In the title story, a disaffected high-school senior named Emma who’s full of sarcastic wisecracks about the Sacred Heart graduating class of 1994 despises her school and is eager to escape the Midwest. “In movies,’’ she notes, “the thoughtful outcast girl always has some sort of nonschool lifeline, some outlet that affirms her faith in humanity, for instance a supportive gay guy, or a nice old person who passes on wisdom. I have nothing.’’
She’s headed to Brandeis in the fall “because it’s in New England and the campus is predominantly Jewish and there are no Catholics running around,’’ yet privately she dreads leaving home and seems unable to control her crying fits. (“I’m growing accustomed to it,’’ she says, “like a perpetual cough.’’)
In one of the most compelling stories, “Very Special Victims,’’ a girl named Kath who was sexually abused by her uncle suffers the vast consequences of having talked openly about her trauma: “Her parents wanted everyone to be friends. Their wholesome holiday enclave had, at Kath’s indiscretion, become tabloid fodder.’’ She struggles to achieve an identity beyond her victimhood, but fate seems to conspire against her.
Elsewhere, after a landlord starts sending creepy e-mails to a woman named Isabel, she is confronted with having misrepresented her past in a memoir. (She claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary.)
And in the final story, “None of the Above,’’ Rivecca shows off her gift for producing wonderfully off-kilter opening lines: “When she first began teaching, Alma promised herself she would never wear a sweater with an apple on it.’’ A third-grade teacher is convinced that one of her students is lying about being beaten by his parents, yet after an obsessive investigation, she discovers that the truth is more bizarre than she could have imagined.
Two contrived stories, “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling’’ and “Consummation,’’ are weakened by a second-person voice; both read like exercises written for an MFA class.
