What's Not Mine: A Novel

"Nora Decter has written a wrenching, knowing, and wry novel about coming of age into a rough world." - Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion For fans of Miriam Toews, an absorbing, darkly funny story of family, addiction, and survival The summer Bria Powers turns 16 is sinister. Waves of insects plague her hometown of Beauchamp, where fentanyl has recently infiltrated the drug stream. Forest fires muddy the normally wide-open skies, and everything smells like a barbecue all the time. It's also the summer Bria goes from having saved a life to ruining her own. Since her drug-dealing father disappeared and his girlfriend overdosed, Bria has lived with her aunt Tash and best friend/cousin Ains. By day, Bria and Ains babysit Ains's younger siblings and sling fast food at Burger Shack. But at night, Bria has her own secret world, sneaking out to see Someboy, an older guy who captivates her sometimes. Other times, he angers-insults-upends her, and that has a certain charm too. But trouble comes for Beauchamp and for Bria in the form of bears that wander into town, dick pics texted from a mystery number, and a creeping dependence on what Bria should hate most of all. Steeped in tragicomedy and written in starkly observed prose, What's Not Mine explores inheritance, addiction, and survival when the odds are against you. A heartbreaking portrait of Bria, a teenage girl slipping into addiction despite loathing what the same drugs have done to her family. In the middle of a heat wave, Bria must deal with a bear that wanders into town, unsolicited dick pics texted from a mystery number, and a creeping dependence on what Bria should hate most of all. Nora Decter is a writer from Treaty 1 Territory. She studied creative writing at York University and Stony Brook University, and in 2019 received the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for literary fiction for her YA novel How Far We Go and How Fast. Nora lives in Winnipeg with her partner and their two cats, near the foot of Garbage Hill. My dad started working down by the border for some bikers maybe six months ago? Not your ideal employers, but it wasn't like I could give him my open and honest critique. I wasn't even supposed to acknowledge the very real change in his demeanor-I'd have been punished for clocking the shift in his phone use and schedule, for eavesdropping on more than one occasion, for having a brain and a pulse and for paying attention. So, for a while he sends money. Money transfers that arrived on my phone or Steph's with no message attached, just a security question whose answer was my name. And then he stops sending, and we figure, Sure, that's about right. I didn't have to tell Steph he wasn't coming back anytime soon. She knew. She was good like that. I'm nothing if not highly adaptable, she bragged the first day she came home in the uniform she had to wear at the gas station. It was just black pants and a black polo shirt with the company's red logo on the pocket, but it looked way wrong on her. Usually she wore pajamas, flannel ones in pastels or long nightshirts with flowers and teddy bears on them, the kind of thing I'd never seen on an adult before. Or else she'd be done up, red lipstick and hairspray, tight outfits and knee-high boots. Never before in between, until Dad disappearing necessitated the gas station. The work clothes didn't dull her though. She seemed unbothered by employment in a way I had never witnessed. Sinking into the couch eagerly afterwards, her things spread out on the table within reach. Smokes, lighter, ashtray, phone. A Big Gulp from the gas station and her purse, with its stash of pills. Your parental units have failed you, Bria, Steph once said to me, but you yourself are not to blame. Aren't you sort of a parental unit? I asked. She was, ostensibly, my dad's girlf...