Excerpt from Spare Parts by Joshua Davis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With little choice, Lorenzo decided to embrace the fact that he was different. While the other kids at school had short hair and nice fades, Lorenzo went the other way. His mother cut his hair—they couldn't afford a barber—so he asked her to only trim his bangs and let the rest of his hair grow out. Soon, he had a mullet.

"It looks really nice," Laura told her son.

His classmates were less supportive; the ridicule was frequent and varied. Sometimes they called him an egghead; other times, he was referred to as El Buki, after a long-haired Mexican pop singer. When students called him a woman, he fired back that he was more of a man because he could take all the insults. "I don't want to be like everyone else!" he yelled back, and tried to pretend it didn't hurt.

In seventh grade, a friend asked him to carry marijuana for Sur Trece, a local gang associated with the Crips. He agreed and was entrusted with a pound of weed, which he stashed in his backpack. Eventually, he was instructed to leave it in a hole on school grounds. He did as he was told but was terrified the whole time. "I could get my ass kicked at any moment," he kept thinking. He realized he wasn't cut out to be a criminal and refused to do it again.

Instead, when he arrived as a freshman at Carl Hayden Community High School, he decided to join the marching band. To prepare him, his mother found a piano program offered by the Salvation Army and managed to get a free upright piano (though it was missing a number of keys). She set it up on the back patio so he could practice. Lorenzo learned how to play pieces by Debussy ("Clair de lune"), Erik Satie (Gymnopédie no. 3), and Chopin (Sonata no. 2). Lorenzo could listen to the music a few times and then play it back. He figured he was learning enough that he could wing it at band practice.

Unfortunately, band practice is not a place where winging it works. The first problem was that the band had no piano. The closest thing the music teacher could come up with was the xylophone. Next, Lorenzo had no idea what to play since he couldn't read the sheet music.

Nonetheless, as Christmas neared, the teacher handed him a uniform and hat and told him to get ready for the annual holiday parade. Lorenzo dutifully donned the outfit, strapped the hulking xylophone to his body, and marched alongside the rest of the band as they paraded down Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix. He knew the songs they were performing had big parts for the xylophone, but he couldn't play them. Every now and then he would try to hit a few notes, but they were always wrong. As the parade streamed endlessly through downtown Phoenix, he kept wondering when the humiliation would be over. The best he could do was keep his legs in time with the others as they walked.

"It was a walk of shame," he says.

He returned the xylophone and never went back to band. He felt that he didn't belong anywhere, though he was desperate to find friends, or at least people who wouldn't mock him. But it was high school and he looked funny. He had also been held back a year in first grade when he was still learning English. As a result, he was a year older than his classmates, which suggested he had flunked a grade.

Lorenzo tried to reason with his hecklers. When he mispronounced a word in English and kids laughed, he pleaded for some sympathy: "Why you gotta make fun of me for something I meant?" That only produced more laughter.

Lorenzo's anger mounted and he started picking fights at school. He ended up bruised, scraped, and in the principal's office. He was on track to be expelled. In an effort to turn him around, the school counselor assigned him to anger-management class. He learned that his anger was explosive, the most dangerous type. If he didn't rein it in, he would self-destruct. The counselor showed him how to calm himself by counting backward from ten. The problem was, he wasn't sure he wanted to calm himself. It was hard to ignore all the teasing.

Excerpted from Spare Parts by Lindsey Davis. Copyright © 2014 by Lindsey Davis. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.