Freaks Like Us (review)

Narrator Jason Milwaukee and his only friends, Sunshine and Drip, huddle together in a tight pack. Special ed students who are labeled at school with the initials of their psycho-social disorders and kept apart from the mainstream, they refer to themselves as "Alphabets" or "short bus kids." They are the first to be suspected and the last to be believed when things go wrong, and things have gone terribly wrong: Sunshine got off the school bus, said good-bye to Jason, and never showed up at home. Jason's military mom pulls strings to get an FBI investigation underway with astonishing speed, but it's Jason who promptly comes under the scrutiny of the lead investigator, Agent Mercer. Told that the first twenty-four hours after a disappearance are of critical importance, Jason and Drip join forces to elude Mercer's attention and pursue some hunches of their own. It's an uphill battle, though, between Mercer's bullish interrogations and a brutal beating by a set of bullies that had been harassing Sunshine. Readers may figure out the mystery well in advance of the conclusion, but that should not diminish the pleasure of the race-against-time plotting that drives the tense, first-person narration as schizophrenic Jason tries to keep focused on the mission while reasoning with the voices inside his head.