Charlie hurts herself. When Her parents find out they send her to a recovery home, which is a school with dorms, Which have Doctors and Nurses crawling around, with sharp tongues and steel eyes with clip boards ready to write down every cut, suicide attempt, and pound lost. Charlie used to be normal She didn't used to cut. But then Her best friend Owen killed himself and She went down hill. Charlie Meets Clara at the school first. A starving Anorexic girl, who just wants a family of her own to raise. She doesn't care if she starves, but she hates it when her friends try to do the same thing. She's Charlie's roommate. Next she meets Ryder. It wasn't his piercing eyes that caught hers' but his small waist and his sticking out ribs. They soon bond over their mutual love of taking pictures. Ryder is Anorexic, cuts, and is suicidal. He's smart, quick, and protective, but a loner at the same time. She then meets Ayelie, A girl who is cynical, sarcastic, thinks her situation is hilarious, and wants anything but to recover. Charlie then meets her friends Daniel, Alen, and Ava. Charlie soon comes to find out she has the means to be Anorexic if she just cuts out the junk food. And when she does and drops weight, she craves to be skinny. Just when she thinks things can't get any worse, Owen walks through the front doors of the school straight from the grave. Three months of crying, of cutting, of wishing she was dead, all for nothing, because Owen is still alive. And she's pissed. Soon her Child hood friend Moves back into her old town. So not only does Charlie head back to the school broken hearted about her family, She heads back to school with a new Crazy kid, (Ck) to meet her crazy Family. Will she continue to starve, and stay in the school until she withers away into nothing? Light as a feather.
Carmen is screwed up. She's been in and out of juvie all her life and seriously there's no place she'd rather be. Until she gets released from juvie unexpectedly, given a probation officer, and forced to live with a normal family and go to a normal school. Carmen doesn't even know the definition of normal. Much less family, or school.
Separated from the only system she's known and has stayed constant all her life, she finds it hard to adjust to the world outside the concrete building. The structure and rules aren't the same. In juvie, rules were like opinions, people ignored them. But in the real world, supposedly it wasn't socially acceptable to steal cash, or graffiti the front of the school building.
Enter the Harrisons, the family who's taking care of her. The matriarch of the family hates her criminal record. Sammy, the seven-year-old, is too clingy, too innocent, and too naive to understand anything. Then there's Jay, the guy she's forced to share a room with. A self-righteous son of a bitch, Jay doesn't understand Carmen and doesn't understand her self destructive way of thinking. Though he's not bothered by her, he's fascinated with her.
The family represents the structure and rules that Carmen doesn't, nor wants to, understand.
But as Carmin starts to push back at the structure and rules suddenly rushed into her life, it starts to change. Her whole way of living is thrown off balance, what she deems normal isn't. And through a series of events, she starts to spiral out of control, and she doesn't know if someone can pull her up from that.
Carmen was given a second chance, but is it a good chance, or is it just another recipe for getting thrown right back to square one, like she always is?
Because second chances don't usually get handed out.
And she's about to learn what it means to get a second chance.
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