Gender politics among kids in the post-WWII South.
(from Collected Stories)
I picked this story because of its title, expecting intrigue or something like it, and there was some of that, but mostly this was a story about a girl trying to choose her role. She’s sort of a spaz, which doesn’t help her in the fitting in department. The story’s final moment had a touch of dramatic fakeness to it, but ultimately I can’t call shenanigans because the character was so young that makes her motives questionable and her actions forgivable. Plus it was a neat way to end it.
Read this in a Vermont mountain between kubbing matches.