Just Boys is a powerful coming of age story told by ‘Blue’, now twenty, who gives a no-holds barred account of how he survived a close friendship with two boys whose deviant ways knew no bounds.
Why would you read it?
For its highly visual, dramatic narrative that explores a beguiling and dangerously evolving teenage world virtually hidden from the adult world it runs parallel with.
Introduction
What starts as a typical story of boys struggling to get a steer on their hormones and the changing world they find themselves in slowly descends into a nightmarish account of kids committing sex crimes against other kids, of one boy’s sexual fantasies veering dangerously and, finally – fuelled by a cocktail of loneliness, pornography and parental neglect, fatally – out of control.
Synopsis
South London, 8 years ago, and ‘Blue’, a twelve year-old who spent most of his life growing up In New York, Texas and LA, is bored of his school and the people in it. Until, one day, a new boy turns up. Simon. Simon’s eccentric looks and unusual frankness appeal to Blue and they quickly become friends. They discover they share a passion for soccer.
Everything is on the up for Blue until one day, the two boys return home to Simon’s to discover Simon's mother dead on the kitchen floor. Nothing is the same ever again. Simon becomes withdrawn, difficult. He gets into trouble with the teachers. He gets into pornography and becomes possessed by his hormones.
The narrator is confused and disgusted and tries to distance himself from his friend. But Simon’s extreme character works a magnetic effect on him and the two go into business selling pornography outside the school. For a while it's just a business as far as the narrator is concerned, but then his hormones catch up with him and he begins to understand what all the fuss is about. With Simon's dad away a lot on business – or in hotels with lovers – following the of his wife, it's not long before Simon is drinking, growing cannabis in the back garden and watching porn films at home.
One afternoon Simon tempts the narrator back to his house with the promise of a girl who will have sex with him. The offer is none other than Simon's own sister, heavily sedated. She'll never know, Simon promises. But Simon has an ulterior motive: he bursts into the room clicking a camera the moment the narrator is done. Simon likes girls but he likes his 'best' friend better. He threatens to show the photos to the authorities unless the narrator agrees to be his sexual slave…
The stress of fulfilling sexual favours through blackmail finally breaks the narrator's health. When he returns to school eight months later, he returns a stranger. There is only one boy who shows any kind interest in him, and that’s Nick.
Nick is a new boy. Like Simon he is nearly a year older than the narrator and offers a new beginning. He looks like a monkey and plays up like one too. He is the catalyst Blue needs to find the will to throw to throw off his cloak of convalescence and get back to living life to the full.
But there's a catch: though apparently free of obsessions with sex, Nick is just as manipulative as Simon – he has had to be to survive the turmoil of his own dysfunctional family. To complicate matters, it turns out that Nick's older sister is going out with Simon… As the narrator's history with Simon catches up with him, infecting his relationship with the whole of Nick's family, the fates of all three boys converge on a course of death and destruction… ending in a spectacular shoot out with an air rifle in Simon’s garden.
Download the first the 3 chapters of Just Boys.