In Erin Baldwin’s new YA romance novel, fake dating isn’t just complicated–it’s competitive.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Good Luck, Babe! by Erin Baldwin, which is out now.
Reality TV enthusiasts Noelle and Yumi spent ten years attached at the hip—until the summer after junior year. One ill-fated night (and one awkward kiss) ended their friendship, and after a year of no contact, fate throws the girls back together when they’re offered a last-minute spot on their favorite show—an Amazing Race analog called The Adventureverse.
It’s a chance to put their superfan status to the test, a dream come true. Except for a few snags: It’s an all-couples season, filming starts in two days, and Noelle hasn’t spoken to her “girlfriend” in a year. But Noelle already has plans to use the prize money on her ailing father’s medical expenses. She would do anything for him—including fake date her ex-bestie on national television.
Can Noelle walk a tightrope between reality and TV while juggling a pretend relationship and true feelings? Or will she get sent home empty-handed and brokenhearted?
EXCERPT
Chapter 5
THREE THINGS
I don’t mean to look at the email. Okay, I do mean to look, but I don’t mean to care. In my defense, my dad was asleep when I finished my shower and I was left alone with my thoughts. Over the past hour, I’ve reread the message so many times that I could recite it from memory.
Adventureverse Casting— URGENT
Dear Noelle Breland and Yumi Panganiban,
Thank you for applying The Adventureverse. We’ve had some unexpected last-minute changes to this upcoming season’s cast and would like to speak with you and your
partner about an available position that we need filled immediately. It is extremely short notice, as filming is set to begin this Monday, May 25th, so please contact us as soon as possible if you are interested. While we can’t give away too many details about the season, as an added incentive, I can disclose that the prize money will be doubled to two million dollars (USD) for Season 25 only.
Please contact me ASAP if you’re interested.
Aliona Vasilyeva
No matter how many times I close the app, I keep finding myself drawn back to those three words: two million dollars. Eugh. I resist the urge to scream into and/or suffocate myself with my shower-hair-dampened pillow.
I love The Adventureverse and I’ve dreamed of competing on it for over ten years. But Yumi got that email, too—her email address was right next to mine—and she didn’t say anything. So, why would I? I’m fully prepared to just repress it—seal up the memory of my dream come true in the little lockbox that I hide in the cobwebby corners of my mind.
But then the reality of the situation hits me. Two million dollars. Well, my share would be one million. And after taxes, it would be closer to half a million. Still, though, that’s five hundred thousand more than what my dad has right now.
This is a way out. I am being offered, on a silver platter, the opportunity to buy my dad out of his stress, his worry, his debt. While it’s not like he could buy a new liver (it only works that way on the black market), the money would give him options. Professional cleaners to make the house safe when his immune system is nonexistent post-transplant, a home health nurse to check on his recovery, healthy food. No debt. No pushing himself to go back to work before his body is ready. And if I don’t need to get a job right away, I can be available to drive him to lab appointments and checkups.
At least for a little bit, we could relax.
I inhale, angry at myself for pushing back against the inevitable.
My life keeps asking me to change. Just when I’ve gotten the pieces into a configuration I’m happy with, something else moves, or grows, or pushes against me. And it’s never my fault. No, not fault. It’s never my choice. My mom dying, losing Yumi, my dad getting sick, college, The Adventureverse—no matter how carefully I place the puzzle together, the picture keeps changing. So, fine. Just tell me where to go, tell me what shape I need to be.
Whatever makes the puzzle work.
People endure things they don’t want all the time. People who live in war zones don’t want their houses to be destroyed. Poor parents don’t want to have to work two jobs. My dad doesn’t want to have liver disease. Yet here I am, not wanting to go on a fun little globe-trotting game show adventure and learn to polka dance for two million dollars.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
It’s time to grow up, Noelle. You say you’d do anything for your dad—the least you can do is grovel for him.
You know what’s not interesting?
Dread.
It’s a slow, boring whitewashed wall of a mental state, like apathy or depression. Though artists and writers try to romanticize it, it has only ever been, and will only ever be, a mind-numbingly dull wasteland. And yet I’ve spent so much of my life hanging out in it. It’s dark outside by the time I do the first of three things I’ve been dreading: I go to Taylor Norris’s graduation party. This, in and of itself, isn’t the worst fate. I like Taylor. She still invites me to her parties even though I rarely make an appearance these, and
I appreciate that.
However, that appreciation doesn’t keep me from contemplating faking my own death the entire drive over, because action items two and three for tonight are as follows: find Yumi Panganiban, and beg her to do The Adventureverse with me.
I park, and even though I would happily sit in my car and anxious-avoidance around for the next few hours, I force myself to move. My consciousness separates from my body, leaving the discomfort of being perceived somewhere behind me, an afterimage Noelle Breland abandoned on the side of the road. She watches me step out of the car, lock the doors, and march down the block.
Pounding bass-heavy music reverberates down the street, and I wonder how the cops haven’t been called yet. This is an upscale neighborhood right on the edge of Phoenix, the kind where every house has an elaborate xeriscaped lawn—that grassless, zengarden-like design that uses different types of gravel and pops of native plants to say, Even in a drought, I’ d still be wealthier than you. These people absolutely call 911 on house parties.
When I open the Norrises’ front gate, its hinges don’t squeak and the bottom doesn’t scrape along the ground. I find this deeply unsettling. Silent fences live in a different tax bracket than me. A gaggle of nicotine addicts greet me with a synchronized vape glow as I cross the front porch and step inside.
I suspect that if I stumbled upon Atlantis one day and the Atlantians were throwing a little function that I needed to awkwardly maneuver in order to explore the city, the lost empire would remain lost. I would reboard the boat, declare there’s nothing to see, and be on my merry way—reality-shifting discovery be damned. That is to say, I am deeply uncomfortable as I wander past stacks of discarded beer cans and strings of color-shifting lights, looking for my former best friend.
I find her in the living room, which has been cleared of furniture to create a dance floor. Yumi’s dressed in the black fitted crop top her older sister, Mila, got her for Christmas two years ago. Her wide-leg jeans are slung low around her hips, highlighting her lean swimmer’s body. She’s laughing, red plastic cup hoisted into the air as she looks back over her shoulder at the girl she’s grinding on.
I know that doesn’t mean anything. That’s just how people dance at Taylor Norris’s parties. And it shouldn’t matter to me if it did mean something. But she used to dance with me like that. I can’t stop my teeth from clenching, but it’s totally fine. I’m over her. I’m so over her.
She looks up, her eyes locking with mine. The smile dies on her lips faster than she can angrily mouth, What?
I try not to bow my head, even though my primate brain is desperate to show deference. I nod toward the kitchen and the backyard beyond. Can we talk?
Yumi’s jaw flexes, relaxes, and flexes again as she decides what to do. Then, without a single word, she abruptly stands up straight and brushes past me, jerking her head to indicate I should follow her.
I imagine it’s habit more than anything that has her walking to the farthest corner of the yard, past the pool and its burbling filter, away from the people partying on the deck. We used to come sit on this stone bench whenever we needed a break from yelling over the music and brushing up against sweaty bodies on the dance floor. It’s secluded here, tucked away beneath a vine covered trellis and turned in such a way that nobody can see it from the deck. Obviously, that means we’ve walked up on couples making out a few times, but that’s just an occupational hazard of secluded benches.
Thankfully, tonight the bench is empty of football players and their hot girlfriends, so Yumi perches on one end and I take the other. Neither of us speaks, sitting in parallel as we stare off into the middle distance.
I wish I could freeze this moment—not because it’s good, but because it’s something. Call me pathetic, but it’s as if the opacity on this layer of existence is turned down, and I can almost see through to what should have been: On this stone bench in another dimension, she’s still my person. Fruitlessly, I want to stay here and hold on to that life, even though the dust of it has long since blown out of my fist. But I can’t.
“I want to do The Adventureverse.”
“No,” she says sarcastically, drawing the word out. “Really? I thought you were just dragging me out here to ask if I liked your speech.”
“Did you?” I ask, trying for playful and probably coming off nervous.
She raises her eyebrows and gives me a look that reminds me I came here to grovel.
“I don’t—” I fight the urge to cringe at myself. “The prize is two million this season.”
“I saw.”
She saw? She read the email? I guess that shouldn’t be surprising because I also read the email, but it gives me hope. Maybe the gap I have to bridge is smaller than I thought. “I need the money.”
Unimpressed, she says, “Okay.”
“My—my dad is . . . sick.”
Though she still doesn’t look at me, her brow furrows. “Like, sick how?”
“Like, I missed prom because we were in the hospital,” I admit, feeling gross about how badly I want her to make the connection that I was in the ER on a night when her biggest concern was whether or not she would win prom queen. She didn’t, by the way. She lost to Kalie McMichaels.
“Did he get hurt at work?” she asks the trellis above us.
“No. His liver is failing. He might need a transplant.” Might.
Like there’s a possibility he doesn’t. Even though the organ donation list has been the only thing occupying my thoughts for months.
“Oh my God.” The surprise gets her. She turns in my direction, mouth open on a gasp. For another brief moment, I see through the overlay of this reality again. Her mouth is open, but
this time she’s laughing at something I’ve said. She offers me a guava candy from her pocket as she sways to the music drifting out of the house.
Here and now, though, her gaze ricochets right back off me, sending her looking over her left shoulder at the trumpet-shaped flowers that climb the trellis. “What happened?” she asks.
It’s an impossible question, one that nobody can answer despite months of specialist visits. Hours of watching my dad swear up and down to new doctors that he doesn’t use IV drugs or drink excessively. Knowing they think he’s lying. Knowing, in their minds, that means he deserves it.
“They call it ‘acute liver failure of unknown origin.’ Apparently, it just happens sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Oh. Is that all my dad deserves? Is that all I deserve? It’s just one more gut punch in the endless boxing match that is my life, but I remind myself that I came here to beg Yumi, not to befriend her. I don’t need her comfort or her empathy. What I need is for her to agree to do The Adventureverse.
I don’t know if saying her name will help or hurt here, but it feels right. “Yumi, he’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and he hasn’t even had the transplant. And. . . and I’m not asking for your half. Obviously, that’s yours, and you can use it for school debt or rent or whatever. I know this is crazy. I know you don’t want to do it. It’s just that when I saw that email and realized . . .”
I trail off with a shrug.
She sucks in her cheeks. “You’re right. I don’t want to do it.”
“I know.” I scratch at a chip in the bench’s surface and admit, “Me neither.”
After a beat of silence, she exhales loudly, asking, “He’s really that sick?”
“He really is,” I confirm.
Yumi pulls her phone out of her pocket and taps at the screen a few times before placing it in the space between us, unlocked and open to the casting email. “Okay.” She shakes her head. “Say we do this, then what? We just go back to this, right? Like, you don’t think we’re suddenly going to become besties, do you?”
The way she looks at me—like she’s a celebrity and I’m a parasocial fan pleading with her to read my diary and braid my hair— makes my nose scrunch in distaste. “If it’ll get my dad a million dollars, we don’t even have to talk in the hotel after the cameras go off. No strings. We go on the show, we win, you can forget I exist.” I barely stop myself from bitterly adding again onto the end of that sentence.
After a beat, her eyes shift to me. “And I can still say no? If we call right now, leave a voicemail, and then I change my mind before she calls us back tomorrow, I can dip?”
I want to say no, but how can I? “Of course.”
Her gaze scans me from head to toe. “I’m only agreeing to this for Papa Breland.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know,” I repeat.
She stares a moment longer, like she wants to be absolutely sure that I understand how much she despises me now. And I do.
So, she clicks on the number at the bottom of the message.
Good Luck, Babe! By Erin Baldwin Copyright © 2026 by Viking Books for Young Readers. Reprinted with permission.
