Overview

Sophomore year at Westborough High begins the way hallways begin: with floor wax and the illusion that summer has not changed anyone. Ares Taler carries a notebook, a pencil behind his ear, and a secret in his bones. He watches. He catalogues. He writes columns for the Krugerand, the school newspaper published under the advisorship of Mr. Jace Canterbilly, a man whose relationship to the English language is adversarial, affectionate, and conducted over glazed donuts. Ares does not yet know that the thing wrong with his body is the same thing wrong with his brother Puck's body, inherited through a maternal line that keeps its appointments in a drawer. Crew Smith kicked a forty-yard field goal to beat Southwedge and lost his ankle to Big Emmet Mills 1.7 seconds later. He wears a plaster cast with a comet drawn on it in felt-tip. He is in love with Katie Albertson, who laughs with her whole face and is moving to Ohio after Christmas. Eleven days is not nothing. Stan Harrison drinks cherry vodka from a Thermos labeled WORLD'S GREATEST DAD, two ounces at a time, on a schedule calibrated to make the world's frequency bearable. His supplier is Mike Redson. His reason is a stuffed mouse named Dayrl that he lost in the mud at nine years old and found again and put in a drawer where the dark could keep it. His recovery begins in Canterbilly's Saturday office with two words: I drink. Andy Harper arrived from Wisconsin three weeks into the school year with a half-full notebook and the ability to read rooms the way a point guard reads a court. He declined the vodka in the darkroom. He fell in love with Julie Taler on a front stoop. His brother Craig calls on Saturdays for advice about a girl named Debbie whose freckles he has memorized. Daniel Bergman was bullied by Mike Redson for fifteen months. In December, he brought a .22 caliber revolver to school in a brown paper lunch bag. The gun fired in the east corridor. The bullet hit a locker. Nobody died. He went to the Kerway Institute for six months and came back as Daniel, not Bergie. His first column for the reinstated Krugerand was published under the word ""transformation."" Canterbilly's grandfather clock stops at 11:47 in January. The seven-month clause suspends his editorship. His departure from Westborough is not for the reason the school believes. The reason is his heart, the physical organ, the muscle that is failing, and the failing takes him to a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he shares Room 412 with a student he did not expect to see again. A Farewell to Shins is the second volume of The Westborough Crusaders, a trilogy that began as an eight-episode television series written by David Boles as a sophomore in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1982. Two episodes were filmed the following summer and won a Cable ACE award. Forty years later, the series becomes a novel. The feelings are not fictional.

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