Travis MacArthur, who recently started his senior year in high school, was comfortably settling into his seemingly ordinary life, living with his busy, mostly absent, divorced father in the New Jersey suburbs. Patrick and Kate are his witty and sarcastic best friends and happen to be the only people in the whole world that know Travis is gay. While life isn't perfect (whose is?), things had been running pretty smoothly up until the day his feline companion unexpectedly dies. From that moment on, many complications begin to manifest in every aspect of Travis' life. His father's work schedule increasingly leaves Travis alone much of the time, his mother's new live-in boyfriend is obnoxious and the last person he wants as a stepfather, and a series of bad decisions lands Travis in the hospital and at the mercy of his school's rumor mill. To further complicate matters, in the midst of all his troubles, Travis falls madly for Ryan, a kind, charming, and insanely handsome guy he meets in the last place he would ever expect to find a love interest. While he is equally smitten with Travis, it is Ryan's first same sex relationship, and in his apprehension, pulls away, adding to Travis' mounting problems. Travis copes the best way he knows how - by trying to find the humor in life with his best friends at his side. But what happens when those things aren't enough to pull him out of despair? And will he really have to give up his first true love?
Summer, 2003. An easygoing teen skateboarder and his insensitive best friend must navigate their changing friendship when a flirty boy comes between them.
*****
Sixteen-year-old Matteo is a simple dude. It's 2003, his brother is fighting in Afghanistan, and his best friend Logan is obsessed with gay jokes, but Matt doesn't like to worry. He just wants to film his skateboard video.
Then cute emo boy Quinn applies to work at the skate shop with Matt. Being friends with clever, flirty Quinn is like learning a new skateboard trick: a little bit intimidating but totally (probably) worth the challenge. Now Logan hates Quinn, there's money going missing at the shop, and Matt can't seem to figure out if Quinn might possibly, maybe, want to kiss him back. This summer just got a lot more complicated.
*****
*featured in LGBTQ+'s "BxB Teen Fiction", LY's "Love Your Identity", and WattpadNaNoWriMo's "2019 Top Picks" lists*
Complete at 59k words.