Autumn Drawings

Seventeen-year-old Xo lives by herself, having filed for emancipation when she was sixteen in order to escape her parents’ drug-controlled lives. A high school junior, she faces constant bullying from her classmates—even from Beth, who is supposedly her friend. She works as a waitress after school to support herself.

Although Xo endures flashbacks to the trauma she experienced at the hands of her parents, she wants to believe she has put her troubled childhood behind her. But when a figure emerges from the shadows and upends her life, she soon discovers that the past is coming back to haunt her in the form of her parents’ dealer and his teenage son, Kit, one of Xo’s classmates. As she struggles with terrible memories, she finds a possible ally in Kit, even if he is one of the ones holding her captive. But only time will tell whether the two of them can escape the violence of their lives and find happiness together.

In this novella, a teenage girl living on her own deals with the consequences of her parents’ poor choices and finds an unlikely source of hope and happiness in her kidnapper’s son.