Jeremiah Reskin has big plans for tenth grade—he wants to make some friends and he wants to take a girl’s shirt off. It’s not going too well at first, but when he meets a group of semibohemian outcasts, things start to change. Soon he’s negotiating his way through group back rubs and trying to find the courage to make a move on Renee Shopmaker, the hottest girl in school. At the behest of his composition teacher, Jeremy’s also chronicling everything in his own novel—a disastrously ungrammatical but unflinching look at sophomore year.

From the Hardcover edition.