Token by Alisa Kwitney and Joëlle Jones

Shira Spektor is a nerd st her high school. She is fairly pretty, but she isn't rich enough to be with the "in" girls at the High School. The one source of love she has is her Dad, and he's always been there for her. But when her Dad starts dating one of his secretaries, a woman named Linda, life goes downhill for Shira very quickly.

Shira isn't Daddy's Little Girl anymore, and he doesn't want to spend time with her, or buy her nice things, "just because". He spends time with Linda, and Shira feels like she's the one getting the shaft. To even up things, Shira takes up a new hobby, Shoplifting. It isn't even things she really wants or needs, but doing it makes her feel excited.

And through it, she meets a hispanic boy who at first chides her for looking guilty, and offers to teach her how to do it better. He also steals a kiss from her, her first, and Shira can't help but be attracted to him. He's handsome, he's a little older than her, and he wants her in a way that no one else around her seems to.

Shira can confess to her Grandmother, Minerva, but even her Grandmother's advice doesn't help too much at this point. Unfortunately, when Shira sneaks out of a dance at the Jewish Synogogue to meet her boy, Rafael, she doesn't realize that her grandmother is going to have a stroke, and the house of cards she built to insulate herself from the changes in her family, is going to come tumbling down around her. Can she save her relationship with Rafael? Or is it too late for them? What sort of life does she have to look forward to?

This is a slice of life story about Shira, whose life is facing some major changes, but from the outside. Her dad is in love, and the change in their relationship presages all the changes that are coming afterwards. But we see it all from Shira's point of view, and her dad looks pretty unreasonable from where she stands.

From where I stand, too. I admit I sort of laughed when Shira's dad asked where she got such a materialistic look on life when he's been buying her anything she wanted ever since she was a child. I felt like saying, "Where do you think, dimshit?"

But for all that, it's a very short story, and sometimes painful to read. It almost reads like a true story rather than fiction, but it won't be of much interest outside of high-schoolers. Recommended for teens only.