That Type of Love Story
Status: In progress (75% complete)
Genre: YA contemporary, a companion to This Year and One Year (Clara is Mabel and Shay's younger sister)
Inspiration: Basically, Clara is every single one of my embarrassing moments from real life put together. I've had a blast writing this one (and also cringe like crazy).
If she can’t have the friends-to-lovers romance of her dreams, she’ll find her happy ending in another trope. Any other trope.
Clara Morgan always wanted the childhood-friends-to-romance trope to be her reality. Fox is her neighbor, her parents’ best friends’ kid, and her movie critique partner. Every Friday night growing up they went back and forth between their houses for a movie night while their parents went out. Once they were too old for babysitters, their parents went out together and Clara and Fox continued to hang out, stuffing their faces with jalapeño popcorn (him) and chewy, fruity candy (her), pulling apart the story structure, dialogue, and cinematography of every film they watched.
When Clara takes a chance and reveals her feelings for Fox in his yearbook, he pretends it never happened, and she ends up with the unrequited romance she dreaded. Wanting to maintain their fragile friendship, Clara decides the best way to get over him is to move on. And to do that, she’s going to date every trope there is: the coworker (a classmate who volunteers at the animal shelter with her), the newcomer (cute new guy who moved here to train for the Winter Olympics), the enemies-to-lovers...wait, no, not that one. Clara would never date Maverick, the smug boy she’s forced to partner with in her Life Skills class – a partnership that turns into a fake marriage with a robot baby.
After a night full of bad decisions, their Life Skills teacher pronounces their electronic child dead and Clara faces failure in a class that should be a piece of yellow cake. Desperate for redemption, she brings home the geriatric dog who follows her around the shelter, taking care of him to make up her grade and give him a more comfortable place to live his little doggy life.
This semester, Clara gets to experience all the love stories she’s ever dreamed of, but is a happy ending really what she’s pictured all this time?