage bag stashed in the back of the closet because they smelled like gasoline, bonfire, and weed and fallen asleep in a matching pajama set she never actually wore, looking the picture of innocence. An hour and a half later when her Dad came in to wake her, Frances had put on an Oscar-worthy performance, convincing him that she had lost track of time studying to prepare for the Ever-So-Important Junior Year at Saint Francis that she got to bed late, and no really Daddy, that’s why I slept through my alarm.

Frances snorted as she shampooed her hair. That was back before her Dad had even considered that his Gorgeous Frankie could ever be anything less than an honest, innocent little lamb. Back before her Dad could even fathom calling his child a whore.

Frances tilted her head back, rinsing the shampoo out of her hair.

“You look like shit, Frankenberry.”

“Oh Sam… You’re just jealous you didn’t spend your evening fucking The Man or any man for that matter.”

“Before the first day of school? I’m so disappointed in you. Let’s go pray about it.”

The memory skittered unwelcomed and uncoordinated across the forefront of her mind like a spider. It was a clumsy, clunky conversation, one that seemed to Frances pathetic and naive in hindsight. Nothing was ever smooth between Sam and Frances, and for maybe the hundred-thousandth time since May, a dark discomfort spread from Frances’s belly through her limbs, cool and unpleasant, at the thought of him. She was so ashamed. She was so ashamed and embarrassed, both that she missed Sam and that they had been so stupid.

There was a violent successive thumping on the door. “WHAT PART OF EARLY IS NOT PENETRATING YOUR SKULL?”

“NOT A GOOD ENOUGH REASON TO USE THE WORD PENETRATE, MARGOT!”

Frances wondered if you could drown in a shower. Frances knew you could drown in a glass of water, so a shower could do the job, couldn’t it?

“COME ON FRANCES!”

Frances twisted off the taps. She stepped out of the shower and started violently toweling off her hair, as if she could begin undoing the shame she carried around with her by making her hair dry. As if she could be clean, free of it, if she just got herself put together in this fogged up bathroom.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the steam-clouded mirror just as she was heading out of the bathroom and averted her eyes. Frances hadn’t liked mirrors, not in months. As a child she had been a classic narcissist, obsessed with her fair complexion and fine, smooth hair. All of that had disintegrated since the Spring. There was nothing to see there anymore. Nothing worth looking at. Certainly nothing worth admiring.

“It’s almost six fifteen!” Margot moaned dramatically from just outside the door. “C’mon, you promised we could get there early. Please? Please please please?”

Frances turned to snap at her sister but – in perhaps the very first and last display of warmth she would show Margot in 1994 – she chose to bite back the caustic retort she had prepared. Frances took a breath. Took another. Looked her sister in the eyes and said, “Can you just give me like… ten minutes to get dressed?”

Margot rolled her eyes, but she and her brilliant new white sneakers trounced off to the living room to let Frances get dressed in peace. She selected a pair of cut off jean shorts and a black shirt from a still not unpacked box in the corner. Her mother had been on her case about unpacking all of her things since she’d been exiled here after Memorial Day, but Frances was more than comfortable with being difficult. She supposed now that she would be wearing clothes other than her work uniform or her pajamas, it might be worth it to move the clothes from old beer boxes and back into her actual drawers for convenience sake.

And yet.

Something about the idea of moving the artifacts of her destroyed life into the baby pink plywood furniture of her childhood seemed far too morbid.

“FRANCES! COME ON!”

“God, Margot, keep your briefs on!” Frances shouted back, hopping around, pulling on a treasured pair of Doc Martens and tying a worn old red flannel around her waist. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulder and took one single deep breath. Frances emerged from her bedroom, feeling perhaps the first glimmer of optimism at the prospect of a new start at this new school. Couldn’t be all bad, right?

“That’s what you’re wearing? God, do not tell a soul we’re related. I’ll be the laughing stock of the squad if they find out I came from the same family as the Sexy Lumberjack.”

Well, so much for that theory.

Ben ***

Despite overwhelming opportunity to disprove this thesis, Benjamin Franklin had utterly fantastic luck.

Even when circumstances seemed to dictate that his luck should be shit, the universe seemed to smile upon him. Take, for example, his totally embarrassing name.

His name was Benjamin Franklin. No middle name. He shared his name with a founding

father and a chain of craft stores. His dorky parents had let their ridiculous obsession with the American Revolution overwrite the parts of their brains that did logic when he was born, and in choosing the name Benjamin Franklin, they had essentially damned him to a life of people thinking he was a) kidding b) lying or c) utterly insane whenever he said his name.

And yet, as luck would have it, Ben was actually pretty good at steering into the skid that was his sort of embarrassing name. He would play along, and people thought that was grand, By the time he was ten, Ben could charm the pants off any passerby who thought to inquire about his name.

That was just the kind of life that Ben had. It was a lucky one. His parents, history nerds though they were, were doting, supportive, and kind. His siblings were significantly younger than he was, but rather than being bratty or attention hogging, Abbie and Georgie were generally pretty self-contained and well-behaved. Even though he attended the same school where his father taught history, Mr. Franklin was by far the most well liked teacher at Antioch Community High School, considered smart and funny and fair by most students, and Ben too enjoyed a level of popularity as a result.

And it was this, and only this, that gave Ben the ability to pull himself out of bed on the first morning of his senior year of school. Things had been shit these last few weeks, but things usually just worked out for him. He just needed to get over himself and get out of bed. Things would work out. Things always did.

Ben yanked off the covers, standing to stretch. He let himself shift into autopilot, going about the same morning routine he’d had for the last five years. Skipping and hopping over the piles of clothes and and other debris, he got dressed without thinking too hard about it - he had to spend the day babysitting freshmen for National Honor Society, so he had to wear the navy NHS shirt anyway. He was lacing his shoes when a knock came at his door.

“Ben, Daddy says fifteen minutes,” A tiny voice squeaked through the door. Ben stood up, snatching up his backpack slouched against the wall near the door, and opened the door. His little brother, George, was standing outside, all dressed in his first day of school outfit: a striped polo, new khakis that were a bit too big, and brand new sneakers that lit up when he walked. These shoes had real shoelaces, a fact that George had been rubbing in his little sister Abbie’s face since their mom had made her get Velcro shoes when they went shopping two weeks ago. George was starting the second grade; Abbie was starting first.

“Okay, I’m heading down,” Ben said, smiling as he stopped to ruffle Georgie’s bowl cut.

“Staaaaaaahp,” George whined, pushing Ben’s hand away. “Now it’s all messed up!” He was frantically smoothing out his hair, and Ben shook his head, smiling. Little Georgie was awfully finicky about his appearance for a seven year old boy. Their younger sister Abbie was content to show up to school in a mismatched outfit with her hair in a frizzy halo of red curls covered in mud, but George wasn’t happy until he had examined and approved everything their mom put out for him.

“Okay, kiddo, let’s go eat breakfast,” Ben said eventually, putting his hand on Georgie’s shoulder and nudging him toward the stairs. George took off at a run, and Ben groaned because he was sure that he would be in a full tantrum by the time he got to the foot of the stairs because Ben dared to touch his hair.

...Of course he was right. George was red faced and motor-mouthing to their mother by the time Ben ambled into the kitchen. His luck really wasn’t what it used to be.

“Morning,” his father said, looking up over his cereal. Joseph Franklin was the only self-respecting man approaching middle age who thought nothing of starting his day with Fruit Loops.

Ben nodded, heading over to the coffee pot and pouring himself a cup before moving to sit down at the table.

“Mom says that’ll make you short,” Abbie said from across the table. She was a sight, wearing yellow tights, a yellow tutu, and a yellow sweatshirt. She was sitting on her feet so she could see properly across the table, but Ben supposed she had managed to put on yellow shoes as well. “Mom says coffee will make you short,” She repeated when Ben didn’t respond. “She says it ‘stunts your growth.’”

“I’m already pretty tall,” Ben said, rolling his eyes.

“Benjamin, please stop being so grumpy,” His mother scolded as she stepped into the room, George hiding behind her legs. She was wearing a red blazer with shoulder pads that made her look kind of like a football player. Her hair was teased high in a way that seemed to only be popular among teachers and administrators these days.

“He’s just nervous about the big day.”

“What’s there to be nervous about?” Ben said quickly, feeling his blood pressure rise. He was fine. They were the ones with an issue.

“Well, you know, first day of senior year. First day of school since Penny…” His father trailed off, perhaps realizing how god damned insensitive he was being.

Since Penny had left for college, since Penny had dumped him over Dairy Queen saying he was “too depressing to be around these days,” since Penny had decided to turn into a total bitch and never actually call him to say if she got to Northwestern alright even though she promised she would and swore that they would still be friends? The possibilities were endless.

Ben breathed heavily out of his nose. He counted to three and reminded himself that he was Ben Franklin. Things just worked out for him, even when they sucked.

“Well we should hit the road,” His father said, rinsing his cereal bowl and moving smoothly toward the attached garage as if he hadn’t just accidentally reminded Ben of all the reasons he did not want to go to school that day. His dad stopped, kissing Abbie, Georgie, and their mom all on the tops of their heads as they bent over the table to finish their breakfasts, and then grabbed his keys from the hook over the counter. “Ready, Ben? Let’s motor.” He pressed the button for their new automatic garage door opener.

“God Dad, just…. don’t. Say. That.” Ben said, dumping out his coffee and following his dad out into the garage. He flung himself into the passenger seat heavily, and his dad fiddled with the radio for a moment before backing out of the driveway.

“Buckle up,” his dad said after a moment, and Ben heaved an uncharacteristically moody sigh as he pulled the seat belt around himself. “You alright, champ? You seem a bit more riddled with teen angst than is your usual MO.”

“Why do you talk like that?” Ben found himself wondering aloud, the words spewing from his mouth before he could remember that his dad wasn’t actually the reason he was a in an awful mood.

Joseph Franklin had always been an incredibly patient human being, and he very politely did not react to Ben’s unnecessary level of snark. “I’m just worried about you,” he said, as if Ben had never spoken at all. “You have not been your usual self since Penny left for school. I know it’s not easy, bud, but that’s fairly common when it comes to first loves. That’s why they are firsts. They end, and there are lots after.”

“Says the guy who married his high school sweetheart.”

“We’re the exception, not the rule kiddo. Your mother and I were made for each other.”

“And me and Penny weren’t?”

“Don’t get defensive,” His father said, stopping at a stoplight. “I’m only saying that I know you feel bad, but that you can’t just expect to feel better by throwing all that badness at other people.” He made the turn into the staff parking lot, continuing to go on about being a good person and a good example, especially since Ben was National Honor Society president and he was going to working with impressionable freshmen all day, but Ben kind of just tuned him out, hoping that he could just stay positive and not bite anyone else’s head off during school today.

His father parked the car, and Ben hurried out before his dad had even finished telling him to have a good first day. Ben strode inside with single minded resolve to throw his shit in his locker and stop being a total dick for the rest of the day. Things worked out for him. He just needed to tap into some as of us untouched internal source of luck.

He reached his locker without incident, the school still sparsely populated with forty-five minutes still to go until the school day started. He had to try his combination twice to get the damn thing open.

“Hey white boy!” Ben looked up as he was closing the door to see his best friend, Joel, striding toward him with the kind of confidence that nobody wearing a National Honor Society shirt had any right to have. “Heading to cafeteria to herd some ninth graders?”

“Yeah, in a sec.”

If Ben had to pick a favorite thing about Joel Clark, it was his complete unwillingness to discuss emotional matters. When Penny had unceremoniously dumped Ben in the Dairy Queen parking lot two weeks ago, Joel had taken the news like a weather report, blinking twice before summarizing, “Oh, that’s bull,” and then dragging Ben to an end of the summer kegger that some mutual acquaintance was throwing. None this “first love” garbage that Ben’s parents had been spouting, nothing mushy or fabricated like the few girl friends he had run into since the dumping. Just beer and an agreement that Penny sucked and they didn’t talk about her anymore.

“So… should we do the whole ‘Senior Year is gonna kill it, we’re totally getting laid’ bit, or is that too Fast Times at Ridgemont High?” Ben asked as he and Joel took off the hall.

“I feel like it’s more like Carrie.”

“Skipping it then?”

“Oh, absolutely. Can’t tempt fate.”

“They always kill the black guy first,” Ben said.

Joel stopped, flinging an arm across Ben’s chest to stop him. “Dude, that’s racist,” He said in a serious voice.

They locked eyes for a moment.

Joel laughed first, like he always did, and Ben laughed with him. Joel shoved Ben playfully, Ben stumbled a little for dramatic effect, and they started off down the hall again.

Joel and Ben stepped into the cafeteria, totally empty except for the small group of navy NHS t-shirts all gathered around a table in the far corner.

They got greeted by a smattering of “hey Ben”s and “hey Joel”s as they took up their spaces in the group, falling easily into routine just-back-from-break questions.

“Sorry to hear about you and Penny,” Sarah Freeman said in the middle of the business as usual conversation, and the whole group went completely silent.

“Thanks, I guess,” Ben mumbled, feeling heat climb in his face. He was so over talking about this.

“Okay, people, buses are arriving!” sang Mrs. Williamson, the NHS advisor. “Please remember to be polite and friendly as you help the new students find their way around. And stop telling people about the pool on the third floor, Dominic, we all know it was you last year.”

Sam ***

Samuel Keddy knew better than to believe in luck.

Luck was something for children, like Santa Claus and the saying “everything happens for a reason.” It wasn’t real, it didn’t mean anything, and it certainly should not be impacting the way a person lived their life. That was the mistake that people usually made, Sam thought, trusting that the universe was controlled by something as stupid as luck.

In the fourth grade, Sam had this stupid blue rabbit’s foot he had carried around, hoping that if he kept it close, luck would win out and save him the horrors of having his lunch stolen by the sixth graders.

He didn’t eat his lunch once in the fourth grade. It was always stolen, and he was always hungry, and nobody and nothing did a thing to change it. On the last day of the fourth grade, he chucked the damned rabbit’s foot at the head of Chuck Finn, one of his sixth grade enemies. The end result was a fist fight, which nobody won, because the playground attendant broke it up right after they had each landed a swing. Sam started the next school year with a note about disciplinary problems on his permanent record and a week of detention. Luck? Fuck no. A lie, like justice and fairness and Santa Claus. Something to tell the kids to help them sleep at night.

So Sam knew there was no such thing as luck. The world wasn’t nearly that organized.

“Samuel!”

Sam pulled the covers over his head.

He heard his door open. “Sam, you need to get up right now,” his mother’s commanding voice invaded his bedroom, and he heard her click on the lights. “I need to be in the office in forty minutes, I will drop you on the way, but you need to get up right now.”

Sam rolled over, firmly keeping the blanket over his head.

“Damn it, Sam, now!” He heard his door slam and the flimsy wooden cross above the door clattered to the floor. Sam slowly turned over, and after a moment of deliberate stalling, he pulled himself upright. He took his sweet time pulling on his white dress shirt, gray pants, and his navy blazer with the St. Francis crest on the breast pocket. He did up his shoes, annoyed to discover that they were a little tight - like his mother said they would be when she had tried to drag him shopping last week. Sam wondered how long he would be able to put up with the pinching of his toes before he finally agreed to let his mother buy him new shoes.

He glanced briefly in a mirror and saw that his dark hair was a long, stringy, dirty mess that certainly did not abide by his private school’s dress code. Good. If they were making him go back – and they were making him go back, no matter how much he had protested and fought and whined and bargained with his parents and the administration – he wasn’t going to come quietly.

Sam cut through the foyer to avoid saying goodbye to his father and went immediately to sit in the passenger seat of his mother’s Jetta.

“God, do something with that hair of yours,” Sam’s mother said, slamming the door as she climbed into the driver’s seat in a pair of royal blue scrubs. Her black hair was tied up in a neat plait, her bangs hanging heavily over her eyebrows. When she didn’t fluff them up and spray them, Sam thought the bangs made his mother look incredibly young. Like an anime character who ought to have been wearing a sailor suit uniform instead of scrubs.

His mother rooted in her purse and tossed a small, foldable hairbrush at him. Sam let it bounce to the floor while his mother pulled out of the driveway.

“Surgery today?” Sam asked, ignoring the hairbrush and playing around with the radio until his favorite rock station from Chicago came in clearly.

“Jesus, Sam,” His mother said, switching off the radio. “Fix your damn hair. You know how much trouble your father and I went to to keep you in school, and you will show up looking presentable.”

“I don’t even know why–”

“I don’t want to hear it, Sam!” His mother shouted, braking suddenly at a stoplight and flinging her arm out so it hit Sam’s chest and kept him from flying forward. “Put on your seat belt for Christ’s sake!”

Sam rolled his eyes, but nonetheless buckled himself up.

“We have been over it a thousand times. We are keeping you in this school so that you can actually get an education! We want you to stay in one place, to learn something, and now that that girl-”

“Mom, for the last time, none of this was Frankie’s fault-”

“Sam! Enough! I don’t need to explain this to you again. You are going to stay at St. Francis’s because I said so. You are going to stay out of trouble, because I said so. You’re going to join an academic club, and you’re going to improve your grades, and you’re going to go to a good college like your sisters because I said so! Is that clear?”

Sam shook his head in disbelief. “Why is it the end of the world if I don’t do well in school? Worried about what the other moms will think?”

A look crossed his mother’s face lightning fast, and it occurred to him that she could kill them both with a sharp jerk of the steering wheel. He’d hit the soft spot. His mom, Dr. Lily Keddy, had been trying desperately to fit in with the other parents at Sam’s schools, with the neighbors on their block, with her co-workers for as long as Sam could remember, but it was never easy or smooth. There was always judgment: judgment about her having married a man with two preteen girls, judgment because she was a surgeon while her husband worked in insurance, judgement because she had been in the Navy, judgment because she had married a white man and adopted his white daughters but then dared to produce a kid who was definitely not white...

They had pulled into the school’s parking lot. “Can you just drop me off here?”

His mom stopped the car, her brown eyes flashing as she through the car into park. “I’ll walk you to your first damn class if I have to, Samuel. You’re going to do better this year, is that understood?”

“Yeah, fine, got it! Whatever!”

“And drop the goddamned attitude!” Sam’s mother shouted.

“In a church!” Sam shouted as he unbuckled and pointed to the steeple of the chapel on the high school’s campus.

“I think God will understand! He had a smart ass for a son too!”

Sam slammed the door of the car, his hands curling into tight fists. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to just become this perfect kid his mother thought he should become. He had been trying for as long as he could remember, but Sam had never been able to measure up to his sisters Dorian and Iris who were perfect and brilliant and responsible. Dorian was a lawyer, and Iris had started her surgical residency, and Sam was the fuck-up.

Sam had always been the fuck-up, who struggled in school and couldn’t play nice and who stole money from a Catholic School fundraiser to pay for an abortion. He argued with teachers, his grades were unimpressive, his focus was shit and his talents mediocre. Sam was good at the guitar and good with fixing cars, but his parents didn’t reward that. Those weren’t desirable strengths. They were signs that he simply wasn’t applying himself in the areas that his parents thought mattered. He just got trapped in the middle of the road, never being good enough for his parents or bad enough to get sent away from them.

Sam hurried to his first class, slinking into the only empty seat just two minutes before the bell was set to ring, earning a sidelong glance from the teacher.

“Hey, sweetheart, having a rough morning?”

Sam turned to see he had chosen the seat in front of Jim Peterson, who was possibly the worst human he had ever had the misfortune of encountering. Jim was your typical brand of asshole, who liked to zero in all everything that made a person different and then make sure that everyone around him noticed too. When it came to Sam, Jim had a few favorites he liked to share: Sam being half Japanese, Sam getting caught ditching gym class to smoke cigarettes and having to serve weeks of detention by cleaning up the bathrooms after school, and Sam being the only person who still talked to Frances at the time that she got kicked out of school last year.

At least Jim never made a big deal out of Sam liking boys.

That was the only secret Sam seemed to still have left. Sam supposed that, if nothing else, those drunken make out sessions with Jim the summer after their sophomore year had bought his silence in that respect. At least Jim hadn’t been the shining example of asshole he was now when they fogged up the windows of Jim’s Volvo… Though that brief escape from Jim’s predictable bullying and assorted other bullshit was mostly Frances’s doing.

Frances had been really very popular, due mostly to having an older boyfriend who bought beer for underage morons, until she broke up with Kurt and was expelled last May. Apparently Jim and his jock friends only liked the parties, and when those stopped, Frances, and Sam by association, were quickly phased out of the reigning teen royalty at St. Francis. Before long, Sam was back to being shoved into lockers, called unrepeatable names, and having zero friends at this damn school.

“Come on, Spicy Tuna Roll, how come you won’t talk to me? Run late because you were working in the rice field?” Jim leered, and his other jock friends tittered with low laughter as their teacher brought the class to order.

Jim was too stupid to even properly be racist. He started miming karate chops and reversing his R’s and L’s just before the class let out, and Sam bit his tongue. His mother would be so proud. As the jocks all chuckled and high fived over Jim’s blatant display of racism and idiocy, Sam decided he needed to put his foot down. He was not going to spend his senior year of high school playing punching bag to the closet case who was far too comfortable living in a shit hole excuse for a suburb.

Parents be damned, he just wasn’t capable of shutting up and staying out of trouble.

Sam winked at Jim on his way out of class. “Catch you later, stud.” Sam exaggerated the swing of his hips as he walked out of the door on his way to gym class, and there was a collective “ohhhhhhh” of schadenfreude from the football and lacrosse players still loitering in the back of the math class.

Sam Keddy didn’t believe in luck because he didn’t have any, good or bad. He just had himself.

#three on a match #ya #YA literature #young adult #young adult fiction #young adult novel

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