I will never forget the day I stumbled upon the YA section of my local bookstore. I was an urban kid, which meant I spent most of my free time walking around the city and reading. We had a TV, but no cable, which to a tween/teen in the 90’s meant basically no TV. I somehow managed to sneak Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Felicity past my parents on a weekly basis, but definitely NOT Beverly Hills, 90210. That, I had to trick my babysitter into letting me see. My ability to watch Dawson’s Creek depended on what mood my mother was in. On the one hand, the characters spoke like middle-aged sexologists. On the other, it was set on Cape Cod. How corrupting could it be?
But suddenly here I was, unsupervised, standing before shelves upon shelves of material detailing exactly the kind of content I was dying to know more about: Boys who drove cars. Expensive trips to the mall. Independence.
Jackpot.
“How nice to see you heading to the book store so often,” My father praised me. I would chuckle to myself like a Disney villain and return to my layer to gorge on fictional high school drama. Months later he would happen to glance at my bookshelf and see the 28-volume series Making Out by Katherine Applegate, which detailed the dramatic lives of 7 teenagers who lived on an island in Maine and took a ferry to school every day. “They think they know everything about one another” the back cover read “. . .but they’re only just beginning to find out the truth.”
It was not what he was expecting.
“Making Out?” I heard him mutter to my mom in the kitchen. “Should she be reading that? She’s 13.”
The answer? Definitely. 10 years later Making Out would help me land my first job at Alloy Entertainment, as (unbeknownst to me) it happened to be an Alloy series 
Lucy Keating assists Alloy’s TV Development team in Los Angeles. She’s obsessed with music, finding good coffee in LA, and her new puppy Ernie.
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