Only the Lonely
By Laura Dower
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Twelve-year-old Madison Finn is allergic to change. Her two best friends are away at camp and Madison is not sure she’s going to survive the summer, let alone the beginning of junior high. Good thing she has a new laptop, which she uses to write and store all of her thoughts on friendship, her parents’ divorce, and her fear of being called a loser for not liking sushi!
At first, change seems like the worst thing ever, but with the support of her family, friends, and little pug, Phin, Madison realizes she can handle anything that comes her way.
Laura Dower
Author Laura Dower has a lot in common with Madison Finn: They’re both only children and they both love dogs, the color orange, and books! Laura has written more than ninety kids’ books to date, including twenty-five in the series From the Files of Madison Finn. Her other books include the new Palace Puppies series and For Girls Only, a guide to girl stuff. When she’s not writing, Laura loves to garden, sing (loudly), and volunteer as a scout leader for her daughter and two sons. She and her family live in New York. Want to be keypals? Drop her a note at www.lauradower.com.
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Reviews for Only the Lonely
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was a cute book! Anyone starting middle school can relate to it.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I didn't like this book for a few reasons:
Madison trolls for friends in an internet chat room? I think that is the wrong message to send. She starts emailing with someone called bigwheels, who is supposed to be a 13 or 14 year old girl? my immediate thought was: 50 year old perv alert.
Madison is not very likable. Her friends go away to camp over the summer and she is all bitter about it. Then she makes friends with a new girl in town, they get along great and hang out, but as soon as school starts, she is very mean to Fiona and ignores her.
Her old friends come back, but she is so self absorbed that she doesn't behave like a friend to them.
I think this book sends the wrong message to young readers in every way.
Book preview
Only the Lonely - Laura Dower
Only the Lonely
From the Files of Madison Finn, Book 1
Laura Dower
For Mom with love—always remember MTM, sour cream & onion chips, and Warren Avenue
Special thanks to my first editor, Helen Perelman, who showed me the ropes;
and to my new editor, Samantha Streger,
who’s helping me bring Maddie back to life …
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Preview: Boy, Oh Boy!
About the Author
Chapter 1
"HNNNNNNUGH! WHAT IS YOUR problem?" Madison grunted at her new orange laptop computer. She was smack-dab in the middle of downloading a picture of a super-cute Ursus maritimus (a.k.a. polar bear) when the screen just froze.
She knew her hard drive had plenty of memory and her virus program was up to date.
She punched all the right keys.
CAPS LOCK wasn’t on.
But nothing.
Sometimes in the past, Madison’s computer screen would freeze, but only for a blip. This time, something was different. Maybe the computer wasn’t really the one with a problem.
Maybe Madison was the frozen one.
Madison Francesca Finn had a dreadful case of late-summer brain freeze. It was not the kind of brain freeze you get when you drink a Grape Slurpee too fast. This was the kind of brain freeze that happens when your thoughts get stuck in a whirly swirl of loneliness, friendlessness, and total and utter boredom. This was the chronic, moronic, pain-in-the-brain freeze that happens when everyone you know is at camp but you’re stuck at home with Mom; the summer reading list you were supposed to be finishing up hasn’t even been unfolded; and you have no pool options on 95° days.
Ugh!
Madison yelped, jumping up from her desk chair. Laptop fail, Phin! Why me?
She glared at her dog, Phineas T. Finn, who was curled up next to a giant metal file cabinet in the corner of her bedroom.
Phin poked up his wrinkly nose into the air and sneezed. Rowroooooooo!
This pug hated it when his nap was interrupted.
Well, I’ll just restart it just to be sure everything’s okay,
Madison said out loud, groaning and hitting a few special keys. Pressing Control+Alt+Delete at once was a trick her dad had taught her.
Dad was the one who had computerized Madison in the first place. He had shown her what HTML meant before most of her classmates had clicked on their first mouses. And Dad always shared the best apps, games, and cool tools—all of them educational, of course. He loved computer jokes, too, even though he told the same ones more than once.
Hey, Maddie, why did the Net chick cross the road?
he would ask.
I dunno, Dad … why?
Madison would say with pretend interest, even if it was the third time she’d heard it.
To get ONLINE!
Dad would laugh.
And that was one of his better jokes.
Just this year, her parents had bought this new laptop in Madison’s favorite color. Dad uploaded all the latest desktop-publishing programs, too. He even got Madison an ice-cream cone–shaped flash drive so she could backup her documents and photographs.
It’s a great way to organize your thoughts, honey bear,
Mom had suggested as they unpacked the computer back in May. Just think, you’re on the cutting edge of technology. This fall, you’ll be the smartest seventh grader at Far Hills.
It made Madison uncomfortable whenever Mom talked about how smart Madison was, like she was a computer genius or a writing genius or anyone with genius
potential. Madison knew her way around the Internet, but she didn’t exactly feel like a genius
—yet.
The laptop beeped and zinged, and Madison’s desktop wallpaper appeared once again. The polar bear was right there in its own box with a collage of white rhinos and mountain gorillas in the background.
Madison always used pictures of endangered animals as her screen savers. In fact, she considered herself an official animal advocate both on the computer and off. She fantasized about working for the National Geographic Explorer TV show, or becoming a super vet, or maybe even becoming a documentary filmmaker like her mom.
With the laptop finally unfrozen and ready to go, Madison logged onto her favorite web site, TweenBlurt.com. Here she could read about the latest and greatest trends; scan true stories shared by a whole bunch of girls she didn’t know; and chat with kids who liked the same things she did.
Best of all, the chat room helped Madison break through a case of brain freeze better than most things. Of course, she knew meeting new people online wasn’t the same as having actual, in-the-same-room friends whose hair you could braid or who could play hoops, but it was better than being alone all the time.
She’d logged onto TweenBlurt for the first time a year ago with Mom’s permission. The administrators in charge of the site were super-sticklers for safety.
The homepage was designed like a giant fishbowl. Everyone chose a fish as his or her avatar. Madison’s was a rainbow fish and her chat room screen name was MadFinn,
which was pretty funny, considering she was a Finn
among the fishes, so to speak. Once she clicked, her rainbow fish swam into a waiting room.
Madison scanned the list of different chat rooms she could join.
I am sooo bored! Hello!
(32 fish)
Tell me anything u want GRRRLS ONLY
(12 fish)
****animal lovers here*****
(3 fish)
Private! Wanna be keypals?
(28 fish)
Pictures of cute boyz can u help me
(11 fish)
only the lonely
(1 fish)
Madison clicked animal lovers here
and went inside. She was sure she must be in the right place. Maybe she’d meet a fellow polar bear admirer?
MadFinn has entered the room.
Downtown Boyz was an all-guy singing group whose lead singer Jimmie J was pretty cute but … wait a minute! Madison wanted to talk about animals. This was the animal lovers here
room. Why were they changing the subject? Who cared about Jimmie J? And why wasn’t Iluvcats girl responding?
Iluvcats has left the room.
As soon as cat girl left the room, Madison left, too.
She went back to the room list in search of someone who would talk about animals or computers or something besides Jimmie J. She saw one other room that looked semi-interesting.
only the lonely (1 fish)
That was exactly how Madison felt. She missed her best friend, Aimee, who was away at ballet camp twirling around; and Egg, who was away at computer camp URL-ing around.
She clicked on lonely
and hoped for the best.
Of course as luck would have it (and Madison’s luck usually ran a little sloooooow these days), she entered and introduced herself with a quick MadFinn
hello, but then nothing happened.
There was no hello
back.
There was no how r u?
There was nothing. Madison waited almost three whole minutes before the (1 fish)
responded in any way at all.
Madison waited.
Madison waited a little longer.
Poof?
Madison felt even more alone than when she had logged on, so of course she logged off immediately. She wasn’t in the mood to be lonely anymore.
After that chat room fiasco, Madison went into her super-special computer files. She accessed the files with a super-special password which was so super-special that even she forgot it sometimes. Luckily, she had it taped inside the top drawer of her desk.
In the last few weeks (partly out of boredom and partly out of a desire to get her life together), Madison had begun a new system of personal information storage on the laptop.
She had been collecting magazine clippings like a pack rat for months and uploading them onto her computer. Mom had a cool app on her smartphone that could transfer photos and letters to Madison’s laptop.
One by one the images popped up in boxes on the screen, one on top of the other. Now Madison needed to add the special effects. She logged onto funkyfotostudio.com and downloaded the images into a rainbow folder there marked Madison.
Once the pics were downloaded she was able to add borders, color, funny captions, and more. She hoped Mom and Dad would let her have her own Web page or even her own Web site one day. Maybe the genius she was destined to be really was a Web site genius?
Mom would love that.
In addition to the photos, Madison decided she would also keep an online record of her most important feelings, fears, and thoughts. Of course, most people would have called this a journal,
but Madison thought that sounded way too obvious. Instead she just called it: The Files of Madison Finn.
Madison had friend files. She had homework files. She had nothing-in-particular files. She classified, collected, controlled, and computed everything. Here, inside this delightful orange computer, Madison was in the process of creating password-protected miles of files. And she backed them all up on her ice-cream flash drive.
She opened a recent one.
Scary Dinners
That made her laugh. On the screen before her was a graph on which Madison had plotted Mom’s predictable fast-food dinners. After sixteen straight nights in a row of egg rolls, tacos, fried chicken, and other scary
dinners, Madison was inspired to keep track. As of tonight, the graph showed pizza running neck and neck with Chinese food, with PB-&-J sandwiches lagging behind.
Tonight, Madison decided to open a brand new file in honor of her hour on TweenBlurt.com.
Only the Lonely
Madison closed her eyes for a second. What to write? Sometimes going online was great: all the people, all the chatter, all