At Idlewild, a tiny Quaker prep school in Manhattan, there are no grades, no last names—just art, angst, and twenty minutes of daily silence. It’s here, on the morning of 9/11, that two queer teen outcasts forge an intense, all-consuming friendship.
Fay is sharp, elusive, and obsessed with gay men. Nell is sensitive, awkward, and obsessed with Fay. United by their outsider status and their homoerotic interpretations of the world, they form the Invert Society and spiral into a private world of coded glances, backstage drama, and increasingly dangerous choices.
Years later, estranged and haunted, Fay and Nell look back on that year—the fanfics, the betrayals, the fall.
Darkly funny and devastatingly sharp, Idlewild is a queer, trans, early-Internet Manhattan prep school novel like no other.
