by Jennifer Weiner

About the author: Jennifer Weiner, staff writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, has written about the entertainment industry as well as women’s issues.

You could hardly find four girls with less in common than Jackie, Taniesha, Nikkie and Lenorra.

Taniesha Roane was 15. She lived with her grandmother in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood where friends were falling, one by one, to the streets. Jackie Przybylski, 17, lived a world away in a small Wisconsin town, a bubbly girl with a Mickey Mouse shirt for every day of the week who amused her close- knit family with her string of short romances. Fourteen-year-old Nikkie Bastan- Siar was a quiet girl whose life was neither as harsh as Taniesha’s nor as carefree as Jackie’s. Her parents split when she was...