Nothing Real Volume 1: A Collection of Stories

By Claire Needell

The first of three digital-only short story collections from teacher and frequent contributor to the New York Times Claire Needell, about coming of age in contemporary America. These refreshing stories are written with humor, honesty, and without judgment.

This outstanding first digital-only collection includes the memorable stories "Nothing Real," "Change Your Life," "The Bubblemen," and "My Name is Adam." Each story is told from a unique perspective and tells of teenagers looking for love—from others, and from themselves.

Epic Reads Impulse is a digital imprint with new releases each month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperTeen
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062338235

Claire Needell

Claire Needell is the author of The First True Thing and The Word for Yes and is a contributor to the New York Times and a former middle school teacher. She lives in Westchester, NY.

Book preview

Nothing Real

Joe was Angie’s cousin. One summer, back when we were ten, Joe came to town to stay with Angie’s family, and we all went to day camp together over in Tarrytown—Angie; her brother, Johnny; Joe; and me. There were two sides to the camp: two sets of grassy fields and archery ranges, separated by a large, domed swimming pool. The boys stayed on their side of the camp, and we stayed on ours, except for swimming. Sometimes, the guys would be leaving the pool area when we were coming in, and they’d swat at our bare legs with their wet towels.

Joe was skinny back then, and on hot days, he’d have his shirt off, and you could count every one of his ribs. He and Angie and Johnny all got so tan the counselors called them the Cherokee Nation. But they were really Italian. Angie and Johnny both had ink-black hair, but Joe’s hair was sand colored, and his skin in the summer was darker than his hair. Also, Joe was blue eyed. He didn’t look Indian at all, just coffee-with-milk dark.

The only other time we’d see the boys at camp was down at the tennis courts, but this we had to arrange. Every Wednesday and Friday we had the option of playing tennis during afternoon elective period. There must have been a counselor hanging around somewhere, distributing balls and rackets, but there was only one set of courts, and we’d have it planned out so the boys would come down there too, and I can’t remember anyone ever bothering with tennis instruction.

We’d hit back and forth for a bit, me and Angie, and Joe and Johnny, and this other kid who Angie liked, Michael Lessing, and a girl named Sally who liked Johnny, until she left camp at the end of July, and then a girl named Sue took her place.

Eventually, one of the boys would hit a ball over the back fence into the woods, and then he’d ask one of the girls to search through the weeds to find it. Once, when Joe and I were hitting, just volleying back and forth, Joe suddenly took a baseball swing at the ball, and up it went, clearing the back fence by about three feet. That was when I knew Joey Shabetti, Angie’s cousin from Philadelphia, was going to try to kiss me.

Joe came back the summer I was sixteen to work with Angie’s brother painting houses. It was good money, and our town didn’t suck too bad in the summer. There were parties a lot of nights, and there was the public pool just down the street, and a tennis court.

My summer job was a nothing. I sat around this store called Ragtime, and sold silk pajama pants to middle-aged women. When these women sometimes brought the pants back the next day saying, My husband hates them! Carol, my boss, who owned the shop, would say, We don’t sell husband clothes; we sell women’s clothes. Carol was a short, slightly overweight Japanese woman who had little patience for our customers who failed to appreciate her up-to-the-minute taste.

It was my job to show the ladies how to cinch in the oversized shirts with a thick belt, and how to roll the pants to show your ankles weren’t fat. I wore the pants around the shop with big silver hoops and the turquoise sandals I got with my employee discount. It was a pretty extreme eighties look, but the ladies in town liked it, and also liked how I had my hair all spiky on top and longish in back. They all had bobs with highlights, or straight blond hair pulled back like they were still sixteen. They giggled like girls when they tried on the harem-type pants and saw how wide their asses looked in them. They bought them not for appearance, but for comfort.

Some ladies worried about the husbands, though, and left the pants hanging in the dressing room, and opted instead for a tank dress that showed off their tennis players’ arms. There was nothing new about the jersey tank dress, but we had to reorder them every month. They are what they are, Carol said. All solid colors. All hit you at the natural waist.

Sometimes, on a hot day, we’d get only three or four customers in the store. Carol would send Jessica, the other shopgirl, home, and I’d stay on since she’d known me longer, and knew I could be trusted to lock up. Then, once Carol left, I was alone with the radio, and I’d play hits or coffeehouse instead of the endless NPR talk that Carol liked to play. I’d keep myself busy dusting the jewelry case, polishing all the little silver heart necklaces and Irish wedding bands Carol had brought back from a trip, and thought might start a trend. Maybe the UPS guy would bring some new dresses, and I would spend an hour or two tagging, steaming, and hanging. Maybe I would take a break, put the sign on the door, lock up, and hang with Angie for a half hour. I never stretched it out, though. Carol trusted me, and that was one thing I didn’t want to fuck up.

Angie worked down the street from Ragtime, at the drugstore. It was all right over there, too, since they sold a lot of cosmetics, but she had to deal with people buying other crap also, like diarrhea medicine and vaginal creams. She said she acted real professional about it, just putting it all in a bag, ringing up the total, and never looking the customer in the face. You didn’t really want to know what someone else’s mom was purchasing at the drugstore.

I remembered Joe from those camp days, and a few other times when he came up in the winter, sharing a room with Johnny, and the two of them would sit all day with their model-airplane parts spread out, and these