Close Modal

Different for Boys

Illustrated by Tea Bendix
Hardcover
$18.99 US
6.63"W x 8.5"H x 0.6"D   | 16 oz | 30 per carton
On sale Mar 14, 2023 | 104 Pages | 9781536228892
Age 14 and up | Grade 9 & Up
Reading Level: Lexile HL710L
additional book photo
additional book photo
additional book photo
Friendship, masculinity, sex—Anthony Stevenson has a lot of questions. Is it different for boys who like boys? A poignant and frank story filled with meta-humor by renowned author Patrick Ness.

Anthony “Ant” Stevenson isn’t sure when he stopped being a virgin. Or even if he has. The rules aren’t always very clear when it comes to boys who like boys. In fact, relationships of all kinds feel complicated, even with Ant’s oldest friends. There’s Charlie, who’s both virulently homophobic and in a secret physical relationship with Ant. Then there’s drama kid Jack, who may be gay and has become the target of Charlie’s rage. And, of course, there’s big, beautiful Freddie, who wants Ant to ditch soccer, Charlie’s sport, and try out for the rugby team instead. Ant’s story of loneliness and intimacy, of unexpected support and heart-ripping betrayal, is told forthrightly with tongue-in-cheek black-bar redactions over the language that teenagers would actually use if, you know, they weren’t in a story. Award-winning author Patrick Ness explores teen sexuality, friendship, and romance with a deft hand in this structurally daring, illustrated short novel.
  • NOMINEE | 2024
    American Library Association's YALSA Quick Pick
  • SELECTION | 2024
    Bank Street College Best Children's Book of the Year
  • SELECTION | 2023
    Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
Rough pencil sketches add to the heightened emotion, reflecting the jagged, difficult emotional realities… The brevity of this story adds to its power, distilling the plot to its most necessary, brutal, loving elements. [Blanking] masterful.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Ness delivers an authentic-feeling story that interrogates the idea that teens are “too young to read about the stuff we actually do.” Black-and-white pencil illustrations by Bendix provide an expressive complement to concise, sensitive, and thought-provoking text in this un-put-downable, easily devoured read.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This spare, affecting novella takes place over the first week of eleventh grade, zeroing in on the dynamics between Ant, Charlie, Jack, and Josh. . . Ant’s first-person narration moves between the present day, his history with Charlie and Jack, and his reflections on love, sex, and friendship with appealing raw-edged frankness and humor, complemented by Tea Bendix’s sketch and collage artwork. . . . Ness takes on the often underexplored social dynamics among teenage boys with nuance and subtlety that will leave readers thinking long after they turn the final page.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)

Ness superbly blends Ant’s philosophical musings with realistically voiced teen thoughts and dialogue, where expletives and sexual content are curtained by heavy black rectangles yet blatantly present. The near-melancholy tone is beautifully matched by Bendix’s inspired artwork. . . Within this beautifully crafted package lies a poignant story of a boy reaching out in loneliness to another boy and grasping unvarnished truth.
—Booklist (starred review)

Ness’s postmodern short story (a version of which was previously published in an anthology), intermittently illustrated with Bendix’s striking pencil drawings and digital collage, candidly depicts the relationships among several teenage boys in eastern Washington. . . . The lean narrative moves briskly with a focus on dialogue, dry humor, and Ant’s wonderings.
—The Horn Book

This spare story by Carnegie Medal-winner Patrick Ness says a great deal within a limited number of pages. . . . The best quality of this narrative is its brutal honesty. . . Young adults will recognize the feeling of being alone as they process their own inner monologues.
—School Library Connection

Debut illustrator Tea Bendix's striking unpolished pencil and digital collage art depicts the characters and setting both realistically and through visual metaphor. . . . Grayscale hallways and classrooms, faces in profile layered one on top of the other, figures with half their body erased all echo the brutal honesty and the imperfect realities laid bare in the text. Ness's forceful storytelling fused with Bendix's rich sketches result in an achingly beautiful reflection of the multiple, messy realities and experiences of young queerness. . . . compelling.
—Shelf Awareness

This book? A scant 104 pages of spare text, much of which is literally redacted with a black box over it, and tons of large, sketched illustrations? It’s daring. As usual with Ness, I laughed at so many of the quips and the tone (at times), but also was gutted by what the characters go through. I felt for all of them. Ness tells a tale of toxic masculinity, homophobia, sexuality, and loneliness. And he does it by redacting all of the 'bad' stuff. . . Damn, Patrick Ness. Damn. Or maybe I mean [Redacted], Patrick Ness. [Redacted.] Tell it like it is!
—Teen Librarian Toolbox
Patrick Ness is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Chaos Walking trilogy, which inspired a major motion picture. His other novels include the Carnegie Medal winner A Monster Calls (inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd), More Than This, Release, The Rest of Us Just Live Here, and Burn. He has won numerous awards, including two Carnegie Medals, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Book Trust Teenage Prize, and the Costa Children’s Book Award. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of A Monster Calls as well as the BBC’s Doctor Who spinoff Class. Patrick Ness lives in Los Angeles.

Tea Bendix is an award-winning illustrator, graphic designer, author, and performer. She works across different media, including picture books, nonfiction, apps, children's radio, and drawings for TV. Tea Bendix lives in Denmark.
THE LIST
 
All right then, if we’re starting out honest, here’s pretty much everything I’ve done (it’s not as bad as it sounds):
 
I’ve __________ , of course. Everyone _________. They’re lying if they say they don’t, but ___________ doesn’t count, obviously. You can’t lose your virginity to yourself.
And leading on from that, I’ve been ______ by someone else, but who’s been to a freshman year party and not gone home without doing that in the coat pile? It’s only someone’s hands.
Getting a bit heavier, I’ve ____ and ____. Still not really a shocker.
A bit more strangely, I’ve ________________________________________________________________________________________________________. (Okay, I’m not
allowed to even hint at the strange stuff. Not that kind of story. Fine.)
And of course we wouldn’t be talking about this if I hadn’t actually _____. You know, actually ______________________________  , which is pretty much the definition of losing your virginity if you’re a boy.
 
And just so we’re clear, it’s not like I’ve done #5 once or twice either. I’m not one of those chess club virgins who goes into a closet and wonders if the real thing’s happened. It has. Trust me. Although it doesn’t really matter how many times you do it: you think it’s going to make your life less lonely, but it never does.
   I suppose my question, though, is where exactly on that list did I stop being a virgin?
   Is it obviously #5? Or can it happen sooner, like on #3? Or even #2?
   Are there degrees of virginity? Is there a points    system? A league table?
   And who gets to say?
   Because maybe it’s not as clear as all that, maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there are people who’d still say I’m a virgin, even after doing numbers 1 through 5.
   In fact, I might be one of those people.
 
 
WHERE IT STARTS
 
There are lots of places this story could start, but it might as well start on the first day of junior year, when Charlie and me are sitting in AP history, waiting for Mr. Bacon to get his seating plan finished.
   “Well, this is taking ______ forever,” Charlie says, then he blinks, surprised. “What the ____ just happened? What are these _______ black boxes?”
   I shrug. “It’s that kind of story. Certain words are necessary because this is real life, but you can’t actually show ’em because we’re too young to read about the stuff we actually do, right?”
   “Teens swear in stories these days.”
   “Not anything like we do in reality,” I say. “It’s the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.”
   Charlie nods solemnly at the truth of this. Then he gets a smirk.
   “ _______________________ ,” he says. His smile gets bigger. “ ________________________________ __________.” He nods again. “Cool.”
And just as he says, “Cool,” that’s when Josh Smith walks in, which is where this all really starts.
   “No ________ way,” Charlie says.
   We watch Josh check in with Mr. Bacon, who finds his name on the list and points him toward me and Charlie. Mr. Bacon’s great new idea for this year has us sitting in “quads” rather than just boring rows. Four desks pushed together in little islands around the room. Says it’s supposed to make learning “collaborative,” but any fool could see he won’t be able to control us like this.
   The quads are alphabetical, so I – being Ant Stevenson – am sitting with Charlie Shepton, who I’ve sat by alphabetically since elementary school. And now here’s Josh Smith, who Charlie and I were also alphabetical friends with from way back, too, before he left after fifth grade to move to Spokane with his dad.
   “Charlie Shepton and Ant Stevenson,” Josh Smith says, coming over to us, grinning. 
   “Josh _______ Smith!” Charlie says, standing up and punching Josh on the shoulder, even though Josh is now twice his size. Josh, in fact, is even bigger than me, not in any fat way, but like he just stepped off the Super Bowl plane to buy a pack of cigarettes. “Where the ____ have you been keeping yourself?” Charlie asks. “It’s been _______ ages.”
   “Watch your language, Charlie,” says Mr. Bacon from the front. “That’s your first warning. Now, sit.”
   “But it’s blacked out, sir,” Charlie says. “It’s like I’m not swearing at all. ____. See?”
   “Sit,” Mr. Bacon says.
   “Mom and Dad got back together,” Josh explains as we all sit down. “After seven years, if you can believe it.” His eyes stray across the crowded classroom. “Hey, don’t tell me the fourth is going to be little Jack Taylor.”
   “Aw, ____ ,” Charlie says, as we see Jack Taylor already being directed over to our quad by Mr. Bacon.
   “What?” Josh says to me, confused. “It’ll be just like old times.”
   Because the thing you need to know is that the four of us, me and Charlie and Josh Smith and Jack Taylor, used to be inseparable. All through elementary, anyway. Besides always sitting next to each other because of our names, we lived on the same few streets, and for a while there, we were always together. Birthday parties and Little League teams and just plain old stupid hanging around.
   Then Josh left and a few years later puberty hit and I suddenly got way bigger than everybody, like linebacker big, and Charlie got a foot taller without gaining any weight, and Jack, well, Jack didn’t grow all that much, and though me and Charlie stayed friends, Jack kinda went his own way when we all went on to high school. And while Charlie and me just did the usual – soccer, skipping class, more soccer – Jack, well . . .
   Jack got a little . . . dramatic, if I’m honest.
   He joined drama club. And choir. And wrote opera reviews for the school newspaper. And he always picked Mark Ruffalo as best out of the Avengers, when, I mean, come on. Hemsworth is standing right there.
   I don’t mean any of that in a bad way, though.
   Because you don’t really notice when it happens over time, do you? Jack’s your friend. You like him because you’ve always liked him. And maybe one day you think, yeah, okay, he’s gone a bit pink, but so what? He’s Jack. And most of the time, you don’t even notice.
   Unless you’re Charlie, and one day, you start noticing. Even in this day and age. When we’re all supposed to be beyond all that.
   From about last Christmas, Charlie’s started noticing. And he isn’t handling it well.
   “Jack’s a little _______ homo now,” he says as we watch Jack come over. “Hey, you can say homo without the box. That doesn’t seem right.”
   Josh raises his eyebrows. “Jack turned out gay?”
   “No,” I say. “He went out with Georgina Harcourt all last year. He’s just kinda flamboyant.”
   “He’s _______ gay,” Charlie says. “He was caught aivina head to a bunch of seniors last year.”
   “No, he wasn’t,” I say. “Claudia Templeton spread that
story to stop people from talking about how her boyfriend texted around all those pictures of her _____.”
   “Oh, yeah.” Charlie laughs. “That was cool.”
   “If it isn’t Josh Smith,” Jack says, dropping his bag on the fourth desk in our quad.
   “Hey, Jack,” Josh says. “Heard you’ve gone all Neil Patrick Harris on us.”
   Jack shoots a glare at Charlie. “I see you’ve been talking to ______ here.”
   “Hey!” Charlie says. “What was behind the box?”
   “Hey, Jack,” I say, nodding a greeting.
   “Hey, Ant.” He nods back, a little carefully.
   “Neil Patrick Harris is a rich man, Jack,” Josh says, still smiling. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
   “Please,” Jack says. “He’s shaped like a scarecrow. Plus, his face makes me angry.” He gives Josh a look up and down. “And where’ve you been? Eating your way through eastern Washington?”
   “Aw, hell, don’t even start,” Josh says. “I wasn’t on school grounds five minutes this morning before the football coach grabbed me.” He nods my way. “You’ve gotten pretty big yourself, Ant. You should try out for the team with me. Be nice to have an old friend around.”
   “We play soccer,” Charlie says, before I can even answer.
   “Quiet in the back,” Mr. Bacon calls over to us, finally ready to start class.
   “So who’s this guy?” Josh says, lowering his voice.
   I shrug. “Just Mr. Bacon.”
   Josh frowns. “He looks familiar.”
   “Nah,” Jack says. “He just looks like if Eddie Redmayne was a serial killer.”
   “God, Jack,” Josh says. “That’s it exactly.”
   Despite ourselves, we all see it. You could totally picture your sister dating Mr. Bacon, but then you could totally see him strangling her, too. I’m about to say so, but then Charlie sneers, “You want to date him, Jack? You want him to ____ you right there on his desk?”
   Jack looks fake surprised. “Are you flirting with me, Shepton?”
   Josh snorts under his breath. I laugh a little, too.
   And then I see Charlie giving me a look that could poison a whole tank of fish.

Photos

additional book photo
additional book photo
additional book photo

About

Friendship, masculinity, sex—Anthony Stevenson has a lot of questions. Is it different for boys who like boys? A poignant and frank story filled with meta-humor by renowned author Patrick Ness.

Anthony “Ant” Stevenson isn’t sure when he stopped being a virgin. Or even if he has. The rules aren’t always very clear when it comes to boys who like boys. In fact, relationships of all kinds feel complicated, even with Ant’s oldest friends. There’s Charlie, who’s both virulently homophobic and in a secret physical relationship with Ant. Then there’s drama kid Jack, who may be gay and has become the target of Charlie’s rage. And, of course, there’s big, beautiful Freddie, who wants Ant to ditch soccer, Charlie’s sport, and try out for the rugby team instead. Ant’s story of loneliness and intimacy, of unexpected support and heart-ripping betrayal, is told forthrightly with tongue-in-cheek black-bar redactions over the language that teenagers would actually use if, you know, they weren’t in a story. Award-winning author Patrick Ness explores teen sexuality, friendship, and romance with a deft hand in this structurally daring, illustrated short novel.

Awards

  • NOMINEE | 2024
    American Library Association's YALSA Quick Pick
  • SELECTION | 2024
    Bank Street College Best Children's Book of the Year
  • SELECTION | 2023
    Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

Praise

Rough pencil sketches add to the heightened emotion, reflecting the jagged, difficult emotional realities… The brevity of this story adds to its power, distilling the plot to its most necessary, brutal, loving elements. [Blanking] masterful.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Ness delivers an authentic-feeling story that interrogates the idea that teens are “too young to read about the stuff we actually do.” Black-and-white pencil illustrations by Bendix provide an expressive complement to concise, sensitive, and thought-provoking text in this un-put-downable, easily devoured read.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This spare, affecting novella takes place over the first week of eleventh grade, zeroing in on the dynamics between Ant, Charlie, Jack, and Josh. . . Ant’s first-person narration moves between the present day, his history with Charlie and Jack, and his reflections on love, sex, and friendship with appealing raw-edged frankness and humor, complemented by Tea Bendix’s sketch and collage artwork. . . . Ness takes on the often underexplored social dynamics among teenage boys with nuance and subtlety that will leave readers thinking long after they turn the final page.
—The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)

Ness superbly blends Ant’s philosophical musings with realistically voiced teen thoughts and dialogue, where expletives and sexual content are curtained by heavy black rectangles yet blatantly present. The near-melancholy tone is beautifully matched by Bendix’s inspired artwork. . . Within this beautifully crafted package lies a poignant story of a boy reaching out in loneliness to another boy and grasping unvarnished truth.
—Booklist (starred review)

Ness’s postmodern short story (a version of which was previously published in an anthology), intermittently illustrated with Bendix’s striking pencil drawings and digital collage, candidly depicts the relationships among several teenage boys in eastern Washington. . . . The lean narrative moves briskly with a focus on dialogue, dry humor, and Ant’s wonderings.
—The Horn Book

This spare story by Carnegie Medal-winner Patrick Ness says a great deal within a limited number of pages. . . . The best quality of this narrative is its brutal honesty. . . Young adults will recognize the feeling of being alone as they process their own inner monologues.
—School Library Connection

Debut illustrator Tea Bendix's striking unpolished pencil and digital collage art depicts the characters and setting both realistically and through visual metaphor. . . . Grayscale hallways and classrooms, faces in profile layered one on top of the other, figures with half their body erased all echo the brutal honesty and the imperfect realities laid bare in the text. Ness's forceful storytelling fused with Bendix's rich sketches result in an achingly beautiful reflection of the multiple, messy realities and experiences of young queerness. . . . compelling.
—Shelf Awareness

This book? A scant 104 pages of spare text, much of which is literally redacted with a black box over it, and tons of large, sketched illustrations? It’s daring. As usual with Ness, I laughed at so many of the quips and the tone (at times), but also was gutted by what the characters go through. I felt for all of them. Ness tells a tale of toxic masculinity, homophobia, sexuality, and loneliness. And he does it by redacting all of the 'bad' stuff. . . Damn, Patrick Ness. Damn. Or maybe I mean [Redacted], Patrick Ness. [Redacted.] Tell it like it is!
—Teen Librarian Toolbox

Author

Patrick Ness is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Chaos Walking trilogy, which inspired a major motion picture. His other novels include the Carnegie Medal winner A Monster Calls (inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd), More Than This, Release, The Rest of Us Just Live Here, and Burn. He has won numerous awards, including two Carnegie Medals, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Book Trust Teenage Prize, and the Costa Children’s Book Award. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of A Monster Calls as well as the BBC’s Doctor Who spinoff Class. Patrick Ness lives in Los Angeles.

Tea Bendix is an award-winning illustrator, graphic designer, author, and performer. She works across different media, including picture books, nonfiction, apps, children's radio, and drawings for TV. Tea Bendix lives in Denmark.

Excerpt

THE LIST
 
All right then, if we’re starting out honest, here’s pretty much everything I’ve done (it’s not as bad as it sounds):
 
I’ve __________ , of course. Everyone _________. They’re lying if they say they don’t, but ___________ doesn’t count, obviously. You can’t lose your virginity to yourself.
And leading on from that, I’ve been ______ by someone else, but who’s been to a freshman year party and not gone home without doing that in the coat pile? It’s only someone’s hands.
Getting a bit heavier, I’ve ____ and ____. Still not really a shocker.
A bit more strangely, I’ve ________________________________________________________________________________________________________. (Okay, I’m not
allowed to even hint at the strange stuff. Not that kind of story. Fine.)
And of course we wouldn’t be talking about this if I hadn’t actually _____. You know, actually ______________________________  , which is pretty much the definition of losing your virginity if you’re a boy.
 
And just so we’re clear, it’s not like I’ve done #5 once or twice either. I’m not one of those chess club virgins who goes into a closet and wonders if the real thing’s happened. It has. Trust me. Although it doesn’t really matter how many times you do it: you think it’s going to make your life less lonely, but it never does.
   I suppose my question, though, is where exactly on that list did I stop being a virgin?
   Is it obviously #5? Or can it happen sooner, like on #3? Or even #2?
   Are there degrees of virginity? Is there a points    system? A league table?
   And who gets to say?
   Because maybe it’s not as clear as all that, maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there are people who’d still say I’m a virgin, even after doing numbers 1 through 5.
   In fact, I might be one of those people.
 
 
WHERE IT STARTS
 
There are lots of places this story could start, but it might as well start on the first day of junior year, when Charlie and me are sitting in AP history, waiting for Mr. Bacon to get his seating plan finished.
   “Well, this is taking ______ forever,” Charlie says, then he blinks, surprised. “What the ____ just happened? What are these _______ black boxes?”
   I shrug. “It’s that kind of story. Certain words are necessary because this is real life, but you can’t actually show ’em because we’re too young to read about the stuff we actually do, right?”
   “Teens swear in stories these days.”
   “Not anything like we do in reality,” I say. “It’s the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it.”
   Charlie nods solemnly at the truth of this. Then he gets a smirk.
   “ _______________________ ,” he says. His smile gets bigger. “ ________________________________ __________.” He nods again. “Cool.”
And just as he says, “Cool,” that’s when Josh Smith walks in, which is where this all really starts.
   “No ________ way,” Charlie says.
   We watch Josh check in with Mr. Bacon, who finds his name on the list and points him toward me and Charlie. Mr. Bacon’s great new idea for this year has us sitting in “quads” rather than just boring rows. Four desks pushed together in little islands around the room. Says it’s supposed to make learning “collaborative,” but any fool could see he won’t be able to control us like this.
   The quads are alphabetical, so I – being Ant Stevenson – am sitting with Charlie Shepton, who I’ve sat by alphabetically since elementary school. And now here’s Josh Smith, who Charlie and I were also alphabetical friends with from way back, too, before he left after fifth grade to move to Spokane with his dad.
   “Charlie Shepton and Ant Stevenson,” Josh Smith says, coming over to us, grinning. 
   “Josh _______ Smith!” Charlie says, standing up and punching Josh on the shoulder, even though Josh is now twice his size. Josh, in fact, is even bigger than me, not in any fat way, but like he just stepped off the Super Bowl plane to buy a pack of cigarettes. “Where the ____ have you been keeping yourself?” Charlie asks. “It’s been _______ ages.”
   “Watch your language, Charlie,” says Mr. Bacon from the front. “That’s your first warning. Now, sit.”
   “But it’s blacked out, sir,” Charlie says. “It’s like I’m not swearing at all. ____. See?”
   “Sit,” Mr. Bacon says.
   “Mom and Dad got back together,” Josh explains as we all sit down. “After seven years, if you can believe it.” His eyes stray across the crowded classroom. “Hey, don’t tell me the fourth is going to be little Jack Taylor.”
   “Aw, ____ ,” Charlie says, as we see Jack Taylor already being directed over to our quad by Mr. Bacon.
   “What?” Josh says to me, confused. “It’ll be just like old times.”
   Because the thing you need to know is that the four of us, me and Charlie and Josh Smith and Jack Taylor, used to be inseparable. All through elementary, anyway. Besides always sitting next to each other because of our names, we lived on the same few streets, and for a while there, we were always together. Birthday parties and Little League teams and just plain old stupid hanging around.
   Then Josh left and a few years later puberty hit and I suddenly got way bigger than everybody, like linebacker big, and Charlie got a foot taller without gaining any weight, and Jack, well, Jack didn’t grow all that much, and though me and Charlie stayed friends, Jack kinda went his own way when we all went on to high school. And while Charlie and me just did the usual – soccer, skipping class, more soccer – Jack, well . . .
   Jack got a little . . . dramatic, if I’m honest.
   He joined drama club. And choir. And wrote opera reviews for the school newspaper. And he always picked Mark Ruffalo as best out of the Avengers, when, I mean, come on. Hemsworth is standing right there.
   I don’t mean any of that in a bad way, though.
   Because you don’t really notice when it happens over time, do you? Jack’s your friend. You like him because you’ve always liked him. And maybe one day you think, yeah, okay, he’s gone a bit pink, but so what? He’s Jack. And most of the time, you don’t even notice.
   Unless you’re Charlie, and one day, you start noticing. Even in this day and age. When we’re all supposed to be beyond all that.
   From about last Christmas, Charlie’s started noticing. And he isn’t handling it well.
   “Jack’s a little _______ homo now,” he says as we watch Jack come over. “Hey, you can say homo without the box. That doesn’t seem right.”
   Josh raises his eyebrows. “Jack turned out gay?”
   “No,” I say. “He went out with Georgina Harcourt all last year. He’s just kinda flamboyant.”
   “He’s _______ gay,” Charlie says. “He was caught aivina head to a bunch of seniors last year.”
   “No, he wasn’t,” I say. “Claudia Templeton spread that
story to stop people from talking about how her boyfriend texted around all those pictures of her _____.”
   “Oh, yeah.” Charlie laughs. “That was cool.”
   “If it isn’t Josh Smith,” Jack says, dropping his bag on the fourth desk in our quad.
   “Hey, Jack,” Josh says. “Heard you’ve gone all Neil Patrick Harris on us.”
   Jack shoots a glare at Charlie. “I see you’ve been talking to ______ here.”
   “Hey!” Charlie says. “What was behind the box?”
   “Hey, Jack,” I say, nodding a greeting.
   “Hey, Ant.” He nods back, a little carefully.
   “Neil Patrick Harris is a rich man, Jack,” Josh says, still smiling. “Nothing to be ashamed of.”
   “Please,” Jack says. “He’s shaped like a scarecrow. Plus, his face makes me angry.” He gives Josh a look up and down. “And where’ve you been? Eating your way through eastern Washington?”
   “Aw, hell, don’t even start,” Josh says. “I wasn’t on school grounds five minutes this morning before the football coach grabbed me.” He nods my way. “You’ve gotten pretty big yourself, Ant. You should try out for the team with me. Be nice to have an old friend around.”
   “We play soccer,” Charlie says, before I can even answer.
   “Quiet in the back,” Mr. Bacon calls over to us, finally ready to start class.
   “So who’s this guy?” Josh says, lowering his voice.
   I shrug. “Just Mr. Bacon.”
   Josh frowns. “He looks familiar.”
   “Nah,” Jack says. “He just looks like if Eddie Redmayne was a serial killer.”
   “God, Jack,” Josh says. “That’s it exactly.”
   Despite ourselves, we all see it. You could totally picture your sister dating Mr. Bacon, but then you could totally see him strangling her, too. I’m about to say so, but then Charlie sneers, “You want to date him, Jack? You want him to ____ you right there on his desk?”
   Jack looks fake surprised. “Are you flirting with me, Shepton?”
   Josh snorts under his breath. I laugh a little, too.
   And then I see Charlie giving me a look that could poison a whole tank of fish.