Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. "Let me put it this way," he says. "Draw a number line, with zero is, you never think about sex and ten is, it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex." Cole sleeps with a lot of girls, which earns him a not-quite-savory reputation around school. This leaves him adrift with only his best friend for company, and then something startling starts to happen between them that might be what he's been after all this time-and then he meets Grisaille. All the Dirty Parts is a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world, an age when sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. "There are love stories galore," Cole tells us. "This isn't that. The story I'm typing is all the dirty parts."