Bone Fire - Mark Spragg

The night after Claire gave him the iPod he fell asleep listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, waking in the middle of the night with a headache, the buzzing in his chest so acute that he lifted his T-shirt to see what was going on. After that, he let it charge while he slept.
He wore the earbuds during the day when they couldn't find enough for him to do or he got bored shooting baskets, and when he'd heard all the songs three times and they started cycling through again, he pushed the double dash to make it stop. On the evening of his fourteenth day in Laramie, he wrapped the earbud wires in a neat coil around the body of the iPod, laid it out in plain sight beside the computer, then waited.

Don't ask me why I finished this book; nothing in it justifies taking the time to do so. I am curious what grade this professor of creative writing would give a student who turned in this book. It is a poor writing with a disjointed storyline and unsympathetic, cliched characters. There is endless dialogue that is largely pointless. This modern western tale is certainly not one to read after Wallace Stegner, then again, it is not to read following any author.