Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Lead:  It is my first morning of high school.  I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

I need a new friend.  I need a friend, period.  Not a true friend, nothing close or share clothes or sleepover giggle giggle yak yak.  Just a pseudo-friend, disposable friend.  Friend as accessory.  Just so I don't feel and look so stupid.

The cement-slab sky hangs inches above our heads.  Which direction is east?  It has been so long since I've seen the sun, I can't remember.  Turtlenecks creep out of bottom drawers.  Turtle faces pull back into winter clothes.  We won't see some kids until spring.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie

I love his writing, but the alcoholic-ridden stories get me down after a while.

I was a victim of a high school high school basketball form of Post-Traumatic Free-Throw Stress Syndrome.

Leads and Endings in a short story:

Lead: Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

Ending: But it was over.  Victor closed his eyes, fell asleep.  It was over.  The hurricane that fell out of the sky in 1976 left before sunrise, and all the Indians, the eternal survivors, gathered to count their losses.

Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts

And like carriers of a virus, those who heard passed it on to others, causing an epidemic of gossip to spread from neighbor to neighbor, child to parent, doctor to patient, friend to friend.

Sweeping Up Glass

Lead:  The long howl of a wolf rolls over me like a toothache.

While I love that boy more than life, Ida's a hole in another sock.

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Lead:  My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.

Ending:  I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life.  Chaos, din, and beauty.  For a moment, I am still.  Then "Cornelia" cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go.

What Dev would figure out very soon thereafter was that all that bluster and drama, that bad imitation of Robin Williams in one of his inspiring-mentor rolls stemmed from the fact that Mr. Trip was a self-important, histrionic, humorless jerk.  A class A windbag.

It was Saturday, the kind of tricky October Saturday that contains equal parts hot sun and cool air, so that you keep taking off your sweatshirt and putting it back on, taking off, putting on until, pretty soon laughing at yourself.

"Hospice," a strangely delicate, weightless word, Piper noticed, one that could be either whisper or hiss.

He could see how you could get used to the not-thinking, the haphazard floating through days, your brain lounging around like a tourist in a loud shirt, grasping nothing heavier that a magazine and a drink (umbrellaed, water beaded, pineapple hanging off its rim like an elephant ear), lulled by the sound of seagulls and ocean waves.

I Had Seen Castles by Cynthia Rylant

The bombs that dropped on Hawaii sent a shock wave straight into the outraged soul of every man in American, and like Neanderthals, we had a primitive, fearless, screaming desire to kill.

After the Nazis decimated our pitiful army a few times with their monstrous panzer tanks and eighty-millimeter guns, it occurred to us that we were--as we had known from the start, but not until now so cruelly--in very serious trouble.

In the window of the barbershop a few blocks from our house was a crudely lettered sign that read, No Yellow Bellies, Skunks, or COs Allowed, and that sums up pretty well the sentiment of most people toward any able-bodied young men who had no stomach for killing.

The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

In the gray quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree.

The pony's tracks were plain enough, dragging through the frostlike dew on the young grass, tired tracks with little lines between them where the hoofs had dragged.

When the peaks were pink in the morning they invited him among them:  and when the sun had gone over the edge in the evening and the mountains were a purple-like despair, then Jody was afraid of them; then they were so impersonal and aloof that their very imperturbability was a threat.