Excerpt from The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A mile east is a neighborhood without an official name, but which most Prescott residents openly refer to as Trailer Town. It is home to double- and single-wide trailers and small houses tilting off their foundations, yards that have been overgrown for so long, the weeds are as tall as young trees. In one of these trailers, a popular boy is kissing the salty neck of a girl whose neck is used to being kissed. She is not his girlfriend. She is used to not being anybody's girlfriend.

The little electric fan inside the trailer is on full blast, but the heat of both their bodies inside the metal box is making the girl sleepy and a little nauseous. She wonders if she had anything she was supposed to do today. She wonders if the boy would notice if she took a little nap. She resigns herself to the answer as she closes her eyes and waits for him to finish. None of these boys ever takes very long.

There was a time when, like so many girls, she was obsessed with princesses, a time when she believed in the power of beauty and grace and sweetness. She believed in princes. She believed in being saved.

She's not sure she believes in anything now.


In a very different neighborhood, a very different girl closes her eyes and lets go, feels the boy's head between her legs, painting pleasure on her body with his tongue, just like she taught him. She smiles, almost laughs with the joy of it, how it takes her by surprise, how it bubbles up and makes her weightless.

She has never questioned her entitlement to this. She has never questioned the power of her body. She has never questioned her right to pleasure.


There are a handful of hills in Prescott, and Prescott High School student body president, straight-A+ student, pre-pre-med at (fingers crossed!) Stanford University, lives on top of the tallest one. At the moment she is driving last year's Ford midlist floor model (her father owns the dealership—"Prescott Ford: Most Fords sold in the 541 area code!") into her family's three-car garage, after finishing her volunteer shift at the old people's home (though of course she would never call it that out loud). "Retirement community" is less offensive, which is important; she doesn't like offending anyone. She would never in a million years tell anyone how old people actually kind of gross her out, how she has to fight off the inclination to vomit through most of her shift, how afterward she sometimes cries with desperate relief as she steps into the hot shower and washes the smell of them off her, a combination of mothballs and soft food. She picked this particular volunteer opportunity because she knew it would be the most challenging, because she knows this is the key to success—embracing challenge.

In her head, she counts up her volunteer hours. She files this number away with her other favorite numbers: her GPA (4.2), her number of AP classes (ten so far, and counting), and the countdown of school days until graduation (one hundred eighty. Ugh.). She vowed long ago to not end up like her mother, a Prescott native who almost made it out, but who skipped college to marry her high school sweetheart. Sure, her mom ended up rich, but she had a chance at something more. She could have been someone besides the wife of a car salesman and the head of her neighborhood book club. She gave up the opportunity to be someone just as her fingers were about to brush against it, just a second before she could have grabbed it and run and never looked back.


Two miles west, a girl searches the Internet for easy ways to lose twenty pounds.


A quarter of a mile east, someone checks for the third time that the bathroom door is locked. They look at themselves in the mirror and try not to cringe, carefully apply the lipstick they stole from their mother's purse, stuff toilet paper in the bra they shoplifted from Walmart, cross their eyes so the blur will turn them into somebody else. "I am a girl," they whisper. "My name is not Adam."

Excerpted from The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed. Copyright © 2017 by Amy Reed. Excerpted by permission of Simon Pulse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.