Gloria adjusts easily, studies hard and explores her newfound freedom. Her father is quick to assent, with one condition: In lieu of payment, Christine must take responsibility for Gloria's future and adopt her as a sister. Gloria is offered a job in a distant city with Christine, a doctor who needs househelp. Her one consolation, her older sister Effie, has discovered boys and all but disappeared. She failed most of her school exams, her long-unemployed father has lost himself to religion and her mother is ravaged by a mysterious sickness.

Ghanaian teenager Gloria Bampo has hit a rough patch. Benson's account unfolds in a speedy, unadorned first person, doling information out to readers as he learns it himself. Benson decides it’s time to make a run for it, until he finds out that no one makes it out of Maxfield…not alive, at any rate.

With no adults on campus, classes are taught by fellow students, punishments are passed on by computer and nothing seems to follow a logical path. He joins a gang, the Variants, just to survive. What he finds, however, is far from normal. Within minutes of the front doors closing-and locking-behind him, he finds himself in a fight for his life. Winning a scholarship with unexpected ease, he looks forward to establishing real friendships and getting a good education at last. Wells introduces Benson Fisher, a teen in search of a “real” life instead of a long series of unwanted foster homes-but instead of the utopia he’s searching for, he finds the direct opposite.īenson thinks he’s found the perfect school in Maxfield Academy, a private school in the wilds of New Mexico.

Variant by Robison Wells