The Breakup Game

Taylor Cornwallis is a cultured, trendy seventeen-year-old who loves her life in Chicago with her dad. Never mind that he’s kind of aloof and she runs their house like some kind of daughter-wife combo. All is well… Until one day he comes home with the announcement that the two of them are moving to a middle-of-nowhere town in Texas called Point Blank. Taylor is totally freaking out, but she keeps up her supportive daughter-wife role and follows along to her dusty new one stoplight-town home. At her new high school in Point Blank, she quickly finds herself smothered with total reneckery, until she sees: cheerleading signups. But she soon discovers that even cheerleading here is messed up by backwards small-town absurdity, because she has to have an initiation before she’s on the squad. And her assignment is to get chronically dumped Mic O’Donnell to date and dump her. Taylor is appalled, but she also sees the opportunity to show her dad just what kind of backwards place he has moved them to, and to hopefully get him to move them back to Chicago. So she’s in. But Taylor discovers that, besides being a nerd with nicknames like Mickey D’s and Mic Dundee, Mic is also really sweet—there’s a reason he’s been able to land fifteen different girlfriends since late middle school, even if the combination of his geekiness and his clingy happily-ever-after mentality made each relationship short-lived. Despite her best efforts and her desperation to get back to the city, Taylor begins to find herself falling for Mic. But everything comes to a halt when she walks in her dad in bed with the big-haired cheer coach Leanne. Taylor learns that her dad has been lying to her for months, and suddenly she finds herself desperate to prove to herself that her dad gives a damn about her. As her attempts to get her dad’s attention spiral out of control, Mic holds on tighter to her in the kind of love and support she’s never experienced before… Until Mic stumbles upon how she’s been using him, just as she realizes that an understanding with her dad is a lost cause. One thing is clear to Taylor: no matter what else is going on in her life, she can’t let Mic get away. She needs to prove to him that she really did fall for him and is sorry for using him. But in his hurt and humiliation, he won’t listen. So Taylor sets out to try a grand romantic gesture in kind with Mic’s own past handiwork. Cruel timing nearly prevents their reunion, but at the last second, after an adrenaline-packed low-speed chase involving a tractor and a train, Taylor and Mic are able to reunite and find happiness at last.