When sixteen-year-old Abigail's mother dies in Scotland—leaving a faded photo, a weirdly cryptic letter, and a one-way ticket to America—she feels nothing. Why should she? Her mother abandoned her as a baby to grow up on an anti-nuclear commune and then in ugly foster homes. But the letter is a surprise in more ways than one: Her father is living in California. What's more, she has an eighteen-year-old sister, Becky. And the two are expecting...

An award-winning writer and playwright hits the open road for a searing novel-in-letters about a street kid on a highstakes trek across America. For a runaway boy who goes by the name "Punkzilla," kicking a meth habit and a life of petty crime in Portland, Oregon, is a prelude to a mission: reconnecting with his older brother, a gay man dying of cancer in Memphis. Against a backdrop of seedy motels, dicey bus stations, and hitched rides, the desperate...

"The shrinkadinks think I have a screw loose. Ain't playing with a full deck. Whacked-out wiring. Missing marbles." Irreverent, foulmouthed seventeen-year-old Cricket is the oldest ward in a Catholic boys' home in Maine—and his life sucks. With prospects for the future that range from professional fighter to professional drug dealer, he seems doomed to a life of "criminal rapscallinity." In fact, things look so bleak that Cricket can't help...

Selling drugs to support his uncle, who has cancer, and putting little effort into his schoolwork, Matt is partnered with cheerful social outcast Amanda at an after-school club, and she becomes determined to get Matt to enjoy life.

In the last months of high school, eighteen-year-old Sutter Keely lives in the present, staying drunk or high most of the time, but that could change when he starts working to boost the self-confidence of a classmate, Aimee.

At a party Harley Langston discovers her boyfriend, Mike hooking up with her younger sister, Audrey. She abandons them both in a rage, and when Mike drunkenly drives Audrey home, he crashes--and Audrey ends up in a coma. Harley is left with guilt, grief, pain and the undeniable truth that her relatively unscathed ex-boyfriend has a drinking problem. Raf, a neighbor and childhood friend who's recently out of rehab, is still wrestling with his own demons....

"The story of a town torn apart by the events surrounding the rape of drunk girl at a house party, from the perspective of the partygoers who witnessed it"--