Grades 7+
432 pages
Elisha Goldstein is your average teenage boy. All he wants to do is save up for the down payment on his top surgery, and what better way to do that than the summer job of his dreams: working at The Nuclear Seasons Experience, a museum dedicated to the 80’s TV show he’s obsessed with?
There’s only one thing standing in his way: Efraín Juarez Reyna. He’s the ADHD to Eli’s autism. The “5 minutes late” to Eli’s “15 minutes early”. The “tall and ridiculously handsome” to Eli’s “short and barely passing”, the “passionate firebrand with a thousand hills to die on” to Eli’s “just trying to survive”.
They’ve been academic rivals since grade school, and as far as Eli knows, Efraín hasn’t even watched Nuclear Seasons. So why does he end up working the same job as Eli? And why does perpetually late Efraín have to risk Eli’s perfect attendance by joining his carpool group?? And WHY does Efraín have to start stirring up trouble with management on their very first day?!?!
But maybe Efraín has a point. Maybe the dress code is more than just a simple set of rules, especially when it goes from “no unnatural hair colors” to Eli’s pronoun button getting banned for being “political speech”. Their older coworkers must find sneaky ways to hydrate to get around the water bottle ban, and struggle with being on their feet all day without stools to sit on. And Eli keeps getting misgendered, by coworkers and the public alike.
Eli desperately tries to solve his own problems—to do the right thing, and do it the right way—but he’s getting nowhere by himself. The Nuclear Seasons Experience is nothing like he imagined, now that he’s seeing The Man™ behind the curtain. But then he finds himself roped into Efraín’s “baby socialist fight club”: a burgeoning labor union. And where before, he got stonewalled left and right, now, with the solidarity of his friends and fellow workers behind him, things start changing for the better. Maybe stirring up some good trouble isn’t so bad, after all.
Yet he can’t shake his anxiety. Efraín is willing to risk it all for his (many) causes, but Eli has a lot more to lose. If he loses this job, he loses his best shot at top surgery before he leaves for college next year. Who knows if it’ll even still be legal by then? But there’s no sitting this fight out, because there’s no such thing as an innocent bystander: in the union, an injury to one is an injury to all. There’s nothing for it.
Be gay, do crime. Be trans… do organized crime.
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Every month the SCCLD Teen Librarians choose one book as a great read from the library's Teen collection. This is the list of the latest picks of the month.
