Enjoy the lush setting, the room of Teresa’s interiority, and Chiusano’s surprising, yet inevitable, revelations. But I won’t, because I want you to experience it for yourself. I could-and I want to!-say more about the story’s sharpness, its sly sophistication. Teresa’s shortcomings, though, are definitely not Chiusano’s, and the cunning in “Swiss Summer” lies in his deft handling of Teresa’s limitations, her inability to comprehend the lives of her loved ones and to see what should have been clear. She sees what she needs to see to make their ensuing sexual relationship the stuff of a romantic comedy, the fulfillment of her years-long fantasy, despite the fact that rangy Bill is not quite the right partner for a spreadsheet-obsessed accountant, and that what she wanted as a teenager is not actually a great fit for her life. When, as an adult in Geneva, Teresa runs into Bill-still bounding, still carrying a ratty JanSport-her viewpoint is just as narrow as when she was an adolescent. Nothing happens between them, but Chiusano uses this absence to show how little Teresa needs to make meaning, and how her fixation on these details distracts her from what is actually going on. She obsesses over him, specifically over their relationship (or lack of one), listing and describing all of their encounters in her diary and delivering nightly soliloquies to her captive younger sister, Casey. The “small moments” that sustain her all concern Bill, the son of a family friend, who stays for several months with Teresa’s family the summer she is seventeen. Transplanted to a quaint Swiss hamlet as an American teenager, Teresa never fully acclimates to her new home or assimilates with her Swiss peers, and in her isolation, she becomes someone who “imagined things and lived on small moments, and could make a big deal about nothing, and cried over tiny coincidences.

In Mark Chiusano’s “Swiss Summer,” Teresa is the point-of-view character, but she’s possibly not the main character-the person at the center of the action-and the story’s pleasurable friction comes from the way Chiusano plays with this distinction. The pain and confusion lie in failing to understand that other people are just as occupied as you are by their individual trajectories. But the relief of growing up is not overcoming this sentiment, exactly, but discovering its universality: everyone experiences life from their point of view, complete with private dramas and thwarted agency, and each person-fictional or not-deserves to experience their own life from its center. (Full disclosure: I had to wear orthodontic headgear.) From my adolescent point of view, my most humiliating thoughts or terrors or wants were excruciatingly visible to other people.

Teenage me definitely displayed the traits of the internet’s favorite problem personality, someone with “main character syndrome.” This was not because I thought highly of myself. The Diminishing Returns of a Prodigal Crush

A prodigal summer