Hard Times

Summary

The year is 1992.

Beca has just turned sixteen, is attending high school and splitting her time between her divorced parents, half the time with her mother and the other half with her father. She hates it, frankly she hates the world.

Beca is in her "emo phase" as her father put it, wearing dark colors and eyeliner, sitting in her bedroom brooding and listening to punk or rock at an alarmingly loud rate that should burst her ear drums but it never does and hanging out, in her father's opinion "with the wrong kind of people". Her best friends, twins Hayley and Benji Williams, yet to turn sixteen, and Taylor and Stacie York, are from the wrong side of the tracks. Hayley and Benji are the children of drug users, who couldn't care less if their children come home at night or pass any of their classes in school. They don't care what they do or who they hang out with. Hayley could come home and tell them she's pregnant and they wouldn't care, too high to even know their daughter's or son's name half the time. Stacie and Taylor's parents own a bar and their father is an alcoholic. Both sets of siblings are known to social services who should have taken them from their train wreck families but haven't.

The five of them spend most of their time under the bleachers rocking out to music and occasionally smoking the weed that Taylor has procured for them or in the basement of Hayley and Benji's bombsight of a house attempting to write music, the five of them had become what could only resemble a band.

Most people assume Hayley and Taylor are dating because of their playfulness with each other but they are simply just friends. Or are they? Stacie was harder to read out of everyone in the group, nobody really knew who she liked or didn't like. But she did have a crush on the popular head cheerleader Aubrey Posen and Benji had a crush on the shy awkward cheerleader Emily Junk.

Can these five teens, Hayley, Taylor, Beca, Stacie, and Benji, navigate the hardships that life throws at them?