Denver, Colorado. August 1989.
Harrison Lennox has learned to make himself invisible. Behind his glasses and his Discman, beneath the weight of borrowed library books and comic book stacks, he has built a quiet world just large enough for one - because the world outside has never had much room for boys like him. They call him nerd. They call him other things too, things he refuses to let land. He counts the days until graduation like a prisoner marking walls.
Scott Miller has everything Harrison doesn't: the varsity jacket, the easy smile, the kind of face that stops a room. But popularity is its own kind of loneliness, and Scott is tired of being wanted for the wrong reasons by the wrong people. He wants someone real. He just never expected to find it here - or in him.
When fate and an algebra class throw them together, what begins as an unlikely friendship becomes something neither of them has words for. Something quiet and electric, built from late-night phone calls, comic book stores, and the terrifying discovery that maybe - just maybe - you are exactly who you've been afraid to be.
But Denver in 1989 is not a forgiving place. And the people closest to them are not as harmless as they seem.
Boys Like Us is a story about first love and the violence it can survive - and the violence it sometimes cannot.