Description

34,000 words.

Meet Katie, a young woman with a dark secret. While her friends are hanging out, talking about the changes they are going through as they navigate new adulthood, she is making money hand over fist as an online sexworker. When her secret is revealed to everyone at her school, her life is turned upside down. Once she processes the parts of the experience that are embarassing, she discovers that there are many silver linings that stem from a new way at looking at her life. People think she is tough. She is about to discover what it means to be tough.

Sample:

When the rest of the day was over, she retreated silently to the space where she performed. She looked at the lights, and gave herself permission to process the torture of conflicted emotions for as long it she felt like it.

"You are nineteen years old." she told herself. "And you have made quite a mess of things in the past year. No boyfriend to love you, or at least hold you tight when you need it. No judgment to guide you away from places you'd rather not go." The thoughts got even darker. "No college degree in your future."

She had suffered some setbacks that were hard to accept: losing a friend who was decent enough tell the truth, being judged by people she admired, a desire for friendship where it was unlikely to blossom. But, there was one clear silver lining. She saw how cruel and indifferent some people could be. Noticed how few people treated her like a human being. She was learning to judge others as they had judged her, something that would protect her in the future.

She had regrets. She had upset her parents and tested the bounds of their parentage. Put her high school principal in a "pickle." Saw charitable behavior that made her suspicious. Her life was harder than it needed to be.

"It's Friday." she thought. And the word took on an ominous ring. There were clients out there waiting for someone to notice how unsatisfied they were. There was money to be made. Sure, this couldn't go on forever, but it felt like it would never end. And that, she realized, was the problem.

Somehow, in the process of things unfolding as they did, she had lost sight of herself.

"I don't want to be good and I don't want to bad. I just want to be me." That was a line she had written in her diary shortly after she started her career as a camgirl, back when she needed pep talks. Well, who was she?

She asked herself to think of two or three things people knew about her, and immediately shuddered at the thought. It was a short catalog of indecent acts that made her look bad. And she had enough defiance in her character to pretend that she didn't care, which was not helping.

She calmed her mind, took several deep breaths, and let her own judgment wash over her until it felt like a kind of baptism. "You are loved." she kept reminding herself. "But you don't feel it." As of late, she had lived her life as if it didn't matter whether she loved herself. That had to change. She had the power to change it.