Suicide's girlfriend

"Elizabeth Evans traces the complex and often painful threads of human relationships ... In these richly textured stories, you'll meet: Oyekan, a confused young Nigerian student who wrestles with feelings his U.S. friends cannot understand. Marie, an adolescent who makes a carefully philosophized, end-of-the-rope stab at salvation for herself and her seven abused siblings. Jenny and Heather, two girls whose friendship has suffered from the distractions of adolescence and the cruelty of one moving on while the other must sit idly by and watch. A group of college boys, whose discovery of a dead body on the side of the road leaves one of them changed in ways he never thought possible. After causing a hit-and-run accident which leaves a woman permanently brain damaged, a motorist sets out to marry her. Carter Clay obtains a job in the clinic where Katherine is being treated and proceeds to woo her..."--p. 4 of cover.