Meet the Author—Blank Sheets and Bunny Pens

How do you get the same notch in a scissor blade?

Some chapters don’t start well. I didn’t learn how to read until high school. Let’s start there.

In first grade, I was the quiet kid who never turned in her work.

My teacher didn’t notice. Like, ever. Every day, she’d offer prizes to the first three kids who finished their assignments. Stickers, bunny pens, modeling clay... It was always the same three kids. I was never one of them. Not even close.

So I started slipping a blank sheet into the done pile after the first person turned theirs in. If the worksheet looked tough, I went third. Never first—that would’ve been too obvious.

I wasn’t trying to cheat. I was six. I didn’t even know what cheating was.

But I got good at it.

By the end of the year, my desk wouldn’t even close from all the unfinished work stuffed inside.

Then one day, I claimed someone had stolen my scissors. We were all assigned the same kind, but this other pair had the same notch in the blade as mine. I made a case.

And then—oops.

“Let me go help you look,” my teacher said.

All of a sudden, I didn’t care about the scissors anymore.

She told me to open my desk.

“Rebecca! I’m shocked.”

Her voice carried all the way down the line of kids already waiting for the bus. She didn’t yell, didn’t call my parents. Just dumped the mountain of undone worksheets into a cardboard box and sent me off to summer break.

I waited all weekend to get in trouble. But nothing ever came. She never told anyone. Just passed me on to second grade.

Second grade wasn’t any better.

Except this time, my teacher—who had us all convinced she was two hundred years old—saw right through me. And she did right by me. She held me back.

By third grade, I was so far behind that my teacher assumed I wasn’t paying attention and sent me to sit in the hallway to “think about your actions” while she kept teaching the rest of the class.

Meanwhile, my brother—brilliant, outgoing, spelling bee champ—read novels the size of bricks for fun. I could barely manage eight pages in a week.

I felt defeated. And I assumed that meant I was destined to fail.

So I adapted. Memorized what I could. Skated by with the help of a friend named “Cliff” and some very creative test strategies.

And somehow—whether by grace, luck, or sheer determination—I landed in AP classes. Somehow, I convinced everyone—including myself—that I had what it took to keep up.

It wasn’t until the end of 12th grade that I confessed to my guidance counselor—and then my parents—that I still didn’t have the foundational skills everyone thought I had.

And yet, I became a writer.

It started with a creative writing assignment in middle school—seventh or eighth grade. We had to write a short story using descriptive language.

Even back then, the story that would eventually become TOUCH was already alive in my head. That assignment gave me an outlet.

I chose to write a scene that still exists in the published version today—one of the only pieces that made it through all the rounds of revisions still intact.

And for the first time ever, I was excited to do schoolwork. I couldn’t wait to get home and keep going. I’d rush through the homework I'd always dreaded just to get back to the story.

I filled yellow legal pads, page after page—always with a calligraphy pen, because I was teaching myself that, too. (It wasn’t very good calligraphy, but it was with a calligraphy pen, so it counts!)

Eventually, I decided the story needed to be legible. So I paid my brother fifty cents a page to type it for me. He was academically gifted and fast at everything. It was easy money for him.

Then high school happened. Life piled on. And the writing stopped.

Years passed. I got married. Had my son.

And one day, while adjusting to stay-at-home motherhood, I came across the old yellow pads in a box in the basement.

I remembered how much I’d loved writing.

So the day after my son’s first birthday, I sat down and picked up where my brother had left off.

From there, the writing took on a life of its own. I wrote around nap times, meals, milestones—eventually with two kids in tow.

I submitted to agents and publishers. Collected more rejection letters than I care to admit.

But I kept going anyway.

Fifteen years later, I finally let my son read it. He was sixteen by then—nearly three years older than I was when I first started writing it.

He finished the book and told me to stop trying to publish it traditionally.

“Do it yourself,” he said. “It’s as good as anything I’ve read. Maybe better.”

He was the target audience. The exact age I’d had in mind. The demographic I wrote it for.

And his encouragement—his whole response, really—gave me the push I needed.

So I trusted him.

I hit publish.

And here we are.

Some chapters begin with missing pieces. Some with doubt. Some with nothing but instinct and stubbornness.

But they still begin.

And sometimes, they take you exactly where you were meant to go.

Also, how does a teacher not notice when a student goes from last to second?