Ought To & Can (A San Francisco Fable)

|||2021 WATTYS SHORTLIST||| Not everyone's high school experience involves hot romance, parties and big plans for the future. Some kids are shy. Some kids are socially awkward. Some kids have heavy burdens placed on them by their families or their religions. This is the tale of two of those kids.

In her senior year, Sabrina Himmelschein feels like she has no privacy and no life of her own. She lives in one of San Francisco's iconic Postcard Row houses, in an Orthodox Jewish family with high standards and expectations. At a speech tournament she meets Neil Cannon, who lives up north among the vineyards of Sonoma County, where his parents happily work in the wine industry, despite being teetotaling Mormons.

They form a bond, but reluctantly break it; the religious and cultural gulfs between them are too wide to bridge. Four years later, their dreams of changing the world reduced to retail jobs selling socks and cologne, they unexpectedly meet again.

After the families and faiths they've depended on their whole lives have let them down in a dramatic way, Neil and Sabrina struggle with an important question: should they feel guilty about being happy to be back together?