WHENEVER YOU ARE

A teenager at the end of his incarceration in juvenile detention recounts the story of his best friend, who disappeared from solitary confinement.

Shortly after Finnegan Kelly’s arrival at a youth correctional facility, he and Clemence Todd are both placed in “administrative segregation”: Clem for speaking up for his classmates, Finn for making a correctional officer uncomfortable. Clem observes, “You don’t do anything unexpected. / You don’t be tall and big. / You don’t do anything tall or big.” When the boys are released from their cells for yard time, they’re only allowed to socialize with one another. Finn, who’s been ill since he came to the facility, tells Clem that he’s found a wormhole in his cell and that he plans to travel back in time and undo the action he regrets most—and then he vanishes, leaving Clem to be questioned by a panel of adults, some well-meaning, some hostile. Clem is a poet who narrates the past in spare, thoughtful verse while conversing with the interrogating adults in present-tense prose. Leavitt accentuates the small scale—two friends, a tiny patch of sky, a notebook, a ribbon, a dog—vividly rendering compact spaces, particularly in the verse passages. Readers are left to weigh little details as evidence for or against Finn’s claims, and though the scales tip slightly to one side, the circumstances remain refreshingly ambiguous. The boys read white.

A beautifully wrought examination of life’s gray areas and the bonds that guide us through them.