Summer 2013 Novels

Some Things You Can't Explain

My first biggest project, Some Things You Can't Explain, is coming this summer and is planned to be completed sometime in August. It's about overachiever and perfectionist Leslie Bell, a seventeen soon-to-be eighteen year old boy, who hides his loneliness of the absence of his parents with school clubs and extracurricular activities. 

One day, though, he meets Roman Brennan, a self-proclaimed delinquent who never refers to Leslie by his real name unless he runs out of enough annoying pet names. Roman is a 'House Hopper': he dropped out of high school, had a subsequent falling out with his parents, and now goes from home to home, not having a permanent place to live. 

Leslie knows to stay away. He's too busy with his already hectic life to bring Roman in on top of it all; especially considering the fact that Roman has taken some weird liking to him that he isn't even sure is real or not. Leslie's friends know all these crazy stories about him (neglecting the fact that the authenticity of each may be a tad wonky)'; it's like the unspoken fact that Roman is just the type of guy you gossip about one day then forget the next, but somehow, somewhere, Roman works himself under Leslie's tough-guy skin and shows him a world where you don't have to hide yourself under a manufactured reality in order to pretend you're fine. 

The Act of Oscillating

I've been working on this one for a little bit over a year, actually. Its been written and rewritten too many times to count; I'm ready to really get it down and finished before my senior year. It begins with Robin Jackson, a teenage boy with something to prove to his mother. Similar to Leslie Bell in Some Things You Can't Explain, Robin works for perfection, refusing to settle for less in fear that his mother will turn her back to him — for good, this time — and he'll be a disappointment to his little sister, Opal. 

But, most of all, Robin  is desperate to prove that he's nothing like his lying, cheating, fleeting father Harriet Jackson. If he can prove this to not only his family, but to himself, he'll feel accomplished. 

His loneliness stops when he meets Trouble Himself: Luke Prescott. Luke's white mother is rumored to be a drug addict, his black father a negligent bastard. Both Robin and Luke are longing for something different from their downward spiraling lives; when Robin decides to reach a helping hand out to Luke, wanting nothing more than to save him from all the rumors and racism that surrounds him daily, Luke takes the bait. 

It's too late by the time Robin realizes that he's drowned himself in something too deep to come back up out of. It's too late by the time he starts to fall in love.