My Cousin's Keeper

The Last New Start and My Cousin's Keeper are two halves of a story being written by Angel for NaNoWrMo 2021.

The two books tell the same story from different perspectives, although they each have separate plot threads as well. The main story is focused around a teen girl, Tess, moving in with her older cousin Gabby after her parents leave the country.

Characters

Main Characters

• Tess Naylor - POV character for The Last New Start; a teenage girl
• Gabby Noel - Tess's cousin, caretaker, and bully; POV character and narrator for My Cousin's Keeper. Ffrances calls her Gabrielle as a joke sometimes; it isn't her real name.
• Ffrances Jones (Gabby's gf; a hypnotherapist)

Gabby's friends

• Malcolm - Gabby's friend. Does interior decorating (decorated the nursery)
• Jenny - Works with Gabby. Might have kids; recommended a 'classic' movie that Gabby and Tess hadn't seen

Tess's classmates

Her parents think of Chloe and Kim as her best friends; not sure how accurate this is. Prior to the book she would mostly hang around with Liz, Kim, and sometimes Chloe; or with Spike (not usually together with the others)

• Spike Torrance - In the year below Tess. Seems to know everyone in school, friendly with everyone. Tess wishes he was her boyfriend, but is scared to ask how he feels. They seem to have something like a relationship without ever making it official
• Chloe - has a natural talent for memorising names and dates, which puts her at the top of Tess's history class. Has helped Tess with studying in the past, but her house is full of siblings yelling across each other so she almost never meets friends at home
• Liz - her brother Delain has a half dozen exercise machines in the garage, because he doesn't have the motivation to work out but always thinks that a new type of machine will somehow make him fit
• Annette
• Kim - full name 'Pocahontas Rainbow-Child Kim'. Parents were hippies; all her friends use her surname only. Moves silently without realising; her friends are used to being startled because she starts talking before they even realised she was there.
• Tami - a new friend, who lives in Palmerston. Tess starts talking to him on the bus because she doesn't know anyone else on that route. His body language and appearance suggest he doesn't quite fit in; Tess initially thought he was from some exotic country, maybe the middle east. But he moved with his family three years ago, coming from the town of Mule Butte, Nebraska.
• Ashli Vance - Tami's gf. In Tess's history class. Says she is really bad at the subject, but does well on tests through determination and hard work. She's one of the girls cute enough that every guy notices her, but she's so wrapped up in her own little world that she barely acknowledges anyone's attention.
• Mindy Ciertowczki - wannabe-popular girl at school. In Spike's class, and has a crush on him. Tries to increase her own popularity by picking on people she sees as less important, but very insecure.

Teachers

• Miss MacManus - Tess's music teacher, who really likes her and wouldn't object if she was late
• Mr Minchin - Tess's history teacher. Likes to continually grade his students, hanging a list on the notice board of who is at the 'top' and 'bottom' in his classes. At the start, Tess is second from bottom, Chloe is at the top, and Ashli has just managed to reach the top half of the list. Tess gets to move up the list a bit after chapter 20

Family

• Tess's parents (John and Trish Naylor) - Moved to San Lorenzo after chapter 3.
• Aunt Mary - the only one of Tess's dad's family to stay in touch with him after some big argument years ago (possibly because Trish insisted in getting married at a church that's a different denomination to theirs)
• Grandma Forton - an old lady who doesn't really understand email. Maternal grandmother to Doug and Gabby. No longer talks to Doug because she had a huge quarrel with Trish. Wants to hear from Tess, but only with Mary passing messages between them
• Grandma Lexi - Trish's mother; Tess used to visit her weekly, until her parents started country-hopping
• Gabby's parents - when she started at university, they didn't help much. She had to rent a truck to handle moving in at her first independent home, because her mum couldn't drive (disability) and her dad decided that if she's moving out of their home she's no longer his responsibility. She's barely spoken to him since.

Others / Namedrops

• Mr Draper - one of Mr Naylor's workmates. They went on a two-week ski trip together last spring, and trusted Tess to look after herself at home
• Alice - Tess's imaginary friend. She spent some time imagining this girl, who might have been the previous owner of all the toys in Gabby's house. Tess imagined that Alice and her three little sisters had left almost everything behind when they had to move. She speculates that Alice might be one of her classmates at school, as she knows next to nothing about her, but there's no way she could find out.

Locations

• San Lorenzo - a Mediterranean location that has a lot of tourists (not clear if SL is an island, a country, or a city)
  • Orange Quarter - part of the city that's kind of upper class. Modern art installations on every street corner. Where the Naylors live
    • Tess's parents can see the beach from their window. If they leave the blinds open they get sunrise colours on the ceiling in the morning, reflected off the ocean
  • Marble Quarter - a "Golden parachute drop zone", where American billionaires go to retire. Responsible for causing some economic problems, and pushing the cost of living in San Lorenzo way up
  • Not sure what the relative time zones are, but Tess's parents called Gabby around 3pm, and ~3 hours later they thought it was lunch time (this could mean it's lunch time in San Lorenzo, or they were trying to work out the time zone and adjusted in the wrong direction)

• Greater Ashfields - the largest town in the area, and where the girls like to go shopping. It seems that Raybridge is an outlying smaller town, which has a pretty good school. The Naylors originally lived somewhere between Ashfields and Raybridge, and decided to send Tess to the older, more established school. The school's catchment area includes both most of the Greater Ashfields town centre, and the eastern third of Upper Ashfields.
  • Hilbert Avenue is one of the peripheral shopping streets, where almost all busses from the North drop off. It has a gift shop called Swaggery, which seems to specialise in tacky jewelry in many different OTT styles
  • Brunchietta - a cafe in one of the pedestrian areas. Everyone calls it Nigel's. Nigel is an older man who is rarely working there himself these days, but knows all the regular customers. Most visitors sit outside on what looks like wrought iron garden furniture, or on the public benches that stretch across a large courtyard
• Raybridge High - Tess's school
  • There's a little block of cheap apartments opposite
• Palmerston - a trashy new-build estate 'north of Pine Ridge', right on the edge of the Raybridge school district. Gabby lives here
  • From Gabby's house to the nearest school bus stop is fifteen minutes walk
  • There's also a "Palmerston, Oregon", setting of the TV series Live From Palmerston. No details about the show given yet; or whether Palmerston, Oregon really exists. But there's a pop culture meme thing, any time someone mentions Palmerston the default response is "Palmerston, Oregon?" regardless of whether someone is talking about the show or a real place by that name
• Pine Ridge - somewhere between Raybridge and Palmerston.
  • Pine Ridge Municipal Care Trust - A large cluster of red brick buildings which is a weird combination of a hospital and retirement home. Ffrances works there as a therapist. The back gate leads to a bit of scrubby ground studded with randomly-planted pine trees, where Ffrances and Gabby sometimes hang out on her breaks. Local kids also hang out there sometimes.
    • One of the streets going past is Brock Street

Trivia

• The number 74 bus is the Palmerston—Raybridge circular, which comes every fifteen minutes

References

• Project page on NaNoWriMo website
• The initial idea in my 'ideas book' on Wattpad
• The Last New Start on Wattpad
• My Cousin's Keeper on Wattpad