Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee

by Jeff Zentner

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

From the Morris Award-winning author of The Serpent King comes a contemporary novel about two best friends who must make tough decisions about their futures — and the TV show they host — in their senior year of high school.

Every Friday night, best friends Delia and Josie become Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood, hosts of the campy creature-feature show Midnite Matinee on the local cable station TV Six.

But with the end of senior year quickly approaching, the girls face tough decisions about their futures. Josie has been dreading graduation, as she tries to decide whether to leave for a big university and chase her dream career in mainstream TV. And Lawson, one of the show's guest performers, a talented MMA fighter with weaknesses for pancakes, fantasy novels, and Josie, is making her tough decision even harder.

Scary movies are the last connection Delia has to her dad, who abandoned the family years ago. If Midnite Matinee becomes a hit, maybe he'll see it and want to be a part of her life again. And maybe Josie will stay with the show instead of leaving her behind, too.

As the tug-of-war between growing up and growing apart tests the bonds of their friendship, Josie and Delia start to realize that an uncertain future can be both monstrous...and momentous.

Release date: February 26, 2019

Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

Josie
 
 
Here’s the thing with dreams--and I’m talking about the kind you have when you sleep, not the kind where you’re finally learning to surf when you’re fifty: they’re carefully tailored to the only audience who will ever see them, which is you. So I’m not big on telling people about my dreams for that reason.
 
That said, there’s this recurring dream I have. It comes around every couple of months or so, but I wish it were more often because it’s awesome, and when I wake up from it, I lie there for a few moments, wishing I could reenter it. In this dream, I’m at a familiar place. Often it’s my grandma’s house.
 
Her house was tiny. It always smelled like quilts and oatmeal cookies and that musty odor when you first turn on a window-unit air conditioner after winter. It had a cellar that smelled like cold dirt even during the summer, where she kept store-brand cans of creamed corn, jars of home-pickled dilly beans, and two-liter bottles of Diet Coke. In my dream, I descend into the cellar. I find a door leading to a passageway. I go in. I follow it for a long way; it’s cool and dark, and I’m not afraid. Eventually it opens into this grand, palatial, brightly lit marble room. There are columns and fountains, and the air smells like flowers. I push forward and find room after room. It’s all grand and glorious, beautiful and perfect. It’s not what you would expect to find.
 
But there it is, and for those few minutes (I’ve heard that dreams are never more than five minutes long, which I totally don’t believe, but whatever), you get to experience the most unexpected grandeur, running like a rabbit warren under my grandma’s little house in Jackson, Tennessee.
 
And then I wake up, the thrill of possibility and discovery drifting upward off me like steam. It’s such a delicious feeling. Just stay a little longer, I say. But it doesn’t.
 
Yet another reason it sucks to tell people about your dreams is that then they suddenly become amateur dream interpretation experts: [Nondescript German psychiatrist voice] Well, you see, when you were riding that bicycle made out of fish sticks while wearing an adult diaper, it symbolizes . . . That you’re afraid of failure. That you’re filled with seething rage. That you’re afraid to become such a grown-up that you no longer call fish sticks “fish dicks.” Who knows?
 
But dreams are their own universe. They exist in you, and you’re the God of that universe, so no one can tell you what they mean. You have to figure it out, assuming dreams have any meaning at all, which I think they only sometimes do.
 
This dream, though--the one about finding all the hidden rooms--I think it does mean something. I think it means there’s something great inside me, something extraordinary and mysterious and undiscovered.
 
That’s a thing I tell myself. It’s a thing I believe.