A Lovestruck Freshman by Caroline A. DeJong

Caroline A. DeJong grew up in Kent, Washington. Determined to get out of the rainy weather, she moved to Los Angeles for college, attending Loyola Marymount University, graduating with a B.A. in Screenwriting.

A lover of stories and books since early childhood, she proclaimed that she was going to be a writer at age 11; that dream hasn’t wavered since. DeJong also writes screenplays and short stories. In the time that she isn’t writing, she loves to watch television, cook new recipes, and dance. 

DeJong currently lives in Los Angeles. 

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About the Book

Eighteen-year-old Sophie Shelton has left behind her comfortable, naive life in Kissimmee, Florida for a startling awakening at the University of Miami. When she begins college, she’s determined to concentrate on her education and future career as a writer. However, her life takes an unexpected turn, and she finds herself thrust into a world she never knew existed.

Immersed completely in a world of sex, love, and cutthroat Greek life, she finds herself dating the freshman quarterback, yet developing feelings for his best friend. Her own best friend advises Sophie to stop leading the two guys on, but she finds that her heart is torn. She knows her path could go either way based upon a seemingly simple choice. Who does her heart belong to? Will she be able to make the choice?

A Lovestruck Freshman, book one in the These Four Years series, will cause you to fall in love with the angst and joy of college, and understand the difficulty of Sophie’s predicament at the center of a love triangle.

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Keep reading for an excerpt:

Chapter 1

IT’S A DAY kind of like Christmas. Everyone is excited for the morning activities. You open up your thirty-something presents, hoping that your dream is wrapped up somewhere. As if dreams can even be wrapped. The day commences, and you enjoy your gifts. But no one really wants it to end. The feeling at 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Day is the worst. Christmas is over. 365 more days until the next one. Who really wants to put that damn tree back in the attic, anyway? Let’s be real.

It’s just like high school graduation. The day when you’re going off into the world, hopefully to college, to see if you can carry the weight of that damn Christmas tree into the “real world.” Who even came up with that phrase, anyway? As if high school isn’t the real world. As if high school isn’t merely a place where they send teenagers so we can understand what it feels like to be taunted, treated like five-year-olds, and told that anything is possible. But it’s complete bullshit. Not everything is possible. How could it be? Is Susan Stein, the weird girl who sits in the front of Advanced Placement calculus, really going to sprout wings like she says? I don’t think so.

The real world. It’s a scary place. Or so they claim. I never felt a rush of fear come over my body the day I was accepted into eight of the nine colleges to which I’d applied. Granted, two were my safety schools in Florida—just in case my SAT scores weren’t as good as my counselor claimed they’d be. Take that, Florida State and Central Florida! The only one I didn’t get into was my reach school, Duke. It’s too bad. I would’ve been an awesome Cameron Crazie. Coach K’s loss.

I was excited to go onto college, eat crappy college food, and gain the freshman fifteen. Well, actually, I didn’t really want to gain the freshman fifteen, but let’s be real, that’s what happens to basically every girl who goes to college. I wasn’t even afraid to move onto the University of Miami campus when I got my room assignment in July to live in Mahoney Residential College with my roommate, Stacy James. Fear did strike me when my older sister explained that roommates can sometimes be stalkers. Or boyfriend-stealers. Or refrigerator scoundrels. I think the idea of Stacy James stealing my dried apricots and whatever fresh fruit I was eating that week struck a chord the most. See, freshman fifteen: what did I tell you?

Luckily Stacy James wasn’t crazy. Well, she is crazy… for the opposite sex. And for sex. For foreplay. The works. She came into college with more notches on her belt than Hugh Hefner at the same age. Ridiculous? Well, yes. But for Stacy, sex is a part of getting to know someone. She probably would’ve propositioned me, too, if she’d been drinking all night and had still been able to walk back to Mahoney without my support. My college experience was quite unusual. Let me tell you about my freshman year: the fear, the love, the pain. Especially the rush of freshman-year fear, which caught up with me pretty quickly. Before school began, I never thought it would. I was way too strong for that. I was way too mature for that. I could handle being two-hundred-twenty-one miles away from my parents, no sweat. I wasn’t clingy. Or so I thought. But the day fear rushed through my body was on the first weekend of college. The first Friday. That was the day I met Ryan Olsen. And Steven Sterling.