Not ready for prime time

the long version

Justine Nichols has green eyes, pouty lip's, pale shoulders, and five secrets. One of them is not her age - she's an edgy twenty-two - or that she's the lead singer with the girls' band Purple Nurple. Or that she works at a used and rare bookstore in Portland, Maine, for an eccentric sixty-year-old who left a lumber mill for poetry. Or that she's falling in a big way for a guy who writes plays about killer weasels. Or that she hates with immoderate passion America's most popular TV sit-com, My Way Or The Highway, which each week partly resolves another ticklish little problem in the life of a warm, wisecracking single mom and her perky teenage daughter. Perhaps it's envy, but Justine's disdain for television's favorite teen and her ever resourceful mom doesn't entirely want reason. Abandoned by her father before she was born, she was deserted at the age of three by her mother, who, some believe, joined a brainwashing, weapons-bearing religious cult. Others say that the adventurous Tina disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle aboard The Enchantress with a romantically Hemingwayesque seaman named Rusty. Only Justine and her guardian aunt, the loopily alcoholic Lenore, know the true story. Which is one of Justine's five secrets.