Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family’s bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you do not recognize until you are old enough to understand what your body has been trying to tell you. In 1982, I was sixteen years old, living in the Midwest, and I sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders. I did not know I was writing the first draft of a trilogy. I thought I was writing television. I was wrong, but I would not understand how wrong for another four decades.

The eight script episodes sat in live storage on Boles.com from 1982 until this year. They moved from paper to file to folder to digital archive, surviving every migration of format and every temptation to throw them away, because something about them would not let me. Not nostalgia. I am not sentimental about my own early work, and anyone who has read Mother Narcissus knows that sentimentality is not a tool I trust. What kept those scripts alive was the suspicion, growing stronger with each decade, that the sixteen-year-old me who wrote them had understood something the adult I had not yet earned the right to articulate. The boy wrote it instinctively. The man needed forty-four years of living before he could write it with precision.

Today, David Boles Books publishes The Westborough Crusaders as a trilogy of Young Adult novels. Three books. Seventy-five chapters. A hundred and fifty thousand words. And every one of those words owes a debt to the eight episodes that a teenager in the Midwest wrote in longhand, then on an old Sears daisywheel typewriter, in a bedroom office where the bed was made withzero  military precision and a blank notebook sat open on the desk.

Dave, at Sixteen

Let me tell you what the sixteen-year-old wrote, because the material deserves to be described on its own terms before I explain what I did with it.

The Westborough Crusaders is set at a fictional Midwestern high school where a group of teenagers run the school newspaper, the Krugerand, under the supervision of a journalism teacher named Mr. Jace Canterbilly. Canterbilly is one of the best characters I have ever created, and I created him before I had any training in character construction, which tells you something about the difference between instinct and technique. He eats donuts. He lectures about the prostitution of the English language. He lives alone in a house with a grandfather clock from Switzerland that stops ticking every time he falls asleep, which is an image I could not have explained at sixteen but which I now understand as the first symbol I ever wrote that functioned at the level of thematic architecture. The clock runs when someone chooses to wind it. It stops when nobody is present to maintain it. That is everything the trilogy is about, compressed into a piece of furniture.

The central friendship is between Ares Taler, a sophomore whose dry wit and moral certainty mask a family marked by hereditary bone cancer, and Crewly “Crew” Smith, a transfer student from Florida who arrives at Westborough on the first day in orange overalls, a green shirt, and red sunglasses, and who announces within minutes that he has uncovered a teacher who is a member of the KGB, sentenced for six years, almost treason. Ares matches him instantly: he has an uncle who took six years to write a sentence. He was a judge. That exchange is the engine of the entire series. Two fourteen-year-olds discover they are funny in the same way and at the same speed, and from that recognition comes a friendship that will have to carry the weight of alcoholism, school violence, bone cancer, institutional betrayal, and the slow recognition that growing up is not a destination but the accumulation of grains of sand in open wounds.

The eight episodes cover the sophomore year at Westborough. A kid named Stan Harrison drinks cherry vodka in the journalism darkroom and does not understand that he has crossed the line from wanting a drink to needing one. A kid named Bergie Bergman, bullied to the edge of psychological collapse, brings a gun to school because his mother told him not to take it anymore and he heard “whatever it takes” instead of “tell a teacher.” A quarterback named Keithe Williams receives a letter from his girlfriend Sandy telling him she is pregnant, and his response is to dismiss it as “probably an abortion,” which is one of the cruelest and most realistic lines I have ever written and I wrote it before I had ever been in a relationship. Ares’ older brother Puck has bone cancer that is hereditary through the mother’s side, which means Ares is carrying the same disease in his own skeleton and hiding it from everyone, including himself. And Canterbilly leaves Westborough for medical reasons that are not explained until the final episode, when Ares arrives at a Minnesota hospital and discovers that his roommate is Jace Canterbilly, recovering from open heart surgery, and the teacher who was supposed to save him needs saving too.

I wrote all of that at sixteen. I do not say this to boast. I say it because the fact astonishes me, and I believe in being honest about astonishment. The sixteen-year-old who produced those scripts had no MFA, no workshop training, no understanding of dramatic structure beyond what he had absorbed from watching television and reading compulsively and paying very close attention to the way people actually behaved in hallways and kitchens and parking lots. What he had was the one thing that cannot be taught: he was paying attention, and he was frightened by what he saw, and he wrote it down because writing was the only defense mechanism that worked.

From the Middle

The trilogy exists because the eight episodes demanded it. They began in the middle of things, with relationships already formed and wounds already festering, and they ended with Ares on a bus to Minnesota and Crew holding an unopened brown envelope containing the last column Ares wrote for the Krugerand, titled “A Farewell to Shins,” which is a comic riff on Hemingway filtered through a teenager’s bone cancer and is, I believe, one of the finest titles I have ever invented.

Everything before Episode One and everything after Episode Eight was implied. Forty-four years of implication is enough. The novels fill the silence.

The Year Before the Wire

The Year Before the Wire is Book One. It traces the academic year before the series begins, following these characters as they become the people the audience will meet in Episode One. This is the book where Ares quits football and discovers that the thing he does with words is better than the thing he does with his body, and the discovery is not liberating but terrifying, because it means leaving behind the only world where he and Keithe make sense together. This is the book where Stan Harrison slides from social drinking to dependency with the quiet ordinariness of rain becoming a flood. This is the book where Canterbilly reads a student file and recognizes talent without discipline, intelligence without direction, and the kind of moral certainty that will either make the kid a writer or destroy him. The central question of Book One is: What do you have to lose before you become the person you are going to be?

A Farewell to Shins

A Farewell to Shins is Book Two, taking its title from Ares’ final column. It novelizes the eight original episodes, expanding their compressed dramatic architecture into full novelistic interiority. Where the scripts could only show what characters said and did, the novel goes inside. You are inside Stan’s body when the cherry vodka hits. You are inside Bergie’s head on the morning he puts the gun in his locker. You are inside Canterbilly’s house when the grandfather clock stops because he has fallen asleep on the couch in his bathrobe, and the silence that fills the room is the same silence that fills his life. The central question of Book Two is: How do you keep writing the truth when the truth is that everything you love is falling apart?

The Stopped Clock

The Stopped Clock is Book Three. It follows the consequences. Ares in the Minnesota hospital, communicating with Canterbilly through the wall by knocking. One knock: I am here. Two knocks: I am scared. Three knocks: tell me a joke. Crew running the Krugerand alone and discovering that his editorial voice is not a scalpel like Ares’ but a hammer, and the hammer is what the paper needs. Stan in real rehab, the kind without epiphanies. Julie changing her perfume, which is the smallest possible act of self-determination and is everything. And Doublewe, the school administrator who spent the entire series crumpling the newspaper and throwing it at his wastebasket, going to Canterbilly’s empty house and winding the grandfather clock every day at lunch for seven months because somebody has to keep time moving when the person who used to do it is gone. The central question of Book Three is: What survives?

Young Adult as an Old Man

I want to say something about the decision to write these as Young Adult novels, because the decision was deliberate and the category matters.

Young Adult fiction has spent the past two decades splitting into two traditions that do not always speak to each other. One tradition produces fantasies of empowerment: chosen ones, magical systems, dystopian rebellions where teenagers save the world through specialness. I have written in that tradition myself, and I believe in it. The EleMenTs trilogy is a fantasy series about disabled superheroines, and it does exactly what empowerment fantasy is supposed to do: it takes teenagers whom the world has underestimated and gives them power the world cannot ignore.

The Westborough Crusaders belongs to the other tradition. The one that does not empower its characters but instead trusts them with the truth. There is no magic in Westborough. There is no dystopia except the American high school as it actually operates. There is no chosen one. There is only Ares Taler, who sees everything and names it and hides the one thing he cannot bear to name, and Crew Smith, who is loyal beyond reason, and Stan Harrison, who is ordinary in his addiction and ordinary in his recovery and all the more devastating for the ordinariness. These characters are not special. They are specific, which is better, because specific means real, and real means the reader cannot dismiss them as fantasy.

The tonal model is early Salinger crossed with the domestic chaos of a John Hughes script that nobody sanitized for the studio. The humor is character-driven, never ironic distance. These teenagers are funny because they are intelligent and observant and terrified, and humor is the only tool they have for surviving a world that keeps proving itself unworthy of their trust. The shift from comedy to devastation happens without announcement, often within a single scene. Ares delivers the grain-of-sand speech in the same breath he uses to mock Crew’s razor purchase. Stan sends anonymous roses to the girl he still loves in the same episode where he gets force-fed whiskey by the people he thought were his friends.

The thematic argument that runs through all three books is this: every institution designed to protect young people will eventually fail them, and the only reliable shelter is the one teenagers build for themselves out of loyalty, humor, and the refusal to look away from each other’s wounds. That is not a comfortable argument. It is not an argument that gets you invited to speak at education conferences. But it is the argument the sixteen-year-old made in 1982, and the sixty-year-old has not found a reason to revise it.

The Empty Hand

One more thing, and then I will tell you where to buy the books, because writers need readers and books need buyers and the work does not continue without the exchange.

I made a decision about Puck Taler, the older brother with bone cancer, that I want to explain. The original scripts leave Puck’s fate ambiguous. He is alive when the series ends. He may or may not survive. The temptation, in novelizing the material, was to resolve that ambiguity one way or the other: to kill Puck for the emotional weight of it, or to save him for the relief. I refused both options. The trilogy does not kill Puck. It does not save him. It lets him be alive for as long as he is alive, and it treats every moment of his aliveness as sufficient. The last time we see Puck, he is sitting on the back porch with Ares, not talking, watching the sun go down, and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out nothing because there is nothing in his pocket, and he laughs at his own empty hand. That is the image. That is Puck. A boy who chose to live on his own terms, which means that every joke he tells is a refusal to let the disease have the last word, and the empty hand is funnier than anything he could have pulled out of it.

I owe that image to the sixteen-year-old who created Puck without understanding what he had made. And I owe the novels to the forty-four years it took me to understand.

Ticking Trilogy

The Westborough Crusaders trilogy, consisting of The Year Before the Wire, A Farewell to Shins, and The Stopped Clock, is available now from David Boles Books. Kindle ebook and paperback editions through Amazon. The series joins The EleMenTs as the second Young Adult series in the Boles Books catalog, and the two trilogies could not be more different in method while sharing exactly the same conviction: that teenagers deserve literature that does not flinch.

The clock is ticking. Somebody wound it.

Listen to the Human Meme podcast episode on the trilogy. Read the Prairie Voice article on the hidden systems of 1980s high schools.