Nothing Real Volume 2: A Collection of Stories

By Claire Needell

The second of three digital-only short story collections from teacher and writer for The New Yorker Claire Needell, about coming of age in contemporary America. These original stories are refreshingly honest, poignant, and humorous.

This outstanding second digital-only collection of short stories from Claire Needell includes the memorable stories "Frank and Me," "Nothing Personal," "The Switch," and "Mom and Ginger Pete, A Love Story." Each story tells a unique and candid story 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: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062338242

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 Personal

It was Mrs. Cole who called Fiona’s mother to tell her about James. It was December, the end of first trimester, and Fiona had been making cookies—procrastinating, as usual. She had two finals left, Spanish and American History, and she’d convinced herself that an hour off from studying was just what she needed. She’d be up half the night anyway, looking up every irregular verb, rereading chapters from the unwieldy textbook that Mr. Rosenthal called a woefully inadequate look at the last four centuries on American soil. There were the notes she’d taken in class too, but she found that these often trailed off into elaborate doodles, spirals, and curlicues that filled her page and then branched into squares and steps, leading into yet more spirals. She tried to avoid drawing squares after Jennifer Gottlieb remarked on them, saying that doodles revealed your true personality, and that square doodlers were sexually repressed. She knew she wasn’t repressed, just bored, and not the type to doodle some boy’s name in the margins of her notebook. Anyway, Fiona’s fling with James was secret, or at least she’d thought it was, until the call came from Mrs. Cole.

As soon as Fiona’s mother picked up the receiver, Fiona could tell something was wrong, and that her mother was surprised by the identity of the caller. Oh, hi! she’d said, too emphatically, and then she’d turned quiet, her thick brows knit together. She glanced over at Fiona, her look prematurely sympathetic.

How Mrs. Cole knew that Fiona was involved with James was a mystery. James had an actual girlfriend, Andrea Beaumont, who was away at Miss Porter’s School, her straitlaced parents’ last-ditch effort to reform their death-metal-inclined daughter.

Andrea was the sort of girl who would go out with a guy like James, while Fiona was not. Mrs. Cole had three sons, and one of them, Will, a long-haired, pothead type who hung out with James’s crowd, was in Fiona’s grade, but she couldn’t imagine Will bothering to mention Fiona to his mother in any capacity. That he would instruct his mother to call Fiona’s mother was almost as startling as the news itself.

Mrs. Cole had been two cars behind James and saw the whole thing. James was driving his beat-up old Camaro very fast around the bend at Broadway when he must have hit a patch of ice and slid across Southgate into the trunk of the Sampsons’ oak tree. It was unclear, even at this very moment, whether James was alive. James’s head had hit the windshield. Mrs. Cole saw this with her own eyes. She had seen the blood trickle down the middle of his forehead.

I’m sorry, sweetheart, Fiona’s mother began, but Fiona waved her off.

I barely even know James Kennedy, Fiona lied. I’ve hung out with him once or twice, but it’s not like I’m close to him or anything. Fiona kept her eyes downcast as she arranged the cookie batter on the sheet in front of her. She could feel her throat constrict and her eyes well up, but she avoided her mother’s gaze. What was she going to do anyway, rush down to the hospital? She could just picture herself in the waiting area, surrounded by James’s dirtbag friends, and his distraught mother. Probably Andrea would come racing home from boarding school, red-eyed, her ample chest heaving, to sit vigil by his bed. There was no place for Fiona by James’s deathbed, if that’s where he was.

Fiona knew James Kennedy from school, of course, but only as a character—James was a sort of prince of potheads, a long-haired burnout with green eyes and a wide, stupid grin that made all the burnout girls he hung out with hot for him. Fiona wasn’t his type, nor he hers. Fiona ran track, did all her homework, and got mostly As. Unlike James’s girlfriend, Andrea, she favored black ballet flats over sky-high platforms. Andrea had dyed black hair, loved the bands Sludge and Quench, and wore elaborate concert T-shirts, whereas Fiona had a black asymmetrical bob, and listened to mostly pop. Her world and James’s world didn’t overlap.

But then there was the pool.

Over the summer, while most of Fiona’s friends were away—working as counselors in training, or traveling with family—Fiona was working at the pool club. It had been her own idea. It wasn’t like they were exactly hurting for money. Fiona’s father, who had died when Fiona was only four, had left them enough to live on. He had life insurance, not to mention a small inheritance from his own parents. When he died of stomach cancer, Fiona’s mother was able to pursue her own career as a fashion writer and personal shopper without worrying too much about the bills.

Fiona could remember her mother’s sadness at her father’s death, a sort of atmosphere that had descended upon the house, but had no distinct remembrance of her father that did not rely on photographs. She could recall her mother crying in odd places, like the car on the way to preschool, or when she took Fiona to the doctor’s office for a checkup. Her mother cried when she had to