On "Even If You Were Here" by Angi Becker Stevens (3508 words) ****

This is one of those stories with a great first line, a line that builds on itself and just keeps building until there are a lot of great lines and eventually a great story. I think of Rick Moody's "The Boy's Enter," for example; I don't think of Katherine Dunn's Truck (great first line, great first few pages, followed by a disappointing dull narrative, at least that's how I remember it from two decades ago). Stevens's story is particularly nice because it seems to capture the adolescent perspective so well: a girl without a father, without an older brother, trying to figure things (i.e., life) out for herself and discovering, in a sense, slowly, the trouble with love. Read the story here at the Collagist.