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Rabit on the Run
by D. J. Herda Length 60,000 Words
Genre YA Coming-of-Age Humor
Representative Faye M. Swetky The Swetky Agency 2150 Balboa Way No. 29 St. George, Utah 84770 435-656-0426 Phone/Fax
Sentence David Lord Rabit comes from a broken home; the problem is, no one knows it yet.
Blurb/Logline When David Lord Rabit decides to make a change in his life, it’s bound to be a beauty. And not particularly well grounded in reality.
But he is secure enough emotionally to know how to get from Point A to Point B, with a few minor detours along the way. With one murdered classmate, a brutal police grilling, and a lost love behind him, he reaches out to the one person he feels can help set him on the path to personal salvation. Along the way, he finds a second person solidly in his corner—an unanticipated bonus—who for Rabit will make all the difference in the world.
Synopsis When high-school heartthrob David Lord Rabit realizes that he’s living a nightmare, he sets out to regain control of his life. Dodging his mother’s daily abuse and a stepfather who can’t or won’t come to his rescue, Rabit decides to take his popularity on the road…literally.
If he can make it as a writer, he’ll have plenty of money to allow him to move out of his dysfunctional household and into a posh high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan on Chicago’s near north side. Of course, at sixteen years of age, he’ll need another break or two to complete his transformation from familial doormat to literary phenom. He’ll need the support of a good woman…a wife. The only problem is that he hasn’t a single candidate in mind.
Or, more appropriately, he has every single girl he knows in mind. Unfortunately, no one else knows it.
When finally he sets his sites on the fantasy girl of his dreams—someone with nearly as many problems as he at home—he makes up his mind to claim her. But he soon learns that she’s going steady with the captain of the school’s football team, and he’ll have to fight the jock to win her love and claim his prize.
When the jock is killed in a drive-by shooting, all eyes fall on Rabit, who feels his chances for salvation slipping quickly away.
After holding up to an intense police grilling, Rabit learns that the woman of his dreams had been cheating on her boyfriend with a basketball player from a rival school. “How many goddam jocks do I have to go through to get her?” he wonders before a mentor steps in to help set his thinking straight.
Armed with a new outlook on life—and the love and support of Danielle, his dream girl’s best friend—Rabit sets about redefining his life’s goals. When Danielle asks him to marry her, he hears the word escape from between two quivering lips: “Yes.”
She is elated. He is speechless. He is also clueless as to just exactly how a sixteen-year-old virgin can possibly make a success of life as a married man in the City of Broad Shoulders. By the time he finds out, he discovers a mere shadow of himself standing before the young woman who stepped in to rescue him from himself. He discovers, as well, that he hasn’t yet forgotten the woman of his dreams, whose re-emergence into his life is all it takes for Rabit to reach a decision that will alter his future forever.
Opening The problem when you think about is that it’s never really so bad as you thought. I mean, some shrink I knew once told me to think about my worst nightmare, my very worst problem in life, and ask myself how serious a problem I thought it would seem like ten years down the road. I told him I didn’t suppose it would seem like a very serious problem at all ten years down the road. He smiled knowingly and said, See?
I smiled and said that I guessed he was right, and I never went back for another session.
I mean, what a horse’s ass. Of course no problem is going to seem serious ten years down the road. That doesn’t mean it’s not serious at the time, you know?
Take a new-born child diagnosed with a congenital heart disease, whatever the hell that is. Anyway, I’m just betting that ten years later—if the kid lived to see it—it wouldn’t have seemed like that big a deal anymore. But ask the kid when he’s six months old if it seems like a big deal, and he’s going to tell you, Goddam right it does.
I mean if he could talk.
“What do you want to do?”
It was Jim. On the ‘phone. I mean, I don’t even know how the hell we began hanging out together and stuff to tell you the truth. I really don't. He’d been a friend of my cousin, who was a real wise guy, you know? A real loser, always getting into trouble and boasting about what girls he was dating and how far he’d gotten with them the night before and bullshit kinda stuff like that. A real zero. And Jim had been his best friend. Or one of them. My cousin had about a zillion best friends, to listen to him. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he had even one. At least not one who was a real friend. But to listen to him tell it, every guy in the world was his best friend, and Jim was right up there with them, right at the top.
I met him at Dale’s house one day. I went over to listen to some new tunes he’d gotten, and I walked into his room and there was Jim. And the two of them were laughing and cursing and telling dirty jokes and shit like that, honest to God, and all of a sudden it’s not Dale and me against the world anymore. It’s Dale and Jim and me.
And then suddenly I got pissed at Dale for borrowing three hundred bucks to buy an old beat-up piece-of-shit car from one of his friends and never paying me back when he promised to, and Jim started calling me up and asking me things like, What do you want to do tonight? It really pisses me off sometimes. It really does.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why? What do you want to do?”
I don’t know why I didn’t just tell him to take a hike. I mean, it wasn’t as if I enjoyed being with him or anything. He was kind of a dork. Short, squatty, not particularly good looking, with that kind of kinky-curly hair that looks as if it belongs on Little Orphan Annie or someone, for God’s sake. I mean it. I couldn’t stand the guy.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You wanna go bowling?”
“Sure,” I said. “Meet you at the lanes in half an hour.”
“Tsch-tsch. Gotcha. See you at seven..” And he hung up.
That’s another thing I couldn’t stand about the guy. He was always making funny noises with his teeth or gums or lips or something. I mean, can you believe a grown guy saying things like tsch-tsch? What the hell is that all about, anyway?
Bio D. J. Herda is author of more than 80 conventionally published books, several hundred thousand short stories and columns, and numerous plays, scripts, and articles. He is president of the American Society of Authors and Writers, a member of The Author’s Guild, and a former member of numerous literary and media organizations. He has been writing fiction and nonfiction for young readers for more than 30 years. |
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NOTE: All material is copyright protected. No portion of this material may be copied or reproduced, either electronically, mechanically, or by any other means, for resale or distribution without the written consent of the author. All copy has been dated and registered with the American Society of Authors and Writers. Copyright 2008 by The Swetky Agency |
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