#531 The Water Cycle- Lucia Perillo

#531 The Water Cycle- Lucia Perillo

A crazy man abducts his own daughter by gunpoint, takes her right from her classroom. She is gone seventeen days; it is a national story. Now she is returned and can barely walk down the street without someone recognizing her and pointing:

“She’s the ghost girl, the one from the TV.”

Aurora is the biggest story to hit this town, and the other girls in her class know that everything has changed. They are told not to treat Aurora any different, but in doing so, they are in fact, treating her different. What starts out as deference and will turn to pity and eventually resentment. No matter the reason, school children hate someone who gets too much attention.

“New clothes, new barrettes, new Hello Kitty plastic purse. New way of looking older when she looked out from her bangs. New dance steps from MTV new way of putting your hands on your hips and jerking them forward like you were in the middle of a car crash. New stupid world new stupid us. She ruled our lives and was our ruin.”

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#517 Ambitious Sophomore- Kurt Vonnegut

#517 Ambitious Sophomore- Kurt Vonnegut

The Lincoln High School marching band is the pride of the community. The hundred piece band is marching in the parade and is poised to once again win the prize. It’s leader, Mr. Helmholtz has only one problem…money. He spends too much too fast and he needs to buy one more uniform, a special uniform that will enable the stage-stricken piccolo player, Leroy, to play his best.

“Helmholtz often gave the impression of a man lost in dreams, but there was a side to him that was as tough as a rhinoceros. It was the side that raised money for the band.”

A deal was struck, the uniform purchased and the band was in position to march to another victory. But tragedy struck before the competition and the special uniform was ruined. As it turned out no uniform was needed, Leroy found inspiration in an obvious place.

“That wasn’t school spirit—that was the love song of the full-bodied American male.”

Rating: 7-7-7-8 Total= 29

#483 The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed- Edward P. Jones

#483 The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed- Edward P. Jones

Cassandra is a young wayward girl. She’s a tough-girl, partially homeless, violent, and spends her time skipping school. But she loves music and she love’s her best friend Rhonda. Rhonda is the pride of the neighborhood, a rising star in the music world.

While Rhonda is off to meet with record executives, Cassandra is on a little road trip with some girls like her. Then tragedy strikes.

Notable Passage: “She sang on into the night for herself alone, her voice pushing back everything she did not yet understand”

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total= 32

#395 Cannibal- Chuck Palahniuk

#395 Cannibal- Chuck Palahniuk

This story is most certainly Not Safe For Work due to sexual conent. And if you’re sensitive to language and slurs, I’d also steer away from this one. Although pointing out the disgusting and foul, things we say, think, and do is sometimes the job of writers, that doesn’t mean we are always in the mood to intake the onslaught of offensive language. However, as anyone who has been to a public high school in say the last 50 years can attest, this is actually kind of tame.

Cannibal is a loser, a seventh grade loner, over-sexed with no girlfriend.

“Because his dad, old Mr. Cannibal, only ever watched the Playboy Channel, and Mrs. Cannibal only liked the 700 Club, so it wasn’t lost on their boy how sex stuff and Christian stuff both looked the same.”

Because he is in such low High School standing, one of the school’s popular girls sees him as the perfect candidate, a low-risk investment, to seduce him into performing a sexual act her boyfriend wants to stay away from. As it turns out, Cannibal is surprisingly adapt at this particular act, and becomes a kind of specialist as the “secret boyfriend” of the school’s sexually oppressed female elite...until he gets too big for his own reputation.

“He brags like his every word’s wearing sunglasses.”

Rating: 8-7-9-8 Total= 32

#198 The Little Chill- T.C. Boyle

#198 The Little Chill- T.C. Boyle

7 forty year-olds, friends from elementary school meet up for a birthday gathering. Hal, Rob, Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle and Pesky haven’t seen each other in six years and a lot of water has flown under the bridge. Each character is given a fun, noir-esque description like this one:

"Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived up the sreet from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets."

I guess we’re supposed to identify with having outgrown our high school clique but understand that we will always be attached to them at the same time. That we will always measure ourselves through their eyes and will always seek their approval. However, this rings somewhat false here. They all hate each other, bitterly and without a tinge of respect or nostalgic fondness. I have a hard time believing that these 7 people wanted to get together with each other…dancing or not.

Note: seeing TC Boyle speak this past year he said that the usual reaction to a short story collection is that people will hate half of them and love half of them, just nobody agrees on which half is which. Pretty funny, and probably accurate.

Rating: 7-7-5-4 Total= 23

#84 Boner McPharlin’s Moll- Tim Winton

#84 Boner McPharlin’s Moll- Tim Winton

“Boner McPharlin was the solitary rough boy that country towns produce, or perhaps require.” Jackie was a young teenager “appalled and enchanted”

by this local, mysterious, outcast legend. She seeks out this bad boy, without understanding what it means to be anything but a child, she pretends.

At first I thought this was a Breakfast Club type of story about teenage angst full of young American small town archetypes (or Australian as it turns out). I thought it was like something out of the John Cougar Mellencamp songbook, I was humming Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days.

In some ways, it is like that, but it actually goes deeper, much deeper. Image is everything, but we are never like we were in High School, we are never what we pretend to be in High School, and we are never like what we want to be like in High School. Sometimes however, we are exactly what we hide about ourselves.

Below are two passages that put together, pretty much sums up the difference between adolescence and adulthood.

Notable Passages: “At 15 I would have annihilated myself for love.”  And then…“Thirty years is a long time to have regrets.”

Rating: 8-7-9-7 Total= 31