“Three days shy of her fifteenth birthday, Alison Pope paused at the top of the stairs.”

Alison is your typical fifteen year-old girl, with visions of all her possible suitors waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She is well-loved, cared for and tended to, enjoys school, trusts people and has the quirky habit of including French phrases in her thoughts.Alison is P.O.V. #1 of this story.

P.O.V. #2 grazes Alison Pope’s peripheral vision: a lanky schoolmate, “a skeleton with a mullet” perpetually dressed in small shorts and a cross-country singlet. Meet her neighbor, Kyle Boot:

“Kyle Boot dashed through the garage, into the living area, where the big clocklike wooden indicator was set at All Out. Other choices included: Mom & Dad Out; Mom Out; Dad Out; Kyle Out; Mom & Kyle Out; Dad & Kyle Out; and All In.Why did they even need All In? Wouldn’t they know it when they were All In? Would he like to ask Dad that? Who, in his excellent, totally silent downstairs woodshop, had designed and built the Family Status Indicator?”

You learn very quickly that Kyle operates in the world of “Only Child/Our Beloved”; assigned, scored and strictly regimented in all that he does. He even carries an ongoing dialogue with his parents in his head:

“Mom and Dad would be heartsick if they could hear the swearing he sometimes did in his head, such as crap-cunt shit-turd dick-in-the-ear butt-creamery. Why couldn’t he stop doing that? They thought so highly of him…What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he be grateful for all that Mom and Dad did for him, instead of- Cornhole the ear-cunt. Flake-fuck the pale vestige with a proddering dick-knee. You could always clear the mind with a hard pinch on your own minimal love handle. Ouch.”

P.O.V #3 is a man in a van- the rapist, the killer, the man with a knife. He appears and Kyle and Alison, long-estranged childhood sandbox friends and neighbors, are confronted with eachother’s existence in a new and challenging way. Kyle hides behind the thousands of parental rules in place that do not permit him to come to Alison’s rescue. He debates, paralyzed on his porch, seemingly without moral compass….and then…he confronts the man, a rock to his skull:

“Really? Really? You were going to ruin her life, ruin my life, you cunt-probe dick-munch ass-gashing Animal? Who’s bossing who now? Gash-ass, jiz-lips, turd-munch—

He’d never felt so strong/angry/wild.

Easy, Scout, you’re out of control.

Slow your motor down, Beloved Only.

Quiet. I’m the boss of me.”

Every once in awhile you read a story and you realize that it’s not in English, at least not the normal, everyday man’s straightforward English that most of us compose ourselves in. This is an entirely unique post-Juno- 2000’s- texting-MySpace-sound-byte language. It translates seamlessly, consistently with the sort of  grace and beauty that no one ever attribute’s to teenage speech and thought. It’s slightly eccentric yet grounded, attempts to follow rules while making up it’s own. Saunder’s is downright funny. And I think his choice to write the story using three p.o.v. ‘s was critical – the vision almost cinematic. And the climax — it breaks the illusion of safety and silence formed by figurative and literal fences that separate neighbors, childhood friends — Each party has created some truth  for themselves to cope with the dead end; the road block. And it was so easy to be passive all of this time…up until now. What do you do?