Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys

Chapter One: Prologue "Megan, we need to talk."Megan Meade swallowed a mouthful of root beer and let the bendy straw fall from her lips. Her heart dropped with it. She squeezed her eyes closed. What were her parents doing back from the base this early?"This is my first soda of the day, I promise," she said, spinning in her father's leather swivel La-Z-Boy chair to face her parents. The moment she saw them, however, she knew they weren't about to talk about her daily sugar intake. This was much more serious.Megan's parents stood before her in the living room of their cookie-cutter government-issue home, both wearing falsely excited smiles. They were also sporting their dress uniforms -- her mom in an army green pressed skirt and jacket with dark panty hose, even though it was about a hundred and ten degrees in the Texas shade, and her dad with his collar buttoned so tight his neck was turning red."Oh God," Megan said. She placed her sweating soda glass onto the coaster next to her and braced herself. She'd been an army brat her entire life, so it wasn't hard for her to figure out what was coming next. She just hoped it wasn't true."It's time to pack your gear, Kicker," her father announced, forcing a boisterous grin. "We're moving to South Korea!"Yup. There it was. Megan went into free fall. Her internal organs turned weightless and started floating around inside her body cavity. She clutched the arms on the chair so tightly her knuckles turned white, just to keep from throwing up."What?" Megan blurted. Her voice sounded very far away."It's been a while since we were transferred, hasn't it?" her father said matter-of-factly. "This should be exciting."Exciting? Had he been testing gas masks over at the base today? How could anyone think she would be excited about this?Megan had been moving all her life. She had been born in Rammstein, Germany, at one of the largest American army bases in Europe. When she was five, right about the time she had made her first friend, her family had been transferred to Turkey. After a few years there playing soccer with the boys and learning Turkish from her best friend, Medha, another transfer had come through, sending Megan to the country she had always thought of as home for the first time in her life. All through middle school Megan had moved, from Fort Carson in Colorado to Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. She hadn't been in any of those places long enough to make any real friends.But here, at Fort Hood, Megan had finally found a home. She had made it through three full grades here. She was on a state-champion soccer team. She had just gotten her learner's permit. She had a real best friend, Tracy Dale-Franklin. And this year, on the first day of school, she was going to talk to Ben Palmer. Finally, finally talk to him. She even had the outfit all picked out and had practiced her greeting three hundred and fifty-one times in front of the mirror. This was supposed to be The Year of Megan. Why was this happening?"Megan? Aren't you going to say anything?" her mother asked.Yeah, I'm gonna say something, Megan thought, standing up. She turned her back to her parents and stared out the window, hugging herself and gripping the sides of her T-shirt in her fists. This was so wrong. Megan had always been the perfect little daughter. She never talked back. She never let her parents know if she was depressed or upset or thought one of their many, many rules was unfair. She had never disobeyed them once in her life. And she was the only girl in school who wasn't strutting around the base in a miniskirt and belly shirt like the pop star du jour. Didn't her parents realize how good they had it?As Megan glared out the window at the perfectly cut lawn, the impeccably kept flower beds, she felt like she always did right before she was going to throw up. And it was like an outside force was working on her; shBrian, Kate is the author of 'Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys', published 2005 under ISBN 9781416900306 and ISBN 1416900306.