When two sisters and their best friend befriend the new boys in their rural town, the girls' thoughts shift from make-believe to the realties of puberty.

With plans to head home the minute the clock strikes 4:30, a young girl arrives at a birthday party fashionably late and realizes she is the only guest who came.

A little girl navigates her relationships with two boys in her elementary school class, a brash bully and a shy victim, and learns about the nature of suffering.

Lynnie is a young, working-class girl who works at the Stone House in town and wastes her days making stories about the lives of the people around her, which she tells to her friend, Isobel. But when rumors start to circulate, Isobel mysteriously moves away, and Lynnie is left wondering why.

A boy feels isolated from his group of friends and targets his rage towards the most popular of them all. When he realizes the extent of the influence this enemy wields, he is forced to come to terms with the hopelessness of his situation.

A senior in high school realizes she is in love with an acquaintance within weeks of graduating, and she tries to initiate something before they both leave for college.

A divorced 16 year old girl reflects on how the sexual trauma she experienced as a child perpetuates in her relationships with men throughout her life, forcing herself to grow up too early and leaving her starved for affection and love.

In contemporary times, a fifteen-year-old creative writing whiz is sent to a gifted creatives summer camp in Massachusetts, where he meets a young male trombonist. As the two become friends and the writer gets to know the trombonist’s family and their troubles, he turns the trombonist and his dying sister into novel characters. Everything changes when the trombonist discovers the writer’s manuscript.

A nerdy high school senior harbors a crush on her now-popular childhood best friend as she babysits his younger brother. When a plane crashes near their school and she lies and says she saw it, her crush takes an interest in her after years of ignoring her.

Two childhood best friends have trouble reconciling the nature of their friendship—and the different worlds they now live in—after having grown up together.