A young boy grows up avoiding his abusive mother and idolizing two men in his life: his father and a boy in his class. But when both of his heroes betray him, he turns to his mother for comfort.

A young boy, who is still unaware of his future in which his mother dies and he becomes a miserable, unaccomplished middle-aged man, lives through an ever-so-slightly unusual day which would later become the one and only core memory he has of his mother.

On his thirteenth birthday, a boy on the edge of puberty climbs the high dive at the public pool for the first time. At the top, he feels as if he can stop time and see the entire world laid out before him — but eventually he must jump.

A young boy eagerly waits all year for his mare to birth a colt. The barn hand promises the boy that he will make sure nothing happens to the colt, but keeping his promise comes at a tragic cost.

After a young Jewish boy moves to Berlin with his family, he learns that his family agreed to watch a boy from the mental institution on the weekends. The two become friends, and the boy learns more about himself through meeting the other boy.

A high school boy makes a habit of stealing cars, picking up girls, and skipping school. When he begins to worry that he is getting into too much trouble, the boy must decide whether to seek help or continue his criminal lifestyle.

As a boy grows to adulthood in the years encompassing WWII, and his understanding of the world changes, so too does his perception of his schoolteacher father evolve from respectable teacher to embarrassing clown to free-spirited man.

A seventh-grade English teacher copes with the recent death of her father and assigns a memoir that her students love reading. However, their parents question her for her pedagogical choices because of the swear words and provocative topics in the book.

While they were originally set on different paths after graduation, a young boy and girl get engaged. They decide to have their teacher as their witness, but once they discover their teacher had killed herself, they break their engagement.

A woman examines a period of time in her childhood spent with her sister and the babysitter's son, viewing it through the lens of an adult, and ponders how the experience might have shaped her as a person.