"Acker navigates her characters' lives with humor, heart, and grace. I loved these stories." --Lisa Ko This debut collection is a complicated love letter to Washington, DC, and to those who call it home: a TSA agent who's never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, and a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. These characters navigate life's "training school"--with lessons on gentrification and respectability- and fight to create their own sense of space and self. Camille Acker's writing has appeared in Hazlitt and VICE, among others. Raised in Washington, DC, she currently lives in Chicago.