The Torn Skirt

Sara Shaw is sixteen, has stopped smiling, and carries a restless heat that her pale, composed surface never shows. She attends Mt. Douglas High, nicknamed Mt. Drug, where the girls wear feathered hair and Love's Baby Soft, and where anger, apathy and desire run just under the scent.

Sara wants something risky and something real. She finds a possible way out in Justine, a willowy, mysterious girl who wears a torn skirt and lives outside the rules.

The search for Justine pulls Sara away from school and into an underworld of prostitutes and their clients, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys. Sara narrates in the first person, and the voice is feverish and close to the skin.

The search ends in violence. As a coming-of-age novel about teenage life on the rough edge of a high school town, the book moves toward a tragedy that Sara cannot steer around.