Keith Calabrese: Wild Ride

Charley Decker is about to have the craziest night of her life! With her mom on a romantic weekend getaway, Charley has plans to spend her free time watching bad movies with older brother Greg, and friends Wade and Oona (if Charley can get Wade and Oona to stop fighting long enough to pay attention.) But then Greg ditches Charley for a date night downtown, borrows their mom's boyfriend's super-expensive, super-rare 1964 World's Fair Skyway Mustang, and accidentally gets it towed. Worse, the tow lot can't even find the car! Suddenly all of Charley's plans fly out the window. So what's an unsupervised trio of seventh graders to do? Sneak into the city, and pull off a Ferris Bueller-worthy scheme to get the car back. Only now the Mustang has a new feature in the trunk: a stowaway who's hiding from his infamous and possibly criminal billionaire boss, Alton Peck. So now Charley has a new problem-one with information that could topple the most powerful tech company in the world. What follows is an all-night race around the clock as Charley and the gang try to save their new friend, evade Peck, his goons, and the invisible ears of his newest ears of his newest artificially intelligent creation, and get the Mustang home before morning.