SYNOPSIS:

This is a coming-of-age thriller, kind of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in reverse – ‘cause I’ve been a teenage nanny, and they aren’t actually the ones in positions of power. This script was optioned several times by Paramount Pictures, and then several times by Landscape Entertainment and Gold Circle. It’s not under option now; I’ve turned it into a YA book published by a small press, and the book trailer is on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUcGU09eciE Janine Larson is a thoughtful, responsible seventeen-year-old, but she stays out past her curfew one summer night with her ditsy friends and her boyfriend Dan. Her old-fashioned doctor father is impatient that she has not found a summer job, and arranges for her to be an au pair for a colleague, a pediatrician known to arrange adoptions of kids from the Third World – he’s a man Janine’s father admires. Janine is put off by his humorless, uptight wife and scornful Bad Seed daughter who interview her. But Janine’s parents insist, so she goes. Her main job is caring for four-year-old Kenny, who is wary of her at first but slowly comes to trust her. He expects to be entertained by her, while he watches her, as if she’s a court jester or on TV; she gets him to engage and to play. She learns that this is the first time in years that his nanny has had a few weeks off; that’s why Kenny has trouble accepting her at first. His older sister is just scary and manipulative – Janine cannot get close to her. This family, the Cargills, take Janine with them to their summer island home. It’s an island where only a few rich people have houses; otherwise, it grows wild. Mrs. Cargill is suspicious of Janine when the kids seem to reject her, and then jealous and competitive when Kenny becomes close to Janine. Mrs. Cargill is even more jealous, hostile and competitive when she catches her husband checking Janine out and possibly coming on to her, which creeps Janine out – but Mrs. Cargill blames Janine. The adoptions Dr. Cargill arranges are not quite legal; things go wrong for him when the people who bring him orphans bring two Latin American kids he says he can’t place. The little girl is six, not the toddler he was promised, and she insists in Spanish that she is not an orphan, she wants to go home to her mother – and Janine has enough Spanish to understand some of this. The baby boy has Down Syndrome. Dr. Cargill is furious; he needed these adoptions to go through to pay off debts. His procurers say the kids cannot be “taken back,” but suggest that if they are truly unplaceable, perhaps their organs can be donated to others who need them. Dr. Cargill at first balks at this, but his money problems are such that Janine hears him saying things, over a baby monitor in another part of the house, that clue her in on what is happening. Janine has already wondered what was going on with the Latin American kids who are kept mostly in the basement, and wondered about things the six-year-old said – and when that girl runs away, and Dr. Cargill goes into the woods after her with a gun and comes back and says a team from the shore came and took her to the mainland – Janine is not sure she believes him. She even wonders if he killed the little girl. She doesn’t know what to think, but meanwhile her cell phone disappears – and when she hears Dr. Cargill through the baby monitor talking about carving up the baby for his organs, she is horrified and flees the house. She goes into a shed behind the pool and takes a flashlight. She knows Dr. Cargill took a gun from there, and has heard there was another gun there that disappeared, they questioned her about it . . . She runs into the woods. She turns for help to the other houses on the island, but the owners are not neighborly; one house is set far back behind an electrified fence, with no way to contact people inside if they are home, and the man who lives in the other house plays piano, and smiles at Janine in a creepy, deranged way through the picture window when she tries to communicate with him, moving his lips when he knows she cannot hear him, but he will not open the door to her. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Dan had been talking to her on her phone about her worries, sympathizing, joking and giving advice, from the first, and he has heard her suspicions, so when her phone goes dead, Dan rows out to the island to look for her, and they find each other in the forest. Her flashlight and his cell phone are lost in a scuffle with the Cargills. Janine and Dan spend a very scary, at times romantic night in a dark forest, joking, keeping each other brave, hunted by Dr. Cargill, trying to survive until morning, when they can locate Dan’s rowboat and go back to shore. At last, with first light, they make their way to the dock where the rowboat is tied – but Dr. Cargill is waiting. He is a huge, powerful man, a former marine, and he fights Dan viciously, and brushes off Janine’s attempts to help fight him. His gun falls through a hole in the dock during the fight, but he pulls out a knife, about to kill Dan, too far away at that point from Janine who has been looking for a large rock to hit him with to do more than scream – and suddenly, he is shot. He falls off the dock and into the water. The six-year-old Guatemalan girl comes out of the woods, shaking and crying. She is the one who stole the other gun from the shed, and she has been hiding in the woods for days. Kenny is sleeping in the boathouse – and so is the baby with Down Syndrome. He has not been harmed. (Neither Janine nor the audience have known that for sure.) Mrs. Cargill and her daughter are somewhere on the island, still. Janine and Dan make sure Kenny closes his eyes as they and the children get in the boat, so Kenny does not see his father floating and oozing blood in the water near the dock. Dan rows them a good way out, and amidst a beautiful sunrise they all look toward the shore of the mainland.

AU PAIR GIRL