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@daeus-lamb Young Matt is awesome, gotta agree with you there. He certainly has some deep-seated issues, but I can forgive a lot of them in an ignorant kid, bless his heart.

And I’ll definitely give you the bit with the fish, Daeus. That was certainly a time when he just wanted to help out. You’re right that he’s hypersensitive about people needing the basics of life and trying to help them, but the failure over all the years of them knowing each other to realize telling Jesse that he’d be happy to pay for a prom dress if she couldn’t afford one shows me he never gains a deeper understanding of her, or the maturity to let other people make their own choices in life.

Which is of course the core conflict of the book, but social incompetence doesn’t make me like older Matt in the slightest. Though I also can’t stand the same social awkwardness cringe in The Office, and that’s a super popular show, so maybe I’m just odd like that.

@befuddled_bookwyrm His parents telling him not to hang around them all summer was, to me, the most interesting part of the book, because it seemed like a real no-win situation. Practically speaking, his parents were absolutely right about bad influences and people coming and going all hours of the day. Jessie and Dickie are a couple of troublemakers with too much time on their hands, and them being bad influences to their sheltered little boi is a real potential problem.

But we also have sympathy for the troublemakers and know that they need a friend and that Matt needs friends in them. I find it interesting that, early on, Matt thinks about how his relationship with Jesse had always been a point of contention between him and his father, when even up to this point, as annoying as it might be to see his parents being like “hey how about you don’t hang around these kids too much despite them being the very first friends you’ve made here among a bunch of terrible other people,” they’re really being about as supportive as I could reasonably expect.