A would-be lover boy can't tell the new boy how much he likes him - it's just easier to be unhappy. Sam skulks across the sidewalks of this hush-hush town, where he also holds out on his best friend - not a hint of the secret. The new boy flits around somewhere out there and Sam feels lost, unable to come clean - unless your best friend is the one that you're supposed to tell this stuff to.

The things you would never say - those are the things one boy decides to sling unguarded when his emotions have blown up on him. Rusty picks a boy on the uncaring sidewalks of November to unload his feelings on, all his frustration over boys that don't like him back. The boy he calls out is going to get a full dose of just how broken Rusty is.

A shy boy fears that he won't make a friend, but then he does, unless the other boy is only acting. The street theater game the kids are playing swallows up everything on the avenue, from what is real to what is not. Oz can only hope that the boy he likes is for real, or else love tells the biggest lie of all.

A 21-year-old guy goes in search of a better ending for his story, an ending that never comes. You can't change a story that's already done but he can't stop thinking about it. Things ended badly with the stranger he met in Salt Lake City and he searches for a way to change the past or find out what exactly happened between the two of them - because it kills him the handsome stranger got away.

A good boy is off to a bad start in college, where he can't get to know anyone - he worries this is all going to turn out like high school did. He has changed his nickname since then to his more adult name, but he never remembers to use it; it just isn't him. One day in philosophy class, a boy that arrives late apparently has to take the first open chair, which is the one next to Kippie.

The new boy crashes the school's-out party of mid-June, where he feels the suspicious eyes of the 6th-grade boys upon him. Steen is afraid to talk to them but wants so bad for them to like him. Football, basketball, track & field - the playground sports throw him into a must-win situation: he either comes up big on a field day under a big American flag or else nobody wants you, not one other boy.

If one boy in these stories finds another boy to love, that's a bonus - because it's not a guarantee. The boys already have to deal with the uneasy fate of life after high school, the uncharted route they didn't see coming. Love only adds to the freight in these 4 novellas: I'm Not From Here, Your Nihilistic Tea House, If by Chance We Meet, A Particular Friendship.

From the steps of a moving train, a socially unskilled Dutch boy makes a friend on the platform. The first-time-ever connection stays with him. It means more to him than he can know, that he has joined the battle of his own emotional distance - just by being there one afternoon in Amsterdam, just by meeting a boy he won't forget.

There are more things to this picnic than the usual food and fun; there is the fact of not knowing what is going on. Clark, with a group from his high school, gets involved in an incident of affection with a guy he thought was a casual friend. The question at the beach when the fires start up is what everybody else thinks about what happened, or the question is only what Clark thinks.

When a surfer gets rescued in the California waves - a stranger carries him out - it could be the perfect start to a relationship for these sophomore boys. Each one desperately needs something from the other. For Alan that is one thing; for the stranger it's way more complicated, and Alan will have to puzzle his way in a very sweet relationship that he doesn't understand.