The intensity of two boys' feelings for each other threatens to be overwhelmed by family tensions that rip them apart before their relationship even starts. Mateo's father is overly obsessed with his fifteen-year-old son's baseball achievements to the exclusion of other interests (manga, indie rock music, and Stick—the boy from the "troubled" family down the street, the one with thirteen children of mixed races). Mateo's mother comes from a sprawling Puerto Rican family that provides little privacy and complicated support as Mateo and his father clash over a baseball injury that jeopardizes his season. Down the street, Stick is dealing with the sudden loss of his father and living up to an image he believes his father saw in himself, one that wasn't gay, which drives him to drink and do drugs beyond anything he and Mateo have experimented. They come together and fall apart. Like a mantra, Mateo repeats the words from one of the band's songs whenever he gets hurt or afraid: I WILL...

CYRUS AND JEFF ARE BEST FRIENDS. Like many best friends, Cyrus and Jeff start a garage band to escape their boring lives in their boring small town. With Cyrus on the drums and Jeff singing—or screaming—and playing guitar, they play hardcore music in a part of of central PA so removed from hardcore it has more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the country. At least that's what Cyrus was told. And the band is a place where Cy can be himself, not the quiet boy whose mother died in a car wreck three years ago. Not the cute boy no one in school knows is gay, the one asked out on a date by his classmate, Mindy. Just Cyrus and Jeff, the best friend he dreams about even though he knows he shouldn't. Even after a kiss in Cy's bedroom leaves him hoping for more. For Jeff, it's a way to channel his rage into music—rage at the father who abandoned him, the mother who has chosen his stepfather over him, and the stepfather who has chosen the righteousness of the backhand and the...