Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson

Ashley thinks of herself as a normal kid: best friend next door, hot, but unreliable dropout boyfriend, parents a bit spacey, and a household barely hanging in there. She's not into the prom the way her best friend Natalia is, so when it nearly gets cancelled because a teacher has absconded with all the money, Ashley is not prepared for Nat's approach. Nat figures they can still have a prom, if they beg for stuff and get teachers to help and bribe the custodial staff and so on. Rather against her will, Ashley gets sucked into the lists in Nat's pink notebook. It delights her very pregnant mom; it makes dealing with all those detentions and uncompleted assignments even more of a chore; it focuses Nat's slightly addled Russian grandmother on dressmaking; and calls Ashley's hilarious aunts to the fore. Modern teen life just outside Philadelphia is vividly drawn in Ashley's first-person tale, and it's both screamingly funny and surprisingly tender.

Runner by Carl Deuker

When Chance Taylor is offered a suspicious job -- retrieving packages hidden on his daily running route and stashing them away for later pickup -- the high school senior doesn't ask many questions. Chance views the two-hundred-dollar-a-week salary as a means to pay mooring fees for the sailboat where he and his alcoholic, chronically unemployed father live, as well as buy groceries and get an occasional muffin at the coffee shop where he spends time with his wealthy yet sympathetic classmate Melissa. Although he suspects he's working for a Puget Sound drug-smuggling ring, Chance doesn't get too worried until the nature of the packages begins to change and the man who hired him dies under mysterious circumstances.