She slips her schoolbooks and notebooks into a small backpack. The backpack is orange, with zippered pockets on its sides for her pencils, pens and Magic Markers. Roy bought it for her. He told her orange was a good color for Iowa. "You'll be easy to spot whether there's snow or not," he'd said. "Some hunter won't think you're just a little brown rabbit and shoot you for dinner." She hates the backpack. She prays the tornado will get that too.

She kneels beside her bed and slips her hand between the mattress and box spring. When she feels the coolness of her diary she stops and listens. There's still just the sounds her mother's making in the kitchen, so she slides it out. The cover is lavender patent leather, so shiny she can see her reflection in it. She sits at her desk and opens the diary to its last page: THINGS I HATE ABOUT MY MOTHER.

1. I hate that she's pretty.
2. I hate that she thinks she's not pretty.
3. I hate that she works at the dry cleaners. (But I like Kitty, her boss.)
4. I hate that she doesn't know karate.
5. I hate that she likes the same music Roy likes.
6. I hate that she doesn't believe in God or angels.
7. I HATE that she makes us live in Iowa.

And this morning she adds:

8. I hate it that she's not really, really hairy. So hairy that only kangaroos would fall in love with her.

She's always especially liked that kangaroos travel with their own little pouches, like luggage.

She closes the diary and puts it in her suitcase and cracks her door open, then steps into the hallway and holds her breath. She listens. Her mother shuts off the water in the kitchen. Her mother and Roy's bedroom is at the end of the hallway and the door's closed. The bathroom is the next room toward the kitchen.

Excerpted from An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg, pages 3-10. Copyright© 2004 by Mark Spragg. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.