Excerpt from The Silence that Binds Us by Joanna Ho, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Tiya Marie Duverne and I have been best friends since seventh grade. We were partnered together for a project in social studies, and we did a dance routine about world religions. The rest is history. My mom loved Tiya because she earned excellent grades and ate everything Ma put on her plate. Her mom loved me for the same reasons. Turns out immigrant Haitian parents and immigrant Chinese parents aren't all that different.

Danny's phone vibrated again. He winked. "Marc says you should come too."

Tiya's brother Marc has been Danny's best friend since some basketball league in elementary school. They were the only kids of color, and they stuck together. Even though Danny was a year older than Marc, they were co-captains of Sequoia Park High School's basketball team, and they balled together almost every day. They were like a pair of broken-in basketball shoes: one didn't function without the other.

I shrugged. "Do you want me to go? I'll go if you want me to. Or you could stay home and we can eat a crap ton of ice cream and trash-talk Stanford all night."

"You're no fun at parties unless you're in the mood. I don't wanna babysit your grumpy butt all night." Danny threw up a couple peace signs and smiled at me before heading back to his room. "Let's do ice cream and trash-talking tomorrow."

Alone again, I flopped back into bed with my arms and legs out like I was about to make a snow angel on the comforter. I lay still, then I grabbed my journal again and started scribbling. Writing helps me process the mess inside my head. Somehow ideas come more easily, more clearly through my fingers than they do through my mouth.

I heard Danny rustling around, and he stopped by my room one more time before he left. He was wearing jeans and a plain white T-shirt, and I could see his Star Wars socks peeking out over his shoes when he moved.

He had on his KT3s, which was a little strange because he usually only wore them for basketball. They were blinding white; I bet he'd cleaned them for the party.

On his eighteenth birthday, Danny jumped and screamed like a banshee when he saw the KT3 box underneath the blue-and-gold Warriors wrapping paper I'd picked out. Klay Thompson's Anta basketball shoes were all he wanted on his big day, so I saved money to get them. Most of the time, he kept the shoes in their box in his car, ready to ball anytime, anywhere. Tonight he held the shoebox in his right hand—probably to put it back in his trunk—and a jacket hung over his wrist.

"Ooooh," I whispered. "I'm going to tell Mooooom. You're wearing shoes in the house. You're gonna be in big trouble."

"What she doesn't know won't hurt her, May-May." He grinned as he did one of his fast-feet basketball drills in my room. I threw a pillow at him.

He stepped toward my bed and tripped over a shoe in the middle of my room.

"May-May," he said, shaking his head. "You gotta get a handle on your closet."

"Go ahead and handle it for me," I said as I threw another pillow at him. He got on his hands and knees and started shoveling clothes into the closet corner where things end up when I don't feel like cleaning. Which is all the time. He set the offending shoe on top of the big pile and dusted off his hands.

"The things I do for you ... ," he mumbled as he came over and squeezed me hard.

"You sure you don't just want to hang with me here? I can think of other things for you to clean, you know."

"Nah, I'm good."

"We could watch Star Wars ... ," I said in my best tempting voice, but he just laughed and mussed up my hair. I wanted him to stay, but it was like trying to hold on to a cloud, its wispy mist slipping softly through my fingers. He slung his jacket back over his arm as he turned to go. He paused, then came back and planted a kiss on my forehead. "I love you, May-May," he said. He looked me in the eye and held my gaze with his off-center dimple and sideways smile.

Excerpted from The Silence that Binds Us by Joanna Ho. Copyright © 2022 by Joanna Ho. Excerpted by permission of HarperTeen. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.