On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD: A Novella

Winner of The 2024 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Selected by Steven Dunn

When his son uncovers a Weezer CD at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cody Taitano recalls his first job at McDonald's during his senior year of high school. Back in 1999, he is a quiet kid desperate to make friends. His classmates, though, see nothing about him worth knowing, and his own family often leave him to figure out his problems for himself. Cody's life is disrupted when, while he bikes home from work, the police mistake him for the only other brown kid at his school. This brief encounter with the cops highlights the complex intertwined relationship between race and class Cody struggled with growing up and prompts him to ruminate on all the ways that people can make themselves responsible for each other--both as high school friends and as parents during a global pandemic.