[Blog Tour] Played (Hooked # 2) by Liz Fichera: Excerpt

Posted by Nina L. on 12:00 PM in blog tour, contemporary, excerpt, Liz Fichera, Pinoy Book Tours, YA,

Author: Liz Fichera

Release date: May 27th 2014
Publisher: Harlequin Teen

Series: Hooked # 2

Age Group: Young Adult

Genre: Contemporary

Tour organized by: Pinoy Book Tours

Purchase: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | The Book Depository 

Add to your library: Goodreads

This Game Is Getting All Too Real

He said: I like to keep under the radar and mostly hang out with my friends from the rez. But when I saved Riley Berenger from falling off a mountain, that rich suburban princess decided to try to save me.

She said: If I can help Sam Tracy win the heart of the girl he can't get over, I'll pay him back for helping me. I promised him I would, no matter what it takes. (via Goodreads)

Excerpt

SAM

My buddy Peter and I hitched a ride in the bed of Martin Ellis’s pickup. Martin drove and Vernon Parker called shotgun. There was a party tonight somewhere near the Estrella foothills. When you lived way out on the Rez like we did, sometimes that was as close to real excitement as you got.

Going out beat the alternative, which was stay home, watch my grandmother weave baskets on the front stoop and pretend that my heart hadn’t been pulverized into a thousand pieces.

Martin’s truck chugged its way along a single-lane dirt road. The sun had already begun to set and by the time we reached the foothills, the sky would be as black as a bruise. Someone would have already started a campfire and (hopefully) someone else would have brought beer – just a can or two apiece, but that was probably all that anybody could sneak from home.

Peter and I clung to the sides of the truck as Martin charged up and out of bumpy washes that snaked across the Sonoran Desert. Peter was another Rez kid and a junior at Lone Butte High like me. Despite being fifty pounds lighter, he was as tall as I was. That’s why our legs kept knocking whenever Martin sped like a madman over the washes. Across the truck bed, Peter kept giving me the stink eye from behind his wire-rimmed glasses, even as his glasses kept slipping down his

“Stop it,” he yelled over the grind of the engine.

“Stop what?” I yelled back, tasting a thin layer of dust on my lips.

He shook his head. “Stop thinking about it.” Peter and Martin were the only ones I’d told, but I was pretty sure everyone on the Rez knew. Even though the Gila River Indian Reservation stretched forever in just about every direction, it was microscopic, if you know what I mean. Sometimes the biggest places could be the tiniest.

I shrugged and looked away from Peter, preferring to stare across miles of brown desert and dried tumbleweeds as if it were the most exciting scenery in the whole world.

As usual, Martin continued to drive like a maniac. Frankly, I was surprised his old man’s truck could do more than thirtyfive. If the truck were a hospital patient, someone would definitely be

I turned away from Peter and focused on the wake of dust that swirled like a minitornado behind us in the darkening sky. If Peter referred to That Which Shouldn’t Be Named one more time, I was seriously thinking about ripping off a truck panel. It was bad enough that Peter even thought

“I can’t believe you’re gonna bail on us this weekend.”

Head over to Letter Trails for the last excerpt from this tour. 

                        About the Author

Liz is an author living in the American Southwest by way of Chicago.

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