Jo Cries in the Bathroom
Josephina Hall is a carefree eighth-grade orchestra geek until she discovers that her father used to struggle with an addiction to prescription opioid medication. She subsequently begins to see symptoms of the opioid epidemic all around her. She nearly has a panic attack when she stumbles upon Percocets in her English teacher’s desk drawer.
Jo becomes increasingly disillusioned with other things happening around her. She keeps escaping to the bathroom during first period because she can’t bear watching the Latinx kids being humiliated by her racist geometry teacher. Jo’s best friend Bobby is struggling to come out as gay to his conservative parents. Bobby’s parents’ attitude toward Jo’s lesbian aunts causes her to fly into a fit of rage. Jo deals with all of this while she’s completely preoccupied by the little white oblong pills that scare her to death each time she stumbles upon one—the pills they can’t even have in the house when her mother is in grave pain from a dental surgery. “It’s too dangerous for your father,” Jo’s mother says.
Stuck
Gretchen is an otherwise ordinary middle-schooler until she starts engaging in compulsive routines that feel out of her control. Sometimes she doesn’t even realize she’s doing them, but her classmates certainly notice, and they give her a hard time about it. When Gretchen is finally diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, she goes into a panic, terrified that she’s a crazy mental patient. After meeting with her cognitive behavioral therapist, Gretchen begins to understand the stigma against mental illness. Her best friends, Jane and Lilian, support her and tell her never to be embarrassed about the way her body works, whether the issue is menstruation or mental illness. As she begins to feel empowered, she starts to worry about something she did last year that she still feels guilty about. Something mean. Something that resulted in her being physically injured. When she is determined to make amends, she is struck once more by how the stigma of mental illness affects not only those who are sick, but their families as well.
Death Drive '73
It’s 1973 in Modesto, California. High school sophomore Kathy Aukerman believes she has seen the man who has been murdering teenage girls and depositing their eyeless bodies under a bridge guarded by stone lions. Suspecting that the killer is more prolific than the local police are aware, she takes it upon herself to start tailing the man. Kathy develops a romantic attachment with the sister of one of the murder victims around the same time that her own sister Brenda goes missing. Her obsession and desperation escalate to the point where she buys a gun illegally and ends up in a tense showdown with the Lion Bridge Killer.
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Genres: Thriller, Mystery, LGBTQ
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