Excerpt from The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My father was watching me through jaundiced eyes.

"I've been busy with friends," I said. "One of us still has them."

He laughed, holding up his hands to signal surrender. "Hey, it's no skin off my back if you turn out mean."

Standing this close to his face, I could smell the dimethyl sulfide in his breath mixing badly with the modified starch of his breakfast. This was portal hypertension—the pressure building in his veins, the stink of his diseased body. The same thiols in a skunk's spray were gathering in my dad's lungs, bubbling to the surface like swamp gas. There's a name for this odor—this sulfurous, rotten-egg smell. They call it the breath of the dead.

I left without saying goodbye and ran out the door to find Emmett waiting in his beat-up station wagon. He'd spent the previous afternoon polishing the hatchback as if it were some vintage muscle car, and the tan paint glistened under the sun like wet skin. He revved the engine, and the feeble sound was still loud enough to chase the sandpipers out of the bird feeder.

* * *

My mother once told me that a flock of sandpipers is known as a contradiction. A contradiction of sandpipers. She had always been a bird person. She worked part-time at a youth reform camp in far-northern Maine, just outside our hometown of Winterville, leading hiking and bird-watching tours for the crazy, messed-up boys who dealt drugs or did drugs or called in bomb threats to their schools. When I was little, I hated thinking of her being around those kids. Another youth camp was along the bus route to my elementary school, this one to help little gay boys turn straight. Confronted by the sight of it every morning and every afternoon, I hardened myself against the possibility of change in people. It was self-preservation—I knew I was just like them. If I couldn't change, how would my mother's troubled boys? They were dangerous, plain and simple, and trying to help them would only cause her pain.

* * *

At school, Emmett disappeared to find his theater club friends, but I went straight to Mr. Foster's homeroom, as though going there early would make time move faster. I wanted desperately to see Sammy, but I would have to wait until I could steal a few minutes before first-period English. I told myself to be patient, but our secret was a firework inside me, already lit.

I squirmed in my seat within seconds of sitting down. When I first moved to Littlefield, we only went to homeroom to get our report cards, but after the Virginia Tech massacre we spent half an hour there each morning. We'd sit in a circle and talk about the Issue of the Day. Usually it was something benign—the dangers of sex, the dangers of soda—but we knew the deal: our teachers were keeping tabs, monitoring our mental health for signs of violence. We conspired against this system like criminals trying to pass a polygraph. Relax, we'd tell each other. Say a little, but not a lot. It's normal to be sad; it's abnormal to be very sad. Feel, but do not feel strongly. This was the language of a sound mind: the elimination of adverbs.

The small details of that room have stayed with me: an enormous snake plant in the northwest corner, just under the window and the light of the sun; on the ceiling, a brown water stain in the shape of Australia. Littlefield was bursting with money from summer tourism, but all of the rich families sent their children to private school and then made it a kind of hobby to vote down the public school budget. As a result, LHS looked from the outside like an abandoned warehouse. My biology textbook that year was twice my age and had its own water stain bleeding through the inside cover. Someone had circled it with a Sharpie and provided a label: MR. HASKELL'S SEMEN.

Mr. Foster sat behind his desk, tapping his armrest with the eraser end of a no. 2 pencil. He was one of those thick, ruddy time-warp teachers. You could put him in any classroom in the twentieth century and he'd fit in fine: thin hair, the perfectly round belly of the perpetually seated. A fifty-pound mustache.

Excerpted from The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff. Copyright © 2019 by Jake Wolff. 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.