During the pandemic, while being quarantined with the rest of the world, I found myself unable to read or write much. Because of this, I, like many of us, slipped down the rabbit hole (or mudslide or goldmine or cesspool, depending on the day) of the internet. My questions were what my questions always seem to be — what are the kids up to these days? What about them is changing in this isolation? What creativity have they tapped into in order to feel less alone, and to feed their cyber addictions? On TikTok, as I fed my own, I noticed the weekly viral dance challenges but not much else. Not that there wasn’t more, but I had no idea how to access it because I’m clueless when it comes to actually working the application and platform. This, of course, is a severe flaw when it comes to the progression of my work, which is ironic because if I did know how to use TikTok better, it would then prove itself to be a severe flaw when it comes to the production of my work. So I turned to YouTube for more eavesdropping. Research, I’d like to call it. And what I found were a few different versions of a game teenagers were playing, age-old in its instructions but brand-new in its execution. At least, to me.

It was Truth or Dare. But in cars. And under the guise of a dating show. The host, no older than fifteen, sat in the back seat. The two contestants, who were somewhere around the same age and meeting for the first time, sat up front. The game went the way the game has always gone. The prompt of truth or dare? lobbed back and forth from contestant to contestant, until eventually the truths get stale because teenagers ain’t got but so much truth in them — especially in front of each other — though they’re full of dare. And full of hormonal fluctuation, therefore, full of curiosity.

I remember myself at this age, playing this game knowing that at any given moment I’d be challenged to ­embarrass myself, especially since everyone knows the point of it back then was to figure out how to get handsy with hands that never really felt like my own in those instances. How to kiss a girl I’d been too shy to approach outside of this controlled and contrived setting. How to push the boundary because the game demanded it. And I noticed while being a judgmental spectator of the ­2020-in-the-car-on-the-internet version that in the almost three decades since I’d played it, not much had changed. There were freebies, easy truths, and easy dares to slow-walk willing participants into the fire. And then there was fire. Every time. Always just before the videos would end. Fire in the form of the host cheekily denying the option for truth, and daring the two ­contestants to kiss.

Now, on the first one, the boy sat up, reached across the middle console, and grabbed the young lady by the jugular, pulling her toward him. Yes, he went for the jugular, not metaphorically, but physically gripping her neck as if it were a train pole. I was shocked, and immediately uncomfortable, but I figured it was just that boy. Just that video. So I skipped to the next one, watched it through only for it to end the exact same way. With a soft-­strangling kiss. So I went on to the next one, this time fast-forwarding to the last few minutes where I was met by another boy’s palm pressed against the windpipe of his ­j­­ust-met counterpart. And on to the next. And the next. And the next, each time, each boy conflating sexiness with choking, which made me afraid to think that they might be conflating ­sexuality with violence, despite consent. It seemed to me that there was some sort of unspoken consensus that this was the way a first kiss was supposed to be. That this was what it meant to act what my mother and aunties call mannish.

Photo: Adedayo “Dayo” Kosoko.

It made me think back to the moments of love I’d witnessed or experienced in my own young life. From watching my father kiss my mother gently whenever he entered the room, grazing against her almost as a reminder that he was there and an acknowledgment that she was too. To my early smooches in the backs of school buses and in basement corners of house parties. To the love songs blasting through car speakers, begging songs, courting songs, songs as soft as the scene they were trying to set.

This made me wonder what had changed. What had broken down. But because I work with young people and for young people, so much of my job is resisting the urge to believe that they exist in some sort of generational vacuum. That whoever they are and however they are just happened once they were born. As if they were products of a mass hatching gone awry, completely divorced from the generations before them. And because I push against that narrative as often as possible, I was forced to ask myself, what, besides inventing social media, did we do that might have been the cause of this? Though kids today have so much more information, so much more access and vocabulary to create cushioned corners for the uncared for, why has the jugular taken the place of the lower back? Why has a tender touch along the cheekbone been swapped for a clamped larynx?

And those questions begat other questions, some brand-new, others I’d been pondering for years. For instance, early in my career when I spent time with young men in juvenile detention centers, librarians would always tell me how the most checked-out books in each facility’s library weren’t mine, or those of anyone writing in this particular tradition (à la Walter Dean Myers) but, instead, romance novels. It was explained to me that this was because the incarcerated young men were living vicariously through the boys in those stories. That they wanted to believe the “bad” boy could still get the good girl and be loved. And it made me wonder why those young men might not have felt the same freedom to read those books outside of a carceral institution. Made me ponder what had tricked them, and continues to do so, into believing love stories aren’t for them?

Which leads me to another question. Why didn’t I ever have a Forever…? After I was interviewed for a documentary on the power of Judy Blume, it dawned on me that I’d never read Forever… despite how much I’d heard middle-aged women speak about it as if they were still sneak-reading it in middle school. The mythology around it, the whispers and blushing, pushed me toward it. And it blew me away, not only because of its boldness but also because I realized I’d never read this kind of story with me in mind. Which is to say, I’d never had the opportunity to get lost in a tale about a boy, in this case, a Black boy, and even more specifically, a heterosexual Black boy, trying to figure out how he felt about himself, sexually, let alone about another person. Why did there seem to be such a glaring dismissal?

Jason as a child. Photo courtesy of Jason Reynolds.

This led me to new questions, which happened to involve my old friends. Guys I’d known my whole life, but I realized there was a hole in our story map. Though we’d shared so much, we never spoke about our first times, and if we did, it was for a macho laugh between toasts. But we’d never actually dug into the emotional landscape of our teenaged selves, specifically as it pertained to this life-changing moment. And once I began to ask them, I also realized, based on their responses or non-responses, that not only had we never spoken about it, but that this was the first time this question had ever even been presented at all. To any of us. As if no one had ever even assumed there was an interior life to our boyhood sexuality. As if we’d become feral once we hit puberty, which is often how young men are described and treated. We’re to be warned against, weaponized, never seen as wonders within ourselves. And so, we never get to talk about it. We never get to feel less ashamed of the insecurity behind it all. The body image issues rooted in racist stereotypes and expectations for Black boys. The adultification so many of us experience. The access to pornography and the lack of access to anything that counters it. The sex talk, which for so many of us was rooted in either a religious fear or an economic one. Wait until marriage. Wear a condom. No means no. But nothing else. No talk of pleasure and tenderness. No talk of caring for self and the other person. No talk of exercising a full humanity, complete with emotional attachment to an intimate partner. No talk of enoughness, or how cool can be a cold prison. No talk of the way trapped tears create stones in the throat after a love is unrequited. No talk of being the little spoon, of wanting to be enraptured, of wanting to feel safe enough to allow a crush to crush the ego. And so, we then feel the need to don a brand of masculinity necessary to mask it all. It masks the shakiness with an overcompensation. It masks the curiosity with homophobia. It masks the fear of being seen as amateur with a grip around the neck of a first-time kisser.

See, I realize now that the point of that gesture is to serve as a symbol of knowingness. It’s meant to signal experience. Expertise. But I would argue, Twenty-Four Seconds from Now… is meant to rally on behalf of the amateur. It’s meant to scream that we should all remain amateurs as it pertains to our expressions of love. Not because it isn’t something we should learn, but because it’s something we should always be learning and always be allowed to learn. As a matter of fact, the root word of amateur is the Latin amare, which means to love. So I’d argue that to be in a constant state of learning, a non-mastery, is the best way to be loving. But one has to be given space to learn. And boys, Black boys, have seldom been given that opportunity.

* * *

This book is not in the front seat. It’s the host in the back. It’s not meant to reexamine the rules of the game, it’s just meant to ask for truer truths, and more daring dares. Let’s start with the dares. I dare you to tell the truth. Now, let’s start with the truth. The truth is, we love, have loved, want love but don’t always know what to do with our hands. Don’t always know how to uncurl them, how to let them hang at our sides, how to use them as evening breezes. The truth is we are afraid, have been afraid, will be afraid to learn that tenderness is not weakness, that tears are not surrender, and that surrendering is not always losing but learning that other people’s arms can be a fortress around us. That we can be held and held accountable at the same time. The truth is, we are human, and our sexual desires are human. They are not add-ons or mutations; they are part of what it means to have breath and breadth. It can be the best of the broken bread. And lastly, the truth is we have changed, we can change, and we are changing. Twenty-Four Seconds from Now… is hopefully a small glitch in the algorithm offering a simple assurance that we do not have to do so in isolation.

* * *

In this undated photo, Jason stands outside with his mother. Photo courtesy of Jason Reynolds.

I want to thank the CSK jury for this incredible award. I will never take for granted all that you, in different iterations, have done for me over the course of my career. This particular time is extra special because what it says to me is that we’re committed to our young people, even when it makes us uncomfortable. We’re committed to their holistic health, and a shameless future where they can be their whole, loving selves. So, thank you. I also want to thank Caitlyn Dlouhy and the whole Simon & Schuster team, as well as my agent, Elena Giovinazzo, for trusting me. Again. It’s amazing to have had such wonderful partners in this journey. I’d like to thank Judy Blume for her kindness and inspiration. And lastly, I have to thank my mother, for sitting me down at fifteen and telling me I was okay. And that it, all of it, was okay.

Jason Reynolds is the winner of the 2025 Coretta Scott King Author Award for Twenty-Four Seconds from Now: A Love Story, published by Caitlyn Dlouhy Books/Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. His acceptance speech was delivered at the annual conference of the American Library Association in Philadelphia on June 29, 2025. From the July/August 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: ALA Awards. For more speeches, profiles, and articles, click the tag ALA 2025.

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