Check out the blurb for Sixteen Candles, as well as an exclusive sneak peak at the beginning of the first chapter!

*    *    *

First-day-of-school buzz?  So over!  It’s the end of September, and the spotlight-loving, drama-obsessed It Chicks’ lives are getting juicier by the second. 

With Skye getting ready for her very own “My Super Sweet Sixteen” episode on MTV, she’s finally back in the center of attention—and she and Tangie are back to BFF status.  Meanwhile, when Tangie least expects it, her secret fling with senior stud Trey Stevens takes a turn that leaves everyone wondering if true players really can have a change of heart.  But will Skye’s jealousy get the best of her when Tangie’s love life takes center stage?  And how long can CJ keep quiet before Izzy spills the secret that’ll change Tangie’s life forever?  

This time around, Tangie’s friendship drama takes a back seat to her romance—can they handle the heat?

*    *    *

Chapter 1. Grown and Sexy at the Coffee Shop

“um, can i help you girls?” The skinny blond hostess with the skyscraper-high legs and the nose bling was clearly a model. All the hostesses and waitresses at the Coffee Shop were models. The fancy diner, located on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, was a people-watching paradise, where fashionistas, random starlets, and members of the hip-hop industry elite loved to mingle.

No one really ate the food, which was a shame, since the herbed french fries were insane.

A group of fifteen-year-old girls was not usually welcome at the Coffee Shop, especially not ones from Louis Armstrong Academy of Performing and Creative Arts. The prestigious high school for budding superstars was right in the neighborhood, and the students were always hanging out outside the restaurant. The Coffee Shop didn’t like to waste a table on a bunch of loud, obnoxious teens. It just wasn’t a sexy look.
Knowing this, Tangie and her two new friends from Armstrong, Kamillah and Regina, had tried to look as grown-and-sexy as possible. Kamillah, a Harlem-born gossipista who studied drama with Skye, was rocking skinny Seven jeans and cherry-red patent-leather Steve Madden stilettos. Regina, a pretty biracial aspiring filmmaker (her mom was Filipino, her dad black) had let out her signature Pocahontas braids, so her hair was cutely crimped. Meanwhile, Tangie had pulled her out-of-control curls back in a wide black headband (her hair was always about five minutes away from major frizz) and was wearing her favorite H&M sundress over leggings and platform wedges; her toned dancer’s legs were her favorite feature, and the high shoes made them look sick. She even dusted bronzer over her milk chocolate–brown skin and applied mascara. The girls looked fierce!

Too bad they had no idea what they were doing there. All they knew was that they’d each received a mysterious text message a couple of hours ago.

It was Saturday afternoon in the last week of September, and almost a month since Tangie’s first day at the school she’d been dying to go to since birth. Since she’d enrolled at Armstrong as a sophomore, most of the dancers in her classes had a whole year of training on her—so she had tons of catching up to do. This morning, Tangie had been obsessively marking her Advanced Beginners Hip-hop routine in her bedroom mirror when she got the text message from her best friend since kindergarten, Skye Carmichael. It said: GIRLZ! MT ME AT CFEE SHP 4 BRUNCH, 12:30. V. IMP! THA RES IZ UNDER ALEXA'S NAME.

And that was it! What made it really weird was that this was the first time anyone had heard from Skye in almost three weeks. Since Friday, September 9, 2005, to be exact. That had been the night of Skye’s drama-filled Back to School party, when she’d had a huge falling-out with Tangie—among other things. The party had been such a disaster, Skye had practically disappeared, sneaking home for lunch and ignoring her friends in the hallway.