![]() ![]() "You've got your skids, your punks, pushers, users, Goths, slags, geeks, hippies, rejects and other standard garden variety misfits." There's also Teo, Simon's boyfriend, with "muscles humming all over the place" and vicious Heather Arlington-Moore, Central's "suicide queen." Then there's Rebecca "Beck" Wilson, burned with a fork by her own father. On the second day of school, gay Simon takes Zoe out to the makeshift hut called the smoke hole and introduces her to Central High. In The Beckoners (Orca $19.95), a first novel by Carrie Mac, who was working as a child and youth advocate at a first stage transition house on the Sunshine Coast when she wrote it, Zoe is dragged from Prince George to Abbotsford by her restless, self-absorbed mother. She's about to discover victim and tormentor are not easily defined and how quickly the two become flipsides of the same coin. But 14-year-old Zoe Anderson's ordeal has only begun. When the tines turn orange and Zoe silently, desperately lists the constellations she cannot see-Ursa Major, Orion, Andromeda-they press the glowing fork to the flesh of her inner right arm and brand her. They drive her out to Mill Lake and in the corner of the bandstand, in the flame of a butane torch, they heat a fork, the handle wrapped in a wad of masking tape so it won't get too hot to hold. ![]() ![]() One starless night the Beckoners come for Zoe. ![]()
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