Pelly must overcome her crippling panic disorder and PTSD to save the life of a girl she thinks is her best friend who has been missing for five years.

SYNOPSIS:

SHACKLED – a full-length thriller

I’m the author of eight YA novels with imprints of Random House and Simon & Schuster. This script is the adaptation of one of those novels, which recently went into its fourth printing.

PELLY, 16 and vaguely goth, is having a panic attack so badly she can’t light a cigarette outside the coffee shop where she recently started working. Her co-worker, DAVID—a young Dulé Hill type of kid who secretly crushes on her—helps Pelly calm down using breathing techniques he’s learned from martial arts. “Strong trees bend with the wind instead of resisting.” It’s better than her usual fix: cutting her arms with a razor kept in a pill box in the coin pocket of her jeans.

Calmed down, Pelly returns to the register while David goes to clean the restrooms. An older man (REBANE) comes in with a gaunt, silent girl Pelly’s age and orders two drinks to go. Pelly becomes paralyzed after recognizing TARA, her best friend who was believed to be kidnapped; it’s the cause of her PTSD and panic disorder. After hearing Pelly blurt Tara’s name, Rebane says she must be mistaken; this is his daughter, Leslie. Rebane leads Tara out of the shop by the hand—but Tara turns back just long enough to mouth the words “Help me.” Pelly’s paralysis breaks as they get into a white Nissan Sentra with a blue sticker on the bumper. Pelly gets the plate number and calls 911, but quickly realizes how insane she sounds on the phone. A patrol unit comes to investigate Pelly’s wild claim, but the officer is skeptical.

Pelly recalls herself and Tara and their families at a park at sunset five years prior. While the girls play hide-and-seek, a man whose face Pelly never sees asks if she has a seen a service dog on the loose. Pelly waves him off, “No!” The man walks off, but Pelly can’t find Tara. In fact, Tara hasn’t been seen since, and not long after, Pelly wasn’t able to make herself leave the house, especially at night. She desperately wants to do simple things like attend school again.

Determined to prove the girl was Tara, Pelly meets with the detective assigned to Tara’s case, but comes away distraught when he won’t confirm whether she picked the old man’s photo from several driver license pictures. Pelly next tries to tell Tara’s mom—who is on medication herself over the loss of her daughter—but she’s furious that Pelly’s dredging up the past and tells Pelly to get out.

Using the license plate number (and David’s credit card) to do an online search for the Sentra, Pelly finds the owner, FRANKLIN REBANE, lives in a small town a few hours outside Phoenix. She convinces David to drive them to Rebane’s home to see if there is anything else there she might use to convince the cops to take more action.

In town, they pass a church with a logo Pelly recognizes from Rebane’s bumper sticker. She and David go in to the office and discover Rebane works there…in youth ministry. David points out that could explain why he was driving around with a teen girl not his daughter, but Tara insists it’s proof that Rebane lied about the girl being his child. They go on to Rebane’s house.

It’s now well after dark . . . and Rebane’s house looks dreadfully normal. David parks behind the house on another street while Pelly peeks over his back wall. When Rebane himself comes out the back kitchen door, gets into his car, and drives off, Pelly talks herself into a closer look. Barely able to breathe from the anxiety, Pelly enters Rebane’s backyard. Still nothing unusual: a shed, a lovely flower garden (she stops to smell the snapdragons), the driveway. As if to prove there’s nothing amiss and she’s been nuts this whole time, Pelly tries the kitchen doorknob.

It turns easily. Terrified now of both getting caught and not satisfying her certainty that Rebane is a kidnapper, Pelly enters the house. Disappointment: it’s just a bachelor pad. It’s a little odd that he’d padlock a closet door to keep his cereal safe, but other than that . . .

Wait—a padlocked closet? No. Rebane has a basement and keeps it locked. She makes this discovery just as Rebane returns home with a prescription med sack in his hand.

Pelly freezes solid. Rebane seems almost ready to let her go until he recognizes her from the coffee shop. BAM! He springs, and after a struggle, tosses Pelly into the basement. There in the near dark, Pelly sees the room has been soundproofed, and that on a small bed against the far wall is Tara! Except Tara keeps insisting her name is Jody. Pelly slowly realizes that while this is definitely the girl from the coffee shop, it’s not Tara—her eyes are the wrong color. Rebane has had her down here for years, keeps her drugged up, and sometimes takes her out in public as part of his perverse power trip.

Rebane comes downstairs, pointing out that this side of the door has a combination lock, so if anything bad happened to him while he was down there, the girls would be stuck. He’s about to prey on Pelly when David’s voice sounds from upstairs! Rebane punches Pelly almost unconscious, then runs up the stairs, screaming for help; he lets David in, shouting about the crazy man who lives here. While David tries to make sense of that, Rebane strikes, sending David flying down the stairs and landing in a broken heap at the bottom. Rebane locks the door, but returns quickly, this time with a Glock. He speaks with a nauseating leer at Jody, and prepares to shoot Pelly—but Pelly, more angry now than scared, screams at him to leave her alone. Instead of scaring him off, this titillates the older man, who throws Pelly to the bed and holds her down, preparing to do his worst. Remembering David’s martial arts talk about bending instead of resisting, she goes limp, making Rebane think he’s the boss. But as he tears at her clothes, she sneaks the pill box into her hand, gets her razor out, and slashes at him. Rebane falls back, and the gun drops. Pelly swoops it into her hands and fires! Rebane, shot in the abdomen, falls, alive but no longer a threat. Jody tells her to kill him. Pelly raises the gun, only to hear David warn that if she kills Rebane, she’ll never be herself again. We pull back from the scene, backward up the stairs, through the locked basement door, out toward the living room before we hear two muffled shots—fired by Pelly into the combination lock.

Two weeks later, Pelly and David sit in a parking lot. It is morning. She is reading an article on her phone about two female bodies being discovered under the flower bed in Rebane’s back yard. While there is no evidence linking him to Tara, he absolutely was a kidnapper, rapist, and murderer, and is going to prison for the rest of his life. Pelly says she’s never been so scared as she is right then. David takes her hand and tells her he’s got her back. For the first time in five years, with David by her side, Pelly walks into school.