You are a shy girl being sent to summer camp. Should you be yourself or somebody else?

(from Tin House, vol. 14, number 4)

There is a lake that shoulders the place, a small unimportant lake named after a woman who was important to somebody.

I liked this story. Let’s do bullet points:

• Second person is an amazing way to hook a reader. So accusatory. So insistent. It’s very much the opposite of choose-your-own-adventure. You are powerless, fated, stuck in the timequake. And you can’t say you’re not because I’m the narrator and I say you are.
• “Shy-Shy” is sticks us in a 12-year-old brain and feels a bit like a morality tale in that way. Childhood lessons tend to be pretty black and white. Lisa Simpson has endured trials smilar to those our protagonist “L” experiences in this story.
• I’m not on some kind of Groening kick. It’s just a coincidence that I talked about Futurama yesterday. 
• I don’t want to spoil anything, but, well, it’s nice to see a kid do the right thing as sort of happens in “Shy-Shy.” Sure, such magnanimity only seems to come from the top of the schoolyard heap, but yeah. 
• Liz Moore is awesome. I need to read Heft, don’t I?
• Okay. Sing it.