by Kris Neri, with the Femmes Fatales
In my November blog, Giving Thanks, I wrote that I would talk more about how crime enters my general fiction novel, Hopscotch Life (coming in March 2020). To refresh your memory, here’s a description of Hopscotch Life:
Poor Plum Tardy. Between being saddled with a goofy name, to the way she misquotes proverbs, to her quirky style of dress, Plum always feel out of synch with other people. But even if others do seem to move in lockstep toward successes Plum can’t even imagine, while she erratically leaps through life as if it were some giant hopscotch court, that doesn’t explain the startling way her life unravels.
Plum catches her fiancé, Noah Rowle, in the act with sexy Claire Denton, his partner in a 
real estate deal designed to allow the soul-sucking Budget-Mart chain to gobble up blocks of land across the country. Thinking her life couldn’t get any worse, she also learns he’s cheated her financially. Desperate to flee, Plum stumbles on a bag of cash. Assuming that to be the booty Noah took from her, she runs off with it, toward a destination that’s just a name on a map. There, Plum finds a quirky town that needs someone like her. In one crazy leap, she not only makes that place her home, she thinks she’s hit on a way to stop to Noah and Claire’s land score.
But while Plum tries to help her new town halt the steamroller of progress, even with her unconventional perspective, she could not have predicted the way her past would collide with her present. Will her offbeat approach save her, or land her in behind bars in hopscotch hell?
There were elements I wanted to address in this novel. One was that at times our lives seem to be on an upswing, when everything seems to go right, and at other times, we’re on such a determined downward slide that there’s nothing we do can stop that trajectory. I’m sure we’ve had both kinds of extended experiences, and often nothing we do brings it about or changes it. One of my distinctive downward slides involved a meniscus tear in one of my knees. That wasn’t something I chose to do, it was just a
matter of my knee turning the way it should not have. But it did mean that a couple of years of my life would be spent in too many doctor visits, too much PT, eventual surgery and more PT, not to mention walking for too long with a cane.
Sometimes the slides are more serious, involving illnesses for which there are no cures, and at other times, they’re just a series of nuisance complaints. But just as a snowball sliding down a hill can build into an avalanche, so can our more depressing trajectories.
Although I gave Plum an entirely different kind of downward slide than mine, with my own in my recent past, I was able to share my feelings about it with her. And to show how hard it is to change your life’s trajectory if you don’t make radical changes.
At the start of Hopscotch Life, Plum has already suffered losses, completely out of her control. When we first meet her, she’s trying to come to terms with the fact that her mother is in a vegetative state. Then, adding to that loss, through no fault of her own, she quickly loses her job, and then learns that her fiancé, Noah, has cheated on her with his coworker, Claire, both romantically and financially.
Another issue I wanted to deal with is that sometimes the really critical choices in our lives aren’t made after serious deliberation, but just on the fly. And also, that choice comes when we’re not in the best of places.
That’s how we come to the crime in Hopscotch Life. I wanted to address at how a good, innocent person, who happens to be in a bad place in her life, could possibly make the worst possible choice.
Here’s how that plays out on the page:
Plum stumbled out to the den, trying to block out the sound of the murmuring voices still coming from the bedroom. With one brief glance at the maps tacked to the wall, she realized the one tiny advantage to this situation. She could take that vacation she needed, after all. And she could go anywhere without regard to what anyone else wanted. She didn’t have to take a hotel here in town, where she might run into someone who knew Noah or Claire. She could go somewhere else, anywhere. Not for long, of course. She’d need another job, preferably sooner than later. And she still had Crystal to think about. But none of it had to be immediate.
Where could she go? She glanced at the wall over Noah’s desk. A desperate longing to take something from him overcame her. I need maps. She began yanking Noah’s maps from the wall. Anger began to overtake her pain. Plum scarcely heard her own breathlessness, as she crushed those unfolded maps beneath her arm. She didn’t hear anything, apart from the sound of the thumbtacks hitting the hardwood floor when she ripped the maps away, sending the tacks flying.
She was about to turn away. To rush outside, clutching her map booty, when she saw it
—Noah’s tony Hartmann satchel. When she saw it earlier this afternoon, it had been on the top of his stack of luggage in their closet. Now, it rested on the desk chair, which was pulled a couple of feet away from the desk—not pushed in as she had left it—with the top unbuckled. When Plum glanced into it, she choked.
The satchel was filled with money. Fat bundles of cash. Loads of them.
Was this what Noah did with the money she gave him every month for their mortgage payment? Or was it the cash from the second mortgage he took on the house by forging her name?
Rage mushroomed in Plum. How dare he?
Plum latched the top of the satchel shut and yanked it off the chair.
Heavy sucker.
Without giving it a thought, she took the satchel.
Hah! Who’s screwing whom now?
After grabbing her tote bag where she’d dropped it on the floor, she sailed out the front door. And this time, she did slam it.
I won’t spoil things for you. I hope you’ll want to read how taking this money that Plum took plays out in her life and the consequences that await her.
How about you? Surely, you’ve had downward slides, right? What did you do to turn them around?