Loner Boy

He sees right through everybody. That's the part they can't forgive.

Loner. That's the word the adults use. Gentle-voiced. Like it's something to be cured.

Thirteen-year-old Terrence "Tre" Boone has never found a way to explain it to any of them. It was never the talking he minded. It's the performing - a whole room of people saying nothing to each other for an hour and calling it a good time. Tre can see the gap between the noise a party is supposed to make and the noise it actually makes. And once you've seen a gap like that, you can't unsee it. Ever.

So they line up to fix him. A doctor with a legal pad and a word on it he was never meant to read. A mother who worries. A stepfather who slides "son" across the table like a bill coming due.

Out on the driveway, none of it follows him.

Millbrook, 1996. A Walkman, his cousin's mixtape, and a crack in the concrete exactly twenty-two feet from a rim with no net. Out there nobody needs him to be excited. Out there the ball goes in or it doesn't, and no amount of talking changes the math.

He has put a thousand cold hours into that crack in the concrete. He is better than every kid in that gym, and he can prove it.

Then the tryout list goes up. His name isn't on it.

"Talent's not the only thing on my list, kid."

What Tre does in the days after that - with a best friend who never asks him to explain himself, a six-year-old sister who thinks he hung the moon, and a stepfather who has been waiting six years for something to fix - is the part nobody on that list ever gets to see.

A story for every kid who has been told to be more like everybody else.

• Set in 1996 - Walkmans, dubbed mixtapes, pagers, and a driveway rim with no net
• An honest portrait of an ADHD kid who is not a problem to be solved
• Basketball at its heart, and the private accounting that actually makes a player good
• A blended family drawn with real tenderness - nobody here is the villain
• Perfect for readers of The Crossover, Ghost, and Booked
• For readers ages 10 and up

The list didn't know him. It never once watched him make eight in a row in the dark, with his hands gone numb, for a version of himself nobody else could see yet.

He went back out anyway.