EXCERPTS
We the Liars by Sam Simas
1997 James James steadied the table as Augie reached into the hazy air to disarm the smoke detector. The hem of Augie’s new sweatshirt lifted away from his stomach, and James glimpsed his hip bones, the bumps…
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Familiar Strangers by Sena Moon
CH1 Grandpa Choi once sat me down and said, you’ve got a face that begs to study. “Jang Mi-in, you’ve got a face that needs education.” Needs. There wasn’t wiggle room in his vernacular. I knew what he…
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When We Drowned by Leigh Camacho Rourks
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell…
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A Girl Is Grown Like a Poem Is Grown by Abbigail N. Rosewood
A girl is trained first and foremost to satiate and please, to induce salivation from: boys, men, priests, teachers, plumbers, fathers, brothers, dogs, occasionally horses. A girl is trained to survive others’ pleasures, others’ desires, her own saliva…
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Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson
We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…
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Little Squirrel by Tim Hickey
But where exactly had it gone wrong this day? Probably when my brother-in-law-to-be, Ward DiBaptista, shouted at me to move the Tahoe so it wouldn’t rut the yard, or maybe just after that, when my fiancée’s entire family made…
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Empire of Dirt by Jonathan Bohr Heinen
That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that surrounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all…
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“A Girl Like You” by Beth Hahn
May took the trolley to the new grocer’s—the one on the boulevard with shining white aisles where the exit was near the back of the store on an otherwise blank wall past the butcher’s station, which smelled of bleach and…
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