A CIGARETTE LIT BACKWARDS

A young North Carolina woman finds more than she bargained for in her local punk scene.

Kat, the 16-year-old narrator of Hacic-Vlahovic’s second novel, is a steady hand at the piano, playing Beethoven and Chopin with ease, but her heart belongs to another kind of music: the punk rock that she’s recently discovered. She started out as a “poseur” but fell in love with the North Carolina punk scene and spends many nights hanging out at Dexter’s Lab, a house that serves as a drunken, drug-fueled haven for local crust punks living like “a million rats, scurrying out from gutters, trash cans, and pipes, taking twisted routes until meeting in a filthy abyss.” As “the least cool person in [her] group,” she’s desperate to belong, and her wish comes true after she hangs out backstage with a visiting rocker and a website reporter who witnesses their conversation proclaims her a “tiny sex martyr” and “local teenage groupie.” Suddenly, she goes from striver to star, earning the respect of her compeers: “Everything boring about me was suddenly fascinating. My irrelevance turned important. My obscurity became crucial.” Her newfound local fame threatens to poison her life, though: She breaks the heart of a young man who cares for her, almost drops out of high school, and falls for a fellow punk whose terrible decisions are coming close to destroying his life, and hers along with it. Hacic-Vlahovic could have turned this story into a typical cautionary tale, but it isn’t that. The author writes about Kat with compassion and respect; she gets Kat and never condescends to her. Kat is a fully fledged character: Beneath her punk-as-fuck exterior, she’s naïve and (though she’d hate to hear it) sweet; while she loves her hard-edged music, she also has an almost childlike fondness for her immigrant parents and grilled cheese sandwiches. Hacic-Vlahovic’s writing is solid, inhabiting Kat’s voice with both hardness and humor: “Teachers often told me that if I ‘applied’ myself more I could get into Ivy League schools,” the teenager reflects at one point. “So I applied myself less.” This is a self-assured sophomore effort from a writer to watch.

Appropriately hardcore but deceptively sweet, too.