Independence & Adulthood
Leaving Redfield gives Bear freedom, but college also asks him to make adult decisions before he feels fully prepared to make them.
The Bear Houston Chronicles · Book Two
Freshman
Year
Bear finally has the freedom to become himself. Now he has to learn what that means.
Published · Available now
About the Book
A Bigger World
In the fall of 1994, Bear Houston leaves Redfield, Kansas, for Eastern Missouri University, ready to carve out a future that belongs to him. The former high school athlete is now an art major, hundreds of miles from the routines, expectations, and familiar faces that once defined his life.
College gives Bear room to experiment—with art, technology, friendship, independence, and life as an openly gay young man. But freedom does not arrive with an instruction manual. Classes challenge him, relationships change, and the uneasy first steps of adulthood repeatedly force him to ask whether everyone else understands the rules better than he does.
Through new friendships, creative ambitions, fraternity life, and the search for a place to belong, Bear begins to learn that identity is not only about where you come from. It is also about who you choose to become.
Inside Book Two
What Shapes the Year
Art & Identity
For the first time, Bear begins to imagine a future built around creativity rather than football. Art becomes both a career path and another language for understanding himself.
Friendship & Brotherhood
Alex, Chip, and the people Bear meets at EMU show him that belonging can be built through new friendships—and sometimes in places he never expected to look.
Change & Belonging
Bear discovers that growing beyond home does not require rejecting it. The challenge is learning how the person he was and the person he is becoming can exist together.
New World, New People
Friendships That Change the Shape of Home
Freshman year widens Bear’s circle. Two friendships in particular become central to the life he is beginning to build at Eastern Missouri University.
Alex Rollins
The Artist
Outgoing, curious, and comfortable with new technology, Alex becomes one of Bear’s first college friends. He helps Bear discover the early web, gives him confidence in digital design, and meets his uncertainty with enthusiasm rather than judgment.
Chip Atwell
The Geologist
Thoughtful, intelligent, and quietly loyal, Chip grows from a fraternity connection into one of the most important friendships of Bear’s freshman year. Their bond gives Bear another place where he can relax, trust, and simply be himself.
From Chapter One
“I could be anyone here,” he thought. “They don’t know the Bear from Redfield. They just see... me.”
Bear arrives at Eastern Missouri University surrounded by unfamiliar buildings, unfamiliar faces, and an exhilarating possibility: for the first time, almost no one around him knows the version of himself he has spent eighteen years becoming.
Meet Bear at Eighteen
He is still six-foot-two and impossible to miss, but the identity that once seemed inseparable from football is beginning to loosen. At EMU, Bear enters art classrooms, experiments with computers, meets people from lives very different from his own, and starts learning that freedom can be every bit as frightening as it is exciting.
Read a SampleContinue Bear’s Journey
Strength in Unity
Freshman year gives Bear a place to belong. Sophomore year asks what he will do with it—through his first professional steps as a designer, deeper fraternity ties, and relationships that begin to challenge the shape of friendship and love.
Discover Book Three