By Sarah Dessen Find it: FIC DES
Summary: Lexile: 920
“Caitlin has a hard family life. Her sister Cass disappeared and her family is falling apart. One night she notices Rogerson Biscoe, and everything changes. Caitlin knows Rogerson is a drug dealer, but he makes her forget her problems.
Caitlin gives up her friends for Rogerson because he gets mad when she’s with them. She starts using drugs with his friends, and he begins beating her. She is afraid to leave him, although in the back of her mind she knows things aren’t right.
One day Caitlin’s friend convinces her to go out for the day with her. Caitlin tries to call Rogerson so he won’t be mad, but she can’t get through. When she gets home he is waiting and beats her. A neighbor calls the police and he is arrested. Caitlin’s family takes her to a mental hospital to help her get over the trauma and to get her off the drugs.”
On Caitlin O’Koren’s sixteenth birthday, her older sister runs away from home, thrusting Caitlin out of her sister’s shadow and into a limelight she is unprepared to face.
The story follows Caitlin through her sophomore year of high school as she tries to forget her own path in the absence of her parents’ guidance
The story juxtaposes two basic settings: Caitlin in her old life—school, her neighbors’ house, her own home—and Caitlin in the new life she has chosen—Rogerson’s car and house, Corinna and Dave’s house, and in her thoughts and dreams. The difference between the two arenas is vast and unbridgeable: for Caitlin, the former represents her sister and how Caitlin could never compare to her; and the latter represents a desperate but rather blind attempt to break all of the ties of the past and make a completely different life for herself, one that does not provide any basis for comparison.
She succeeds at separating herself, but in doing so she creates a life so unfamiliar that she has no basis for understanding right and wrong, and she ends up allowing herself to be harmed both physically…..