Excerpt from The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

RJ slid into the desk next to mine. He was my closest friend—my only friend if you disqualified Emmett for being family. Like all of my classmates, RJ was older than me, and you could see this difference in the way he carried himself. He was not classically good-looking, but I always liked looking at him: his face had a strong, narrow shape and an evenness of expression that I found reassuring. He was difficult to surprise.

RJ's family had moved to Littlefield from France—he was the only black kid in our school. Sophomore year, he was joined briefly by an Ethiopian boy who could swear in eight languages. I heard the boy's father was some sort of prince, or war criminal, or spy. Whatever he was, he moved his son to private school before the end of the first semester. RJ's family had money, too. His dad worked in pharmaceuticals for a company that manufactured the stupidest drugs: one that made your eyelashes thicker, one that made your knees smoother and sometimes, as a side effect, triggered spontaneous orgasms. But I remember RJ's father arguing with his mother, a retired catalog model, about the value of a public school education.

"You spend your whole life in public," his dad said. "Better to start early. Private school is for assholes."

RJ's mom shook a carton of orange juice. "Have you seen their textbooks?"

We'd met in eighth grade after being paired together in Home Economics. We baked brownies and wrote a children's book together for our final project. It was a little domestic partnership, and I was so, so in love with him. But RJ thought about nothing but girls.

"Who's hotter," he once asked, "Bryce or Amanda?"

I shrugged, my brow furrowed. "It's too hard to say."

He nodded gravely. I'd spoken a deep truth.

For the first year of our friendship he was clueless about my sexuality. He forced me to join the baseball team, taught me to spit the juice of my shredded bubble gum in a long, masculine stream. At the end of freshman year, we were hooked on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One night when we came to the scene where Frank-N-Furter fucks Brad on a canopied bed, RJ nudged me and pointed at the screen. "That's you, right?"

I froze. I had an erection, and it made lying seem impossible. "That's not me. That's Tim Curry."

RJ snorted. "No crap it is. I mean, you'd do it with a guy."

"I'm not doing it with anyone. Ever." I stared straight ahead.

"I don't care," RJ said. "My sister said you were gay and that I should talk to you about it because gay people need lots of support."

Excerpted from The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff. Copyright © 2019 by Jake Wolff. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.