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A Boy Called Trevor

A Boy Called Trevor is an in-progress companion novel in the Faultlines series. Its two point-of-view characters are Travis Yoon, a Korean American violinist and composer, and Ezra Cruz, a Puerto Rican trumpeter and model. Assigned to share a room at Juilliard, they learn to recognize one another beyond the quietness and public confidence that first shape their impressions. The book follows their friendship, romance, Travis’s leukemia treatment, and Ezra’s effort to preserve Travis’s music after his death.

Synopsis

In July 2024, Travis waits for his Juilliard housing assignment while friends at The 146th Street House continue offering him an empty bedroom. He trusts an invitation for one night more readily than a permanent place. Ezra, preparing to leave Miami for his first year at Juilliard, is already known for his trumpet playing, modeling work, and conspicuous confidence. His father Rafael’s death remains close beneath the version of himself he lets other people see. Travis studies the photograph in his roommate assignment; Ezra overlooks the email and arrives in New York knowing almost nothing about the person who will share his room.

Ezra calls Travis “Trevor” for nine weeks. Travis hears the mistake each time but does not insist that Ezra correct it. They nevertheless begin caring for each other in small ways: Travis orders Friday pizza, keeps ginger ale Ezra likes, and notices when he needs quiet; Ezra begins paying attention to Travis’s glasses, music, food, and fatigue. Their shared room becomes a place where Travis sees Ezra without his usual performance and Ezra gradually learns how much Travis has kept to himself.

Travis has been managing bruises, bone pain, nausea, cold, and deepening exhaustion without understanding that the symptoms belong to one illness. Ezra notices many of them but cannot name the pattern. After Travis’s fall jury in December, he becomes acutely ill and is diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The diagnosis changes their daily life and brings Travis’s family to New York. During induction treatment, fatigue and tremor interfere with his ability to put the music he hears onto the page. Ezra learns to enter notation into Travis’s software as Travis describes and corrects each part. Travis remains the composer and final authority over the work; their collaboration gives him a way to continue it when his hands cannot keep pace.

Travis tells Ezra that he fears disappearing and reminds him of the nine weeks he was called Trevor. Ezra begins using his correct name with deliberate care. Their attachment develops alongside treatment rather than beginning with it. Travis’s dry humor, exacting musical judgment, friendships, family relationships, attraction, and wish for an ordinary future remain part of his life even when illness controls much of his schedule.

In February 2025, Travis is well enough to leave the New York hospital and continue treatment near his family in Evanston, Illinois. Ezra returns to Juilliard, but their relationship continues through calls, visits, and shared work on Travis’s compositions. By summer, Ezra is part of the Yoon household and the relationship is openly romantic. On a day when they are still making plans together, he has three measures of Travis’s music tattooed around his wrist. Travis recognizes the phrase as a promise made while he is alive, and the two continue writing the music that follows it.

The leukemia relapses, and further treatment fails. Travis asks to go home rather than die in the hospital. He remains frightened and angry about the life with Ezra and his family that he wants to keep living. During his final decline, Ezra asks for another attempt at hospital treatment; the Yoon family holds to Travis’s stated wish to remain home. Travis dies there in August 2025, with his family and Ezra present.

After Travis’s death, Ezra works with the Yoon family to preserve his scores, handwritten pages, completed compositions, and unfinished fragments without inventing endings for them. A later tattoo incorporates a capital T in Travis’s own handwriting. The novel closes with Ezra organizing and backing up the music under Travis Yoon’s correct name and promising that the album Travis envisioned will be heard. The album’s eventual release through Fifth Bar Collective belongs to the future beyond the book’s ending.

At a Glance

  • Timeline: July 2024 through the aftermath of Travis’s death in August 2025
  • Form: a companion novel outside the numbered main-series sequence, with Travis and Ezra as equal co-protagonists
  • Central locations: Juilliard and its Meredith Willson residence hall in New York; Travis’s family home in Evanston
  • Key events: the nine weeks of misnaming; Travis’s December leukemia diagnosis; induction and the composition scribe sessions; the spring separation and summer together in Evanston; Travis’s death; the final music archive
  • Ending: Ezra preserves Travis’s completed and unfinished work under the name Travis Yoon

Useful For Narrators

Travis and Ezra each narrate from knowledge the other does not have. Travis notices other people’s needs and the separate voices in a score while minimizing the disruption he believes his own needs cause. His quietness does not make him solemn, passive, or less authoritative about his music, and worsening illness does not remove his point of view. Ezra’s public confidence, humor, vanity, and musical skill are real parts of him; they also give him ways to keep grief out of reach. His attention to Travis grows more precise before he understands the illness, and his fear often reaches his speech as anger. Their care remains reciprocal even when treatment makes their physical capacities unequal.

Site Note

This page describes an in-progress companion novel. Its place in the publication sequence relative to the numbered main-series books has not been set. Drafting files and the Arc Map live outside the published site.