The Westborough Crusaders · Book One
The Year Before the Wire
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About This Book
What do you have to lose before you become the person you are going to be?
The summer before freshman year at Westborough High, the lives that will collide in the Krugerand journalism room are scattered across separate orbits. Ares Taler is a tight end on the junior high football team, best friends with quarterback Keithe Williams, with no idea that he will quit the sport before high school begins. Stan Harrison is Julie Taler's boyfriend, a fixture in the Taler household, loved by the family like a fourth sibling. Crewly Smith does not yet exist in Westborough; he is in Florida, about to be uprooted by his family's relocation. And Jace Canterbilly, the journalism teacher who will become the moral center of all their lives, is winding his grandfather clock in a house where the food is already running low and the loneliness is already settling in.
The Year Before the Wire traces the academic year from the summer before freshman year through the end of that first year, documenting how each character arrived at the first day of sophomore year already transformed by loss. Ares quit football. Stan lost his sobriety. Bergie lost his safety. Puck lost his health without knowing it. Canterbilly lost his wife, or his hope for one, or whatever it was that made him fake an engagement to a woman named Nancy. This is the story of how these people found each other, what they were before they became the versions of themselves the series knows, and what was lost in the becoming.
The World Before
The early 1980s. A small-to-mid-size Midwestern city. No cell phones, no internet, no social media. Communication happens through landlines, face-to-face conversation, handwritten letters, and the school newspaper. Music is on the radio and on vinyl. Cars are American-made and unreliable. Television has three networks. The Cold War is ongoing. Reagan is president. The war on drugs is escalating but has not yet reached the saturation of the late 1980s. School shootings are not yet a national conversation.
Into this world walks a group of teenagers who will, over the next two years, build something the adults around them cannot see: a civilization made of loyalty, humor, and the refusal to look away from each other's wounds. But before they can build it, they have to lose the things that made them who they were. Book One is the record of those losses.
The Characters
Ares Taler moves from athlete to writer, from Keithe's best friend to Crew's best friend, from a boy who processes the world through his body to a boy who processes it through language. The arc is not triumphant; it is a series of losses that produce a talent, and the talent is its own kind of wound.
Crewly "Crew" Smith arrives from Florida in orange overalls, a green shirt, and red sunglasses. His arc in Book One is the simplest and the most joyful: he finds his person. The complication is that his person is Ares, who is carrying more than Crew can see.
Stan Harrison slides from Julie's boyfriend to Mike's drinking partner. The slow, undramatic descent from social drinking to dependency, told without melodrama and without the clean narrative of a cautionary tale. Stan's arc is the most painful because it is the most ordinary.
Julie Taler decides to stop managing Stan's decline and start managing her own life. She changes her perfume. It is the smallest possible act of self-determination, and it is everything.
Puck Taler moves from eccentric brother to dying brother. His arc is hidden from most of the other characters. He knows before they do, and his response is to become more Puck: louder, funnier, more present, as if being maximally alive is the only treatment he trusts.
Bergie Bergman transfers to Westborough hoping for a fresh start and discovers that the predators at the new school are worse than the ones he left. The accumulation of abuse that will produce the gun in Book Two begins here, relentlessly, in the hallways and bathrooms and on the walk home.
Jace Canterbilly recognizes that Ares is the student he has been waiting for, and the corresponding recognition that the student he has been waiting for is also the student most likely to be destroyed by the very talent Canterbilly is cultivating.
About the Series
The Westborough Crusaders is a Young Adult trilogy rooted in the eight-episode television series David Boles wrote in 1982, at sixteen. Two episodes were produced for Cablevision, shot on location in Lincoln, Nebraska, and won a Cable ACE Award. The trilogy expands that compressed dramatic material into a Before, During, and After structure: The Year Before the Wire traces the year before the series begins; A Farewell to Shins novelizes the eight episodes with full interior life; and The Stopped Clock follows the characters beyond the series finale into the territory of consequence, recovery, and the kind of growing up that nobody teaches you how to do.
Visit the series landing page for the complete episode archive, video episodes, and author interview.
About the Author
David Boles wrote the original Westborough Crusaders television scripts at sixteen, produced two episodes for Cablevision that won a Cable ACE Award, and spent over four decades with these characters before giving them the novels they demanded. He holds an MFA from Columbia University. He has studied medicine and law, not because he wanted to practice either, but because understanding how bodies break and how systems argue seemed prerequisite to writing about human beings with any seriousness.
He is the author of the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, Beautiful Numbness, Passage Land, and Touching Everything, Holding Nothing. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at PrairieVoice.com, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.
He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City.
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See Also
A Farewell to Shins (Book Two) · The Stopped Clock (Book Three) · EleMenTs Trilogy · Fractional Fiction Series · About David Boles