Cowgirl Down

Seventeen-year-old tomboy Theresa Small has always been intense and driven toward success. So when neighbor boy Isaac McKilna first beat her in a county fair cow show at age seven, she began hating his guts. Right about the time that he started falling in love with her. Now, in the summer of their seventeenth year, Theresa’s family and farm are falling apart with her dad’s desertion. Her best friend Madeline, Isaac’s younger sister, has decided to enter the county fair “dairy princess” contest. And Theresa, freshly stinging (though she’d never admit it) from derisive comments of the cool guys in the fair dairy barn, decides to enter the dairy princess contest too. She’s hoping to gain some prestige—or even a bit of respectability would be a nice change from the way most people tend to view her white trash family. And suddenly, with just a bit of the magic she normally works to make her cows look fantastic, Theresa is hot. And those cool guys who spurned her are suddenly trying to flirt with her. As for Isaac, he suddenly realizes that he needs to figure out a way to step up his seemingly fruitless efforts at winning Theresa’s heart before one of these much cooler guys swoops in. Isaac scrambles to find a perfect solution and settles on… tracking down her absentee dad? Isaac thinks he can kill two birds with one stone: bring her legitimately scary, mentally unstable dad back into her life to scare away these sleazy guys, and show Theresa how much he himself cares about her by his efforts. But Theresa couldn’t care less what Isaac is up to. She’s too busy trying to figure out if she’ll break her best friend’s heart by beating her, and deciding whether that even matters in light of how fantastic her new status feels. As Theresa inches closer to her goal of being somebody, she starts sliding farther and farther away from the genuine love she needs.