Book excerpt: Stella is 17, attractive, smart, deeply alienated and unable to face life's absurdities. She is not nihilistic; she is prematurely exhausted. Since her parents OD'd on designer drugs when she was 11, she has lived with foster parents, while her grandfather, her only living relative, repeatedly attempts suicide in his retirement home.Beneath Stella's mordantly funny take on life is the decisiveness with which she disengages from it, planting clues for the act she's about to commit. With remarkable wit, Stella turns her farewell to suburbia into a philosophical inquiry.