Son of a Pitch Entry: Bellamy of the Ball

Title: Bellamy of the Ball

Age and Genre: YA Fairytale Retelling

Word Count: 70,000

Query:

Sixteen-year-old Bellamy's been trained to zone in on a person's soft targets. She thinks it's a game, but what she doesn't know is the game is called self-preservation. 

After Bellamy loses her father, she channels her grief into elbow strikes and leg sweeps thanks to a godmother with a penchant for self-defense. With her help, the girl escapes the clutches of her evil stepmother and changes her surname, but regardless of her godmother's protective efforts, a dangerous hacker unravels the truth about Bellamy's connection to the creator of a spy nanochip that threatens the world's security. When her evil stepmother hires a thief to steal it, he targets the oblivious girl, leaving her with questions about who her father really was. During an intense training session, the watch entrusted to her by her late father breaks open and she finds the highly sought after invention. She pairs with a princely pauper from her S.T.E.M. school to unlock its secrets without revealing her own. However, learning the chip was designed to steal data from every smartphone in the world puts both their lives on the line.

On the night of the masked homecoming ball, her godmother goes missing and Bellamy must rely on her friends and her training to overcome her evil stepmother, deliver the nanochip to the father she thought was dead, and return the rental couture gown before the clock strikes midnight...but she may lose her prince in the process. 

First 250:

I swiped a stray blonde hair from my eyes and locked on the three boys’ soft targets—noses, throats, and groins. To any other sixteen-year-old, possessing such an excess of situational awareness might seem strange, but to me it was a game and a match was unfolding.

The advanced warning manifested itself in the boys’ rigid postures, sweaty brows, open pie-holes, and hands readied at their waists. Their laser focus supplied me with even more valuable insight—I wasn’t their prey.

He was walking ahead of me and toward them along the tree-lined path. I estimated his height to be six feet. He was lean and strong, but not strong enough to take on three, and his focus, lost in his smartphone, was about to provide him with a brutal lesson.

I scanned the park grounds in search of other Brooklynites, but with school arriving tomorrow, patrons had dwindled to nothing. I slowed my pace and tucked a corner of my cotton candy pink T-shirt into the waistband of my black leggings.

With a rush, they were on him. One punch turned him into a dirt eater.

“Effing eff.” Thugs like that thrived on the fight. Stay down, I thought, but the boy scrambled to his feet, fueling the hunger to subdue him and take whatever they were after, usually a twenty, if they didn’t know him or a chunk of self-esteem, if they did.

I picked up the stick, one inch in diameter, laying two feet to my right.