In “Secret Spitters Society,” three eleven-year-old friends sneak into a grandmother’s wine cellar and invent a drinking game. Each boy tells a secret and takes a sip of wine. If the secret is false, the teller spits out the wine; if the secret is true, the boy swallows. What other secrets reside in the cellar? In “A Boy Named Blaze,” seven-year-old Blaze becomes a man on the day the bad men came and changed his life forever. The short story “West” follows two young homeless boys and the human and nonhuman dangers they face as they travel west.

You could say it was a forgone conclusion that Ralph Reekers was going to have a tough time of it regardless of his actual scent. Had he smelled like a bouquet of fresh picked roses he more likely than not would have still had to endure a time, be it short-lived, of childhood where those nasty, mean kids would have made fun of him because of his name and he … would not have liked it much.