Splosion_Aly
Being cast as a "Diamond" in a school play should be a dream come true. But for our sixteen-year-old narrator, it's a fast track to a mental breakdown.
She survives the chaotic, confusing world of high school by following strict rules: wash your hands, wake up at 5:30 AM, run track like a PR Queen, and use 1950s Disney legend Kathryn Beaumont as a blueprint for how to act like a normal human being. But lately, the world refuses to follow the script.
When she's cast in the absurd community theater production of Bestest Bedtime Stories, the backstage drama quickly becomes more intense than the play itself. "Grandpa," her adult co-star, is a stubborn, lightsaber-wielding menace who constantly critiques her "attitude." To cope with the toxic rehearsal environment, she accidentally unleashes The Ghost of April-a spectral alter-ego who launches a backstage newspaper to call out the cast's "uncommon nonsense."
But the drama doesn't stay on stage.
Between hauling boxes to a new trailer park, a terrifying hospital scare with her mother, and the looming, dreaded threat of her older sister turning seventeen (a number she refuses to speak out loud), her carefully constructed "Legend" persona begins to crack. As she faces threats of In-School Suspension, "fake friend" accusations, and a school librarian demanding she sit "like a lady," she realizes she can't use a British accent to mask her way out of real life.
Caught between the neon-colored chaos of radioactive geese on stage and the heavy reality of neurodivergent burnout off stage, she has to figure out how to stop being a "puppet" to everyone else's expectations before the final curtain falls on her sanity.
It's messy. It's dramatic. And it's going to make her act like a total Brewed Iced Tender Coffee Hamburger.