Scar Girl

by Len Vlahos

  The door to the diner chimes, and Harry’s wife, Thea, pregnant with their first child, pokes her head in. “The bus is ready. Time to go, team.”

  “One last question,” I say as they stand to leave. “Tell me what’s next for the Scar Boys.”

  “Same as it’s always been,” Cheyenne says. “We’ll make music.”

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I first tried to write the continuation of the story told in The Scar Boys immediately after the finished draft of that book was turned into my publisher. By the time I’d reached word number 35,000 of the sequel, I knew I was sitting on something truly, truly awful. My editor at the time, Greg Ferguson, suggested I put it aside and work on something else. Anything else. Not only did I heed his advice, I fully expected that I would never return to these characters again.

  But life is unpredictable.

  At a Scar Boys pre-pub event at the venerable Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, IL, one of the attendees, an eighth grade language arts teacher by the name of Wendi Whowell, asked for a quiet sidebar conversation.

  “So I have to ask you,” she whispered, “at the end of the story, is Cheyenne pregnant?”

  “Huh?” I responded.

  “Well, she sleeps with Johnny, she throws up on Harry’s shoes . . .”

  “Oh,” I said, paused a beat, and said again, “Oh!”

  At that moment, the kernel of the story unfolded in my brain. People often ask writers where inspiration comes from. In this case it was an eighth grade language arts teacher from suburban Chicago, and I am forever in her debt.

  Of course, having the kernel of an idea and writing the book are two different things. I tried a number of different directions before settling on the band interview format, and the manuscript I turned into my editor was . . . unpolished. (I’m being kind to myself here.) Jordan Hamessley, said editor, did a masterful job in guiding me through the process of making Scar Girl a much better book. A much, much better book. If you enjoyed this book at all, it’s as much thanks to Jordan’s editorial eye and skill as anything else. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank-yous, Jordan.

  Thanks also to the entire team at Egmont who was so wonderfully supportive of me. This is bittersweet. By the time you read this, Egmont USA will have shuttered its doors. My time with Egmont was magical. My career as a writer would simply not have started without the hard and brilliant work of not only Jordan and Greg, but also of Andrea Cascardi, Margaret Coffee, Michelle Bayuk, and the entire Egmont team.

  Thank you also to Jordan for the Scar Girl cover concept, Steve Scott for the design, and the lovely Egmont staffer Cassandra Baim for serving as the model.

  Thanks to the entire team at Lerner, the new publisher of both The Scar Boys and Scar Girl, including Adam Lerner and Alix Reid. I feel fortunate that my work has landed in their skilled care.

  Unlike The Scar Boys, Scar Girl was written on a deadline. This means that there were far fewer early readers. Thank you to my friend and fellow writer Nadine Vassallo and to my wonderful agent Sandra Bond for their feedback.

  The parts of the book that deal with Johnny’s amputation were informed by a series of conversations with my friend Pat Logan, a prostheticist. When Pat was in his early twenties, he lost his leg in a freak ATV accident. Rather than letting that incident define his life in a negative way, Pat made it define his life in a positive way. He now spends his time and industry in the service of other amputees, and he’s one of my heroes. His insight and knowledge allowed me to make Johnny’s experience more authentic, and I thank him.

  As I did in The Scar Boys, I thank my former Woofing Cookies bandmates for their friendship and for our shared experience, and for allowing me to use the lyrics to “Johnny’s Dead”—a song we all cowrote in the 1980s—at the end of the book.

  A huge thank-you to booksellers and librarians everywhere for embracing The Scar Boys. Without that support, this book would not exist.

  Thanks to my sons, Charlie and Luke, for putting up with Dad’s insane travel schedule in support of his dream to be a writer, and a massive, never-ending, all encompassing thanks to Kristen Gilligan, my wife and partner in all crimes and misdemeanors, for the same. In addition to a lot of weekends watching our kids on her own, Kristen is always my first reader, one of my best editors, and, you know, I love her.

  And of course, thanks to my extended network of family and friends for supporting me as you do. I’m one lucky dude.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Len Vlahos dropped out of NYU film school at the age of nineteen to go on the road with a touring punk/pop band called Woofing Cookies, which eventually became the backdrop for The Scar Boys. He, his wife, and two young sons live in Colorado, where they co-own and work at the Tattered Cover, one of America’s leading indie bookstores. You can visit him online at www.lenvlahos.com and follow him on Twitter and Instagram @LenVlahos.