The story begins with a few girls gossiping in a school restroom. The subject of the gossip is the narrator/protagonist Jack Rothman. The topic of the conversation is an alleged gay orgy involving Jack which supposedly took place in the home of a mutual female friend named Hannah. This short prefatory section before Chapter 1 is told almost entirely in dialogue which was overheard by Jack through a vent; a penetration piercing the veil of solitude that apparently none of the girls who use the bathroom know about.
Chapter 1 begins the first-person narration of Jack who after informing the reader of the flaw in the privacy system of bathroom gossip then proceeds to tell what really happened that night. And, it turns out, the truth was much—much—tamer: nobody was even naked, much less having indiscriminate sex with each other. Jack goes on to explain that this is the story of his life, pretty much. While far from a virgin, his reputation as the school’s most active homosexual student is based mainly upon the depositions of witnesses who were of REO Speedwagon variety: they heard it from a friend who heard from who heard from another person who was actually there.
Nevertheless, Jack enjoys his reputation and is in no hurry to alter the legend to fit the facts. After all, it his legendary sexual adventures which lead directly to becoming the guest columnist on a friend’s blog who offers sex advice to, well, pretty much everybody who has a question. He becomes Jack of Hearts to whom the letters are addressed from writers hiding behind the anonymity of such names as “Bad BJ Breakup” and “Bottom Curious”.
A good chunk of the novel—though not an excessive amount—is thus given over to the content of the letters addressed to Jack of Hearts as well as the answers they received. It is this portion of the book which has been especially targeted for outrage by those taking action to have the book removed from libraries or banned outright. The reply to “Bottom Curious” for example is, like most of the other replies, a full three pages of non-censored—though not hardly pornographic—advice about anal sex. The actual level of explicit sexuality varies from one response to the other based upon the topic, but the point is that the topics are discussed in a frank and open manner by a high school student and that is a fact bound to rile a great many people up. At the same time, the advice that Jack gives is straightforward and sincere: he is not using the column to score points for humor or to insult the writers. So while many can be expected to be offended, many will also find the advice genuinely useful in real life.
There really is not much plot to the book and none of it comes directly from the advice column. Extremely early in the book—Chapter 1, to be precise—Jack finds a note stuck into his locker that simply reads “You are so cute. ♥” Thinking one of the boys in school has a secret crush on him, he doesn’t really give it much more thought. A second note commenting on how he was watched while sharing the note with his friends and ending with the desired wish for Jack to come home with the writer that night makes him feel a bit “nauseous.” A third note which is still expressing the desires of a lover too shy to make a move moves Jack to tear the note up and drop the pieces to the floor like confetti. A fourth note makes Jack a little nervous because the writer was obviously at a party he had attended. It is still basically benign in its open expression of sexual desire, however. And then he gets an email demanding to know why he blocked the vents of his locker so the writer could no longer stick handwritten notes through them. The e-mail ends with a demand not to be treated with disrespect and a vague threat to show him what happens as a result of having done so.
The core of the conflict in the novel from that point is the intensifying alarm caused by the secret admirer who is transforming into outright menacing stalker. The root of the suspense lies in Jack’s attempts to discover the identity of person—beyond the nickname earned by an obsession with a certain color: Pinky—stalking him and threatening his friends and family. When the stalker is finally revealed, it comes as a complete surprise primarily because the objective does not seem entirely clear to anyone. Well, almost anyone. Upon hearing the identity of the stalker, one of Jack’s teachers remarks that the fault lies not just in that individual but in the heterocentric culture of the school. What the teacher doesn’t add—but which seems impossible to ignore—is that Jack’s own embrace of his legendary but semi-fictional status as the school’s gay stud might also have been a major contributing factor.
