Chubby, Jewish, and gay high school sophomore Justin Goldblatt plans to become popular by the end of the year, but instead of dating the star quarterback he catches the eye of Becky, the quarterback's girlfriend, while his best friend, Spencer, stops speaking to him.

"When film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is invited back to the New Hampshire boarding school she attended as a teenager, she finds herself drawn to investigate the murder of a classmate in 1995."--

Harangued by his father about his weight and bullied in all the many schools he has attended, teenaged Michael finds some comfort in his ability to experience "lucid" dreaming but then starts to notice that the things that happen in his dreams are starting to occur in the real world as well.

Convinced her brother's death was murder rather than suicide, sixteen-year-old Frances begins her own investigation into suspicious student activities at her boarding school.

When his older brother is released from prison, seventeen-year-old Jeff's family secret is revealed, causing upheaval in his home, school and love life.

"Tess has worked hard to keep her past buried, where it belongs. Now she's the wife to a respected professor at an elite boarding school, where she also teaches. Her seventeen-year-old son, Rudy, whose dark moods and complicated behavior she's long worried about, seems to be thriving: he has a lead role in the school play and a smart and ambitious girlfriend. Tess tries not to think about the mistakes she made eighteen years ago, and mostly, she succeeds....

While dealing with her first boyfriend and suddenly being pressed into service as a substitute cheerleader, seventeen-year-old Daisy Giordano, daughter and sister of psychics but herself a "normal," attempts to help her mother discover who is behind a series of bizarre attacks on teenage girls in their little town of Nightshade, California.

"A story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city"--

In 1982 Buncombe County, North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Alex Stromm writes of the aftermath of the accidental drowning of a friend, as his English teacher reaches out to him while he and a fellow boarding school student try to cover things up.

When she wakes up in the body of her cat, Mitten Man, bullied fifth-grader Poppy attempts to navigate the world as a cat, while Mitten Man, tired of his owner's timidity, is out to take over middle school--as Poppy.