Closer explores themes of community, resilience, and the impacts of individual actions on collective destinies, offering a poignant reflection on how individuals grapple with their lives amidst societal challenges and personal reckonings.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Miriam Gershow’s Closer, which is out June 3rd 2025.
Set in 2015 during Obama’s presidency and Trump’s early candidacy, the tranquil college town of Horace, Oregon, is disrupted when white students taunt a Black student in the high school library.
This incident sparks immediate repercussions that ripple through the community, affecting students, families, and faculty alike. Woody, the school’s guidance counselor, finds himself thrust into the spotlight after years on the sidelines. Lark, a struggling student, grapples with the fallout as her relationships are reshaped by the incident. Stefanie, a conflicted parent, struggles to balance protecting her child with allowing him to find his own path. Friendships are strained, marriages are tested, and families face the threat of sudden violence.
When tragedy strikes with the death of a student, the survivors are left grappling with the fault lines in their most intimate relationships and searching for ways to draw closer.
Winter Semester 2015
Lark
“So, what is it about?” Baz said, holding Lark’s civics paper. He’d read it and now he was asking her, and Lark had no idea what to say. She’d never had a conversation with Baz Fenning before, and this was a terrible way to meet someone, in the library, all of Woody’s Woodpeckers paired up with all the stupid kids at the round tables in back. Students existed in strata at West, though most of the time the striations weren’t so apparent. Normally, they had the sense to quietly self-segregate.
Lark knew most of the other stupid kids; those were her classmates, her comrades in academic probation and repeat courses. They slouched in their chairs, chewing on pen caps, picking at their own eyebrows. Roger Bass rocked so far back in his chair, it looked like he would fall onto his skull. He and Miles Cobain burped and barked back and forth like they did in class, Penny the librarian all the way up at the front desk, too far to hear.
Miles Cobain was writing something on the back of his left arm with his pen; Lark couldn’t see. His tutor was a big girl with her hair in a headband that showed off her broad forehead. She even looked big-brained. “Come on,” the forehead girl kept saying to Miles. “Please.” Once in civics, Lark watched Miles Cobain write F-U-C-K and S-U-C-K across the knuckles of both hands. Most kids weren’t so loud about being stupid.
Heather Onigan sat a few tables away, covering most of her mouth with one hand like she always did when she talked; Angela Dulles stuttered, red-faced, taking her usual interminable time saying whatever needed saying; Joey Bertram laid his head against his crossed arms on the tabletop, eyes closed, and Lark wished she had the guts to do the same. Joey’s tutor tapped his finger on the tabletop like a metronome, right beside Joey’s nose, tap tap tap, Lark impressed with Joey’s non-responsiveness; maybe he really was asleep.
Lark didn’t know the Woodpeckers, juniors and seniors, straight-backed in their glasses and button-downs, fingers braided, nodding and saying um hmmm, play-acting adulthood. She knew Baz by sight, only because everyone knew the Black kids.
“A quick summary,” he said.
Lark rested her chin in her shoulder now, burying it into the curve of her shoulder bone, her clavicle-bone maybe. Whichever the bone was. Peer support was supposed to be non-threatening and feedback from someone who’s been there. This was what Mr. Langston had explained when he’d had her stay after in Language Arts Fundamentals to hand back her paper, the paper Baz Fenning was now holding, Mr. Langston’s big red question mark at the top. Try again? he’d written instead of a grade, which was worse than just giving her the F. Mr. Langston had pulled some strings with Mr. Hanover to get her into peer tutoring this far into the semester, he’d told her.
“Thanks?” she’d told Mr. Langston.
“I don’t want to see you fail,” Mr. Langston told her at the front of the empty room, and Lark had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from crying. It wasn’t the question mark; she was used to red question marks. A question mark was a question mark. It wasn’t even the failing. It was the way Mr. Langston looked at her, straight on and earnest, like it mattered, looking at her like how Baz Fenning was looking at her right now. She hated all the looking.
“I don’t know,” Lark said. “Can I see it?” She pretended to be reading but could feel her head going foggy like it did when she had to write a paper or think about writing a paper. Or read. Whenever she tried to explain the feeling in her brain—like saran wrap inside her skull? something clouding behind her eyes? too much tired but an awake tired, too awake, like worn out, but in her head, not her body?—she couldn’t. Trying to explain it also made her foggy, so she’d stopped trying to explain a long time ago. She had an IEP, so whatever. Everything was supposed to be good now. Extra time to take tests.
“Health care?” she said.
“Okay,” Baz said. “And what about healthcare?”
Here was everything Lark knew about Baz Fenning: he was a junior, and he mostly hung with Shocky the Arab. Shocky’s name wasn’t Shocky but everyone pronounced his name wrong for so long, he turned the mispronunciation into a nickname. There was only like one Black kid per grade, and Lark wasn’t friends with any of them. She knew some of the Asians from elementary school, but she didn’t really consider them Asian, just smart. She only had them in things like music and PE because they were in AP for math and language arts, except freshman year, when Louie Saeu had been with her in speech, speech the class for kids who wanted language arts credit without all the reading, but Lark was pretty sure Louie was Hawaiian or something.
She pulled out the Time magazine with the $160,000 heart surgery on the cover. “We were supposed to read an article and write our opinion. Everybody’s writing about how we’ll have a woman president, so I wanted to do something different.”
“Lurk!” Roger Bass called out. He loved to call this out. Miles Cobain laughed the way Miles loved to laugh at Roger calling this out. If the stupid kids weren’t so stupid, maybe they’d to try to stick together. Except no one wanted to be a member of the club they were in. Easier to call out Lurk than punch yourself in your own dumb face.
