MEREDITH FIRST left an insanely great recruiting career with Apple, Inc., to write books for anyone who survived high school with a little help from friends. After studying abroad at the University of London, she received a B.A. in Communications/Broadcasting from Oregon State University. Through her books and website, www.MeredithFirst.com, and the donation of 10% of all profits of GRIDLEY GIRLS to children's charities, she hopes to help young people who struggle with similar issues that she experienced. She lives with her family in Minneapolis and Sacramento and is hard at work on GRIDLEY GIRLS REUNITED, book two in the GRIDLEY GIRLS series. That's the traditional author bio, but the real story is that I'm a dork. Let's get that out right now. I had two dreams growing up: I wanted to write books about my group of friends and our crazy childhood and I wanted to work with computers. Neither of those are the dreams of a super-cool kid. As often happens with creative-type careers, the first dream got pushed aside for a more economically feasible career and I entered the high tech world a few years after college graduation. I loved it. I felt like I was living the dream. Eventually, I got to help people get jobs with Apple, the greatest company in the world. Until I started having vivid, heart-pounding dreams that kept me up at night, played out by the characters in my books: my childhood best friends. Dreams that were so real, sometimes I awoke with my heart beating out of my chest, but I was never scared, which was odd for me since I'm a pretty big scaredy cat. It took me a few months, but I finally realized that the main character in my dreams was an older version of one of our best friends growing up in The Group (the oh-so-original name my group of friends were called). Weird thing was, this friend I was seeing in my dreams had passed away thirty years prior. Why was she visiting me in my sleep all these years later? The only answer I could surmise was that I was supposed to write my books. The books where I kept her alive. I'd wanted to write them since we were in Mr. Erickson's eighth grade English class where we published short stories. I wanted to re-imagine our lives and let her grow up with us. I wanted to do for us what God couldn't: keep our friend alive. GRIDLEY GIRLS, is the first book in a series of the same name. Each book will flash back to a different year in our childhood to show us that regardless of how hard we may try, we never escape our high school images and decisions we make in our youth really do come back to haunt us. Sometimes literally. As for the original tagline, "While Most Enter High School as Virgins, Few Leave as One" — I've long believed that everybody has a virginity story (or lack thereof) and most of those stories are so strongly woven into our DNA that they should be shared. Embraced. We need to talk more about our sexuality. Maybe if we could talk about it more, we could make it more special. Especially for young women. There is a virginity story (or blatant lack thereof) in each book showing how their present day lives are affected by their high school decisions. 10% of my profits will be donated to children's charities. For this first book, the majority of donations will go to one specific charity who works to prevent catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. No child should ever be denied treatment when they are sick. Thanks for stopping by my author page. I hope you enjoy GRIDLEY GIRLS as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. Check out my website at www.MeredithFirst.com and pop on over to Facebook (Meredith First), Instagram & Twitter (@MeredithFirst).