Chase and Charlie Excerpt
Good morning everyone!
It has been a little over a month since Chase and Charlie was released, and I would like to thank all of you who read the book already! I really appreciate your support, and I hope you enjoyed it.
Today, though, I thought I would post something for those of you who haven’t read the book yet. Sometimes you need a little taste of something before you decide to commit to it, so I am posting a sample chapter of Chase and Charlie to whet your appetite. It is the first chapter, so you don’t have to know any background information about the characters or the story, and it sets up the plot a bit more thoroughly than just reading the back blurb.
So, without further ado, here is the first chapter of Chase and Charlie! If you like it, I hope you’ll consider reading the whole book. Trust me, you won’t regret it. 
Chase and Charlie
By Jessica A. Scott
Chapter 1
My big brother is awesome.
Sure, brothers and sisters are supposed to fight all the time, but
Chase and I never have (Don’t worry, my parents don’t understand
it either). Chase is two years older than me and, despite his
enormity (he’s 6’6” and 310 pounds) and my petite-ness (I’m only
5’5”), a lot of people mistake us for twins, possibly because we do
everything together. We go places together, we watch movies
together, we finish each other’s sentences, we read each other’s
minds…well, sort of. In our conversations, there’s never a “Chase”
without a “Charlie,” never a “him” without a “me” right after it;
we’re so close that my mom says we’re basically one soul living in
two bodies.
Chase is my best friend—which is why I had to try to clear his
name when he was framed for murder.
It happened at the movie theater, of all places. Chase and I had
gone to see the new Star Trek flick two nights before his college
graduation. It was supposed to be our last hurrah—our symbolic
last night of fun before he had to go off and join the adults in the
“real world,” where he had already landed an internship as a
physical therapist at the YMCA. To start our night off with a bang,
we had gone to Chuck-E-Cheese, where we had won enough tickets
to combine and exchange for an enormous, life-size Chuck-E-
Cheese doll and a handful of disapproving looks from the younger
kids’ parents. Next came the movie (we left Chuck waiting in the
passenger’s seat of the car to guard our leftover pizza) and after
that, we had planned to go to an all-night mini-golf course, where
we were going to play until one of us got a hole in one (which
probably never would have happened, due to my appalling lack of
coordination and the fact that Chase’s hands made the putter look
like a Barbie doll accessory).
Our night was supposed to be epic. Instead, it was epically
awful.
“Ugh, I hate previews,” Chase groaned as we filed into two seats
toward the middle of the theater.
“What, you don’t like movies about talking dogs?” I asked,
plopping down in my seat and pouring my box of Snocaps into our
gigantic communal bucket of popcorn.
“No, I just don’t want to see all of the funny parts of a movie in
the trailer.” He emptied his box of Sour Patch Kids into the mix as
well. “Half the time, the movie they’re advertising only has about
three funny parts in it altogether, so they show those in the
previews to market it as a comedy and get you hooked—”
“—then you pay to see the movie, expecting it to be hilarious,
but it’s actually some dramedy about a girl who gets impregnated
by some dude she met in a club,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
We had had this conversation before, many times. Chase and I
loved movies. We had seen every movie that had come to that
theater since we were ten years old, even if we had had to scrape
together all of our birthday money or do extra chores around the
house to finance our trip. When we weren’t at the real cinema, we’d
watch movies at home on cable or DVD, or on one of the hundreds
of old VHS tapes our Grandpa Max had left us when he died. Films
were our passion, and just one of the many things that brought us
together when that pesky “real world” kept threatening to pull us
apart.
The lights dimmed a bit lower as the more impressive trailers
began to play, reducing the visibility of the theater to “can barely
see my hand in front of my face” levels. I leaned back in my seat
and shuffled my feet to unstick my sneakers from the floor, then I
fearlessly plunged my hand down into our trademark cesspool of
movie theater snackage.
“Ugh.” I grimaced as my hand squelched against the soggy
popcorn. “We put way too much butter in this.” I took my hand
back out to show it to Chase and we both watched as big, fat
teardrops of golden butter glinted in the light from the cartoon
movie preview on the screen and splashed back down into the
paper bucket.
“I’ll run and get some napkins,” Chase sighed, rolling his eyes as
he squished his extra-large soft drink into his cup holder and stood
up.
“What am I supposed to do while I wait?” I asked, waving my
dripping hand at him.
“Just stick your hand back in there and mix the butter in with
the rest of the popcorn,” he said, shoving my hand back into the
soggy mess. “It’s already all gross anyway.”
“Thanks.” I smirked.
He stuck out his tongue at me in reply, then began his slow,
hulking, disruptive shuffle to the end of the row of seats. A few of
the Trekkies behind us shouted angrily that he was blocking their
view of the whole screen (which, admittedly, he probably was), but
he was eventually able to sidle past everyone to the end of the aisle
and down the carpeted stairs.
I did as Chase suggested and stirred the popcorn, mixing in the
butter with the melting Snocaps. Half-drooling with anticipation of
its gooey goodness, I grabbed an enormous handful of greasy
popcorn, oozing chocolate, and sticky Sour Patch Kids. Just as I was
about to shove the delicious disaster into my salivating mouth, the
lights went out completely, plunging the theater into complete
darkness.
I dropped my popcorn back into the tub.
It was normal for the house lights to go down at the start of a
movie, but the movie wasn’t playing. The screen was just as pitch
black as the rest of the theater, and I couldn’t even make out the
shape of my sticky hand anymore when I waved it in front of my
face.
All around me, people began to shift in their seats, whispering
nervously to each other, as if the darkness imposed some sort of
volume limit.
“What’s going on?” A man yelled from behind me, sounding
oddly panicked (Apparently he didn’t know about the volume
limit).
“Yeah, where’s the movie?” called a gruff-sounding woman
toward the front of the room.
“Chase?” I squeaked, completely inside the noise parameters. It
was a little known fact (except to Chase, of course) that I was—and
am, to this day—deathly afraid of the dark. It seems irrational, yes—
until you consider what kind of things could be lurking in said
darkness, especially in a shadowy movie theater full of possible
perverts and rapists. “Chase?” I whispered again, my heart
pounding so hard in my chest that I was sure that the Trekkies
behind me could hear it.
Slowly, people started to remember that they all had cell
phones. Soon, the theater was filled with tiny, floating squares of
blue light, all bouncing toward the exit. It didn’t help me see any
better, however; it only dazzled me, stinging my eyes and
reminding me of a swarm of lightning bugs bobbing across an
empty, black abyss.
Suddenly, there came the sound of a scuffle from up by the
screen.
The quadrilateral fireflies flocked in that direction as I rooted
myself to my chair, cowering in my fear of nothing and straining to
keep myself from hearing what was going on.
“Help!” a muffled male voice cried out, as most of the fireflies
reached the end of their thirty-second lifespan and flickered out.
There was a loud grunt and a clang, then the sickening, splattering
sound of a pumpkin being smashed to pieces across the carpeted
floor.
Several people screamed, but I didn’t know why.
Who cares? I thought. It was just a pumpkin!
Wasn’t it?
My mind was too alert, too many thoughts were racing through
my brain for me to figure out what was really happening, and the
bright, burning, blistering cell phone lights couldn’t even begin to
penetrate the cloying, suffocating darkness around me. There was
more grunting, more thumping, more cracking, more screaming.
Just as one last, loud, agonized moan reached my ears, the lights
came back up, this time to their full brightness.
Everyone gasped.
All of the people in front of me were staring at the platform
beneath the screen, covering their mouths in horror and disgust.
Some were crying, others were stoic and emotionless as they stared
ahead of them with blank faces, as if they were in shock. One of the
Trekkies behind me stumbled to the aisle and threw up.
I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t want to see anything. I didn’t
know why, but I was sure that my sense of foreboding, for once,
should be heeded, and that I should not, under any circumstances,
look at the platform below. Every neuron in my brain was telling
me to just stay seated, to just wait, to just sit still and stay quiet
until my big brother came back to get me.
But I was standing up.
Against my will, my numb, tingly body brought me to my feet,
to stand atop my jelly-legs.
I took a deep breath and looked down at the platform.
I felt the popcorn bucket fall to the ground, brushing wetly
against my pant leg, as I met Chase’s eyes beneath the blank white
screen.
It was him. He had been the one grunting, the one groaning, the
one smashing the pumpkin (it was a pumpkin, right?). He was what
everyone had heard, what everyone was gaping at with a mixture
of fear and anger.
He was holding a bat. A shiny, silver, aluminum baseball bat
covered in something that not even my delusional brain could
confuse with pumpkin guts.
“Don’t look, Charlotte,” Chase plead, in a whisper that carried
to me through the now-silent theater as well as if he had shouted it.
“Please, don’t look.”
But I looked.
I looked at his red-stained clothes, at his wide, panicked brown
eyes staring out at me from the depths of his pallid, blood-streaked
face. I looked at the bloody bat in his hand. I looked at his oncewhite,
now-crimson tennis shoes. Most of all, though, I looked at
the battered, bleeding, broken body of the man that lay on the floor
at his feet—the man that everyone in that theater knew had just
been killed by my big brother.
That’s when I fainted.
(To read more, you can purchase Chase and Charlie from Black Rose Writing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or other major booksellers. See the “Books” page for links.)
