Excerpt from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They had the same American History class, and Oneida, who sat three rows behind him to the left, would spend the whole period waiting for him to answer one of Mrs. Dreyer's questions. He'd raise his hand, and she'd notice how smooth and muscular his upper arm was, and then he'd answer the teacher's question correctly and confidently, without stuttering or rambling or adding extraneous detail, as Oneida was wont to do whenever she was called upon because Dreyer didn't think she was participating enough. One day, after Oneida had given a miniature treatise on the Whiskey Rebellion under such duress, Andrew Lu had actually turned around, made eye contact, and smiled. Oneida felt she'd been plugged to an electric generator; her entire body was shocked. It made her violently aware of a hunger she didn't even know she had, and she'd spent the rest of the day hiding in the drama club's prop closet, in the loft above the auditorium stage, sulking and crying and generally feeling sorry for her freakish, friendless self.

The fates aligned: Mrs. Dreyer assigned Andrew Lu and Oneida Jones to the same group history project. The worthy souls were being given a chance to recognize each other at last. That the other members of their group were two of Oneida's least favorite people at Ruby Falls High, not to mention in the world, hardly seemed relevant. That is, until they were sitting in her kitchen and wouldn't shut up.

"I don't know why anybody still cares about the Beatles," Dani Drake said. She jiggled her leg against the kitchen chair and rubbed her temple with her pen. "They're just . . . they're so done, you know? Everybody knows they're, like, the gods of pop music, but who cares now? You know? God is dead, so if the Beatles are God, wouldn't it follow they're also dead?"

"Who would you rather we write our reports on?" Oneida asked. She reshuffled her stack of loose-leaf history notes until all the pages were straight and neat. Oneida was proud of her compulsive tendencies. They made her feel older than fifteen, more in control, able to stop herself from grabbing a hunk of Dani Drake's bangs and bashing her headfirst into the kitchen table.

"Oh!" said Dani with mock urgency, gazing heavenward. "Oh, you're right! There's no other band in the history of music that could possibly be more important than the Beatles! How stupid of me!"

Wendy chuckled into his can of soda, which surprised Oneida: she never would have thought Eugene "Wendy" Wendell possessed anything approximating a sense of humor. What he did have was a reputation: he was to be feared and avoided. It was commonly known that he drank grain alcohol with every meal, kept a Bowie knife duct-taped to his thigh, and that the white rope of scar running from his temple through his eyebrow was the result of a broken bottle fight with a hooker from Syracuse. The hooker won, but Wendy was still a badass motherfucker. It didn't seem right for him to chuckle, even if the joke was mean.

"Guys—I don't think the Beatles are irrelevant, but for the sake of argument who else could we write this report about?" said Andrew. Oneida felt a little hurt. She tried not to hold it against him; being a good leader was mostly a question of diplomacy, after all, and Dani Drake lived off the bones that were thrown to her. Andrew had become the group's de facto leader, a position Oneida would normally have insisted upon holding herself had she not been immobilized by his physical presence in her house. In her kitchen. She wanted to run her hand through his thick black hair, wanted to will Dani and Wendy into nonexistence so she and Andrew Lu could sit and talk, just the two of them, on a Saturday afternoon, talk about anything and everything: The Scarlet Letter, which they were reading in English. What was his favorite movie? What had it been like to grow up in China? She wanted it so badly that she felt a little sick.

"I vote for The Clash," Wendy said.

Excerpted from This Must Be the Place by Kate Racculia. Copyright © 2010 by Kate Racculia. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.