Excerpt from More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He's a guy of few words, which is why he's only my sort of best friend. A real best friend would use a lot of words to make you feel somewhat good about your life when you're thinking about ending it. Like I tried to. Instead, he distanced himself from me because he felt as if he had a duty to hang with the other black kids—which I thought and still think is bullshit.

I miss the time when we took full advantage of summer nights, ignoring curfew so we could lie down on the black mat of the jungle gym and talk about girls and futures too big for us—which always seemed like it might be okay, as long we were stuck here with each other. Now we come outside because of routine, not brotherhood.

It's just one more thing I have to pretend I'm okay with.

Home is a one-bedroom apartment for the four of us. I mean, three of us. Three.

I share the living room with Eric, who should be home any minute now from his shift at the used video game store on Third Avenue. He'll power on one of his two gaming consoles, chat with his online friends through a headset, and play until his team bows out around 4 a.m. I bet Mom will try and get him to apply to some colleges. I don't plan on sticking around for the argument.

There are stacks of unread comics on my side of the room. I bought a lot of them for cheap, like between seventy-five cents and two dollars at my favorite comic shop, without any real intention to read them from start to finish. I just like having a collection to show off whenever one of my more well-off friends comes over. I subscribed to one series, The Dark Alternates, when everyone got into it at school last year, but so far I've only gotten around to flipping through them to see if the artists have done anything interesting.

Whenever I really get into a book, I draw my favorite scenes inside them: in World War Z, I drew the Battle of Yonkers where zombies dominated; in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I drew the moment we meet the Headless Horseman because that was when I suddenly cared about an otherwise so-so ghost story; and, in Scorpius Hawthorne and the Convict of Abbadon—the third book in my favorite fantasy series about a demonic boy wizard—I drew the monstrous Abbadon being split into two from Scorpius's Sever Charm.

I haven't been drawing very much lately.

The shower always takes a few minutes to heat up so I turn it on and go check on my mom. I knock on her bedroom door, and she doesn't answer. The TV is on, though. When your only living parent isn't responding, you can't help but think of that time when your father was found dead in the bathtub—and the possibility that beyond your home's only bedroom door life as an orphan awaits you. So I go inside.

She's just waking up from her second nap of the day to an episode of Law & Order. "You okay, Mom?"

"I'm fine, my son." She rarely calls me Aaron or "my baby" anymore, and while I was never a fan of the latter, especially whenever my friends were around, at least it showed that there was life inside of her. Now she's just wiped.

Beside her is a half-eaten slice of pizza she asked me to get her from Yolanda's Pizzeria, the empty cup of coffee I brought her back from Joey's, and a couple of Leteo pamphlets she picked up on her own. She's always believed in the procedure, but that means nothing to me since she also believes in Santeria. She puts on her glasses, which conveniently hide the sunken lines around her eyes from her crazy work hours. She's a social worker at Washington Hospital five days a week, and spends four evenings handling meat at the supermarket for extra cash to keep this tiny roof over our heads.

"You didn't like the pizza? I can get you something else."

Mom ignores this. She gets out of bed, tugging at the collar of her sister's hand-me-down shirt she recently lost enough weight to fit into because of her "Poverty Diet," and hugs me harder than she has since Dad died. "I wish there was something else we could've done."

Excerpted from More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera. Copyright © 2015 by Adam Silvera. Excerpted by permission of Soho Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.