Excerpted from the forthcoming international bestseller:
The (mis)Adventures of Abernathy Titwhistle
The auditorium smelled like waxed floors and panic.
It was the night of the junior high talent show—an institution more sacred than the Mother Mary, more terrifying than puberty itself. Abby sat backstage in a too-big tuxedo jacket borrowed from Gramma’s cedar closet, palms slick with sweat, heart a trapped animal in his chest.
The piano sat center stage, lit like an altar. And Abby—Abernathy Titwhistle—was about to lay himself bare.
But before Abby, there were others. Many, many others.
First up was a pair of identical twins in denim vests and matching mullets who played “Dueling Banjos” on electric guitars. The crowd went feral. Then came a girl in a sequined leotard who twirled a flaming baton that wasn’t actually on fire but still nearly hit a teacher in the front row.
Next: a boy named Taylor performed a ventriloquist act with a sock puppet named Commander Flapjaw. His set included conspiracy theories about milk and cartons. Commander Flapjaw also sang a song called “My Locker Ate My Homework.” The audience laughed in that uncomfortable, performative way that kids laugh when they’re not sure if something’s funny or sad.
Then a girl sang “I Will Always Love You” with enough ear-piercing and shaky vibrato to make even the living legend Whitney Houston pause, tilt her head, and politely decline to comment.
There were ribbon dancers, a magic act involving four ferrets, a mime routine no one understood, and a clarinet solo that made two eighth graders weep from laughter.
All the while, Abby waited.
Katie Lynn found him backstage between acts, dressed in a vintage prom dress from the ’60s and Doc Martens, now paired with a black fishnet shrug, dark lipstick, and a spiked choker she claimed to have found in a pawn shop called The Ankh’s Edge. Her electric pink pigtails were beginning to fade into lavender. She handed him a lollipop shaped like a bat and stared at him like she was reading his aura in Latin.
“This is it, isn’t it?” she said, eyes shining. “‘Hearts Like Ours’—you’re really going to do it. You wrote it. You named it, so sing like it belongs to you.”
“By the way, you look like the spectre of a dead bellboy.”
He exhaled a dry laugh. “Thanks.”
“You ready?”
“No.”
“That’s how you know it matters.”
She sat beside him on a crate of props including rubber chickens and magician’s scarves spilling out like entrails. Abby stared at the floor, listening to someone rehearsing an obnoxious clogging routine offstage.
“I think I’m gonna throw up,” he said.
“Perfect,” she replied. “Throw it into your voice.”
Each new act made the knot in his stomach pull tighter. His song wasn’t charming. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t even palatable.
It was one boy’s grief and awakening wrapped in piano chords.
He could feel it in his body from the anticipation, and the way it buzzed in his bones. Kurt was out there. Slouched in the back row with Shaun and the freshman crew, half-laughing, half-bored, pretending he wasn’t scanning the program for Abby’s name.
When Abby peeked through the curtain, he caught a sliver of Kurt’s face. It looked blank. Not angry. Not proud. Just… absent.
And then there was his mother. Mrs. Titwhistle returned to town recently—why, no one really knew. She arrived with a new baby in tow, one no one had seen before, and a silence around her like scandal wrapped in a fresh coat of Covergirl mascara. Rumor said she’d been staying off and on with Mr. Titwhistle again. Even stranger, the whole Titwhistle family had come out for the talent show: siblings, father, and all.
Mrs. Titwhistle herself looked like the ghost of Las Vegas, clutching a cigarette she wasn’t allowed to smoke, decked in a vinyl mini-skirt barely covering anything, and a leopard-print halter top that screamed clearance rack. Her bleach-blonde hair was teased into cartoonish spikes, her eyeliner applied with the subtlety of a war crime.
She sat arms-crossed, scowling, as if daring anyone to suggest she might be proud of her son.
When Abby’s name was finally called—after the yo-yo champion but before a harmonica duo from the Baptist church—he stepped into the spotlight.
The applause was polite. One person whistled. Probably Katie Lynn.
He sat at the piano and looked out. Not at anyone. Just into the dark, where judgment lived. And he began to play.
His fingers found the keys like they were old lovers.
The first notes rang out, a tentative haunting, the kind of sound that makes people pay attention. Then his voice followed, low and sharp:
“Tie me to the mast of your expectations, let me drown in the silence you serve as salvation…”
The lyrics bent around the auditorium like a spell.
He sang about longing. About rage. About the lie of love when it’s laced with control. The pain of being molded into something unrecognizable. Each verse a blade. Each chorus a scream held just beneath the skin.
“They dressed me up in shame and called it kindness, left me in the garden with the serpents…”
Someone gasped. Someone else chortled. Another kid whispered, “What the hell?” with awe or maybe confusion.
But it didn’t matter.
He wasn’t playing for applause.
He was playing because he had to.
Because there was rot in his chest and fire in his fingers, and if he didn’t let it out, he’d never breathe again.
Halfway through, Abby saw Mrs. Titwhistle visibly cringe, shaking her head like the song was an attack on her personally. She whispered something to a woman beside her who recoiled at the cigarette stench and scooted two seats away.
“Too dramatic,” Mrs. Titwhistle sneered aloud. “He always was.”
Kurt still didn’t look up. He leaned in to say something to Shaun, and Shaun laughed too loud, too forced. It sounded like betrayal.
But Abby kept going.
He wasn’t singing to get Kurt back anymore. He was singing to get himself back.
The room blurred at the edges. The heat of the stage lights soaked through his crumpled suit collar. He imagined himself not as a boy playing a song, but as an offering. A living sacrifice to be offered up to the divine.
He built the bridge into a crescendo—an aching, glorious breakdown of dissonance and chord crashes. Tori’s voice threaded through his memory again, rising behind his own like a protective echo:
Why do we crucify ourselves…
Every day…
I crucify myself…
He saw himself nailed to that piano bench, every lyric a wound, every measure a reckoning.
This wasn’t performance. It was liturgy.
A queer communion in a room full of forced witnesses.
A sacrament of defiance.
A countermelody of survival, turning pain into performance.
“Spare me the cross if the nails are made of promises. Spare me the light if it blinds me to myself…”
His voice cracked. Then soared.
He ended in a whisper. One last note. One final lyric sung like a confession:
“And all the perfect little lies you fed me… I turned them into lullabies.”
Then: a long period of silence followed by applause. A few scattered claps. Then a ripple. Then stillness again. It wasn’t ovation. It wasn’t triumph. But it wasn’t rejection either. It was the sound of people unsure how to respond to something they didn’t expect to understand. Some teachers clapped too quickly. A few students stared with glazed expressions, unsure if they’d just witnessed brilliance or a breakdown.
But Gramma stood.
Hands clasped. Eyes wet. Chin lifted like she was watching a phoenix rise from the ash.
And for Abby, that was enough.
Because he hadn’t disappeared.
He wasn’t broken.
He had risen.
And the world had no choice but to look.
Katie Lynn met him in the wings with tears in her mascara and a glitter-filled fist bump.
“You crucified them,” she said. “Kindly, but still.”
Abby laughed—wet, hoarse, and real.
Behind him, someone started the next act.
A couple of boys with harmonicas.
As if nothing had happened.
As if everything hadn’t just changed.
Backstage, no one said anything. A tech kid gave him a thumbs-up. Katie Lynn ran up, hugged him hard, said something about the CIA and chakras, but her voice wobbled and her mascara was streaked. She saw him, even if she didn’t understand him.
He hadn’t meant to look for Kurt, but the moment he stepped off the stage, there he was, near the gym doors, lingering in the shadow of the vending machines. Arms crossed, expression unreadable, like he’d just heard something he wasn’t ready for but couldn’t ignore.
Abby paused. Kurt stayed.
No one said anything.
So Abby walked past the water fountain, through the double doors, into the parking lot. Kurt followed.
They stopped near the flagpole, where the light was dim enough for honesty but bright enough to see each other clearly.
The parking lot buzzed with headlights, idle engines, and teens trying too hard to act unaffected. Then came the sound of a low growl—an engine tuned to purr and roar in perfect balance. All heads turned.
Abby opened his mouth to say something before the night cracked open with music.
Out of nowhere, a muscle car pulled in the parking lot revving its engine. Deep aubergine, glassy as a dream, chrome trim catching every smear of fluorescent light. The wheels spun slow, deliberate, like it was gliding in on a cue only it could hear. Dual exhaust, matte-black hood, and a spoiler sharp enough to split open the night.
Inside, When in Rome’s “The Promise” played on an immaculate Kenwood system, the volume just shy of rude.
When your day is through, and so is your temper…
The door slung open. Out stepped a senior no one ever talked to but everyone knew. A legend. He looked like a magazine ad made flesh with a swarthy, olive-tinged complexion, long flowing hair, a five o’clock shadow that probably reached its peak by lunch. His biker jacket hung over a threadbare white tee that gripped his chest like a prayer. But, it was the Levi’s that made Abby and Kurt begin to drool. High-waisted, faded, hugging tight around the thighs and hips with a package so prominent it could only be sculpted by destiny or the denim gods themselves.
He stood there, silent, leaning against the hood, legs spread, boots crossed at the ankle like he knew exactly what the crowd was doing with their eyes.
Like a gaggle of squawking geese in comes the cheerleaders. The same ones from the local green grocer. This time with Slushees, swinging their hips and twirling invisible strands of hair.
A Valley Girl wannabe pondered aloud, “Okay, but are we sure he’s legal? He’s not like some criminal that came back to finish his diploma, right?”
Another held up a lip gloss like it was a holy relic and whispered, “If he even looked at me, I’d give him my social security number.”
Then, in unison, they broke into a mock cheer:
“M-U-S-C-L-E, that’s the thing that ruins me! T-I-G-H-T L-E-V-I’s, now I can’t feel my thighs!”
From inside the car, “The Promise” continues to blare, the vocals crisp and heartbreakingly synthetic:
If you need a friend, don’t look to a stranger…
Abby blinked, and suddenly, it wasn’t just a moment.
It was a fever dream.
He and Kurt were the only ones standing still as the world melted into slow motion. The music warped, stretched, “When your day is through…” like a voice from a cassette tape half-eaten by time. The cheerleaders circled the car like witches in a frenzied spellcasting surrounding a cauldron. Their glitter shimmered like blood in the moonlight. One of them pulled out a pom-pom and began chanting in mock unison:
“Oh my God, he’s like, the Marlboro Man’s secret gay twin.”
“He’s not real. He’s a vapor. He’s a cologne commercial.”
“I would absolutely risk it all and die for him.”
Kurt turned to Abby, his mouth open, his pupils wide, like they were both watching a god descend from a ’69 Cuda.
Then the senior looked directly at them. At both of them. He didn’t smile. He nodded.
That nod cracked something.
They weren’t alone in the wanting.
Abby looked down, and the world snapped back.
The song no longer warped. It rang clearly now. Crisp. Familiar.
The cheerleaders were still there, but now they were just girls clutching their frozen drinks and fumbling with the colored inserts of their cheer shoes. Their flyaway pleated skirts, crushed from hours of sitting on bleachers, flared up with every gust of wind.
The guy in the muscle car was still leaning against the hood, casually perfect. But the magic had thinned. He was human again. Mostly.
Abby and Kurt stood a little too close, hearts still racing from something that hadn’t happened but felt truer than anything.
For a second, both Abby and Kurt stared.
The guy flicked his eyes over and nodded, like he was used to being admired by girls, boys, teachers, parents, and probably priests.
Then he got into his car and peeled out slowly, the song still echoing behind him:
If I gave you my heart…
I’d be wishing on the stars…
Abby exhaled. “Jesus.”
Kurt muttered, “Unfair.”
They looked at each other and laughed, a bit too quick, a bit too surprised.
For a moment, the old rhythm came back. The quiet shorthand they used to share. The way their glances used to hold entire conversations. The way they used to breathe each other in without even noticing.
Then it broke.
“That was… heavy,” Kurt said.
Abby shrugged. “Felt heavier inside.”
“I didn’t know you could sing like that.”
“I didn’t know I could either.”
Another silence. But this one held something. Not discomfort. Possibility.
Kurt shoved his hands deeper into his hoodie pocket. “Shaun thinks you’re dramatic.”
“Shaun wears too much cologne and calls his mom ‘dude.’”
Kurt chuckled. “He’s kind of a dick.”
Abby smiled. “You said it.”
Kurt glanced sideways. “I heard… the song. All of it.”
“You were supposed to.”
“I thought it was about me.”
Abby’s face didn’t change. “Maybe it was…”
Kurt looked down, then up. His voice dropped. “I miss you.”
Abby’s throat tightened. “I know that I left, but you left, too.”
“I didn’t know how to stay.”
“Did either of us really try?”
Kurt stepped forward. “I’m trying now.”
Abby didn’t respond. Not right away. He looked at the school, the fading tail lights of the muscle car, the cheerleaders still talking too loudly.
“I’m not asking you to fix anything,” Kurt said. “I’m not asking for forever. Just…”
“What?”
“Just don’t hate me.”
Abby looked at him. Really looked.
“I don’t hate you,” he said. “I’m just afraid.”
Kurt nodded, slowly, like someone reading a sentence in a language he almost remembered.
“I get that.”
And for a moment, they stood there between what was and what might be, in the soft flicker of a streetlight and the last lines of a song only they could still hear:
When your day is through…
And so is your temper…
You know what to do…
I’m gonna always be there…
Kurt exhaled like he wanted to explain something but couldn’t yet find the words.
Sometimes if I shout…
It’s not what’s intended…
These words just come out with no cross to bear…
Abby swallowed. The song kept speaking when neither of them could.
I’m sorry but I’m just thinking of the right words to say…
Kurt’s voice cracked as he said, “They don’t sound the way I meant them to.”
“I know,” Abby said. “But I heard them.”
But if you wait around a while…
I’ll make you fall for me…
They both laughed, soft and uncertain.
I promise you…
I promise…
I promise you.
Even if the moment faded, if nothing came of it, if tomorrow Kurt couldn’t look at him, it would all be okay. Because tonight, he sung the song, stood the ground, held the gaze.
And somewhere inside him, Tori whispered one last time:
Why do we crucify ourselves?
Abby didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to.
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