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At fourteen years old, John
feels trapped in a life that he says "is not a life." His father--who,
he says, named him after a toilet--vanished when John was four; his mother,
who works soul-destroying double shifts in a factory, is nearly always
absent. What's worse, the man who moved in six months ago, and whom
Mom plans to marry, abuses John routinely. At school, John has a crush
on a beautiful but shallow girl and battles daily with his tuba in band
class. As a result, the highly imaginative teen lives mostly in his
head (the story is largely an interior monologue) and understandably feels
that no one knows him. |