Fourteen challenging and compassionate stories about "outsider"teens. These compellingly readable stories focus on the vulnerability and resilience of adolescents as they try to fit in with their peers and move toward independence. Here are teens who are too brainy, unathletic, poor, the "wrong" religion, emotionally fragile, from non-traditional families, not model-thin, or simply bent on following a unique path. Shala is ridiculed when she wears the traditional Moslem headscarf that marks her passage to womanhood. Timothy is a computer geek who can't find a girlfriend. Gigi lives in an RV with her motheron the run from her father. Brutally honest, with surprising resolutions, these sympathetic stories reveal the outsider within each of us and console us with the knowledge that we are not alone. Among the contributors are Sandra Cisneros, Rand Richards Cooper, Chris Fisher, K. Kvashay-Boyle, Wally Lamb, Sandell Morse, Katharine Noel, Claire Robson, Rebecca Rule, Annette Sanford, Akhil Sharma, and seventeen-year old Caitlin Lonning.