Nathaniel Rothstein, a high schooler in Newton, Massachusetts, beats up a student even dorkier than himself. His mother, beside herself, ships him off for the summer to live with his uncle, an emeritus professor of history at UT-Austin. Uncle Bob takes his bushy eyebrowss, baggy gym shorts and wayward nephew to volunteer in a senior citizen home and to join him at Terry Tucker’s boxing gym. Nathaniel serves up a few weeks of requisite teen-age sullenness at the senior citizen home, but with time is mesmerized by his boss, the Haitian immigrant David Delice.
Impressionable and horny, Nathaniel uses his emergency money to call a phone-sex line (the year is 1998.) Sasha, a Russian dominatrix, plays her part for Nathaniel, who after painfully long-minutes of silence, finds a voice as the Haitian, David. For reasons you’ll have to read about, it is just quite believable that a summer-long relationship develops between Nathaniel, who is pretending to be Black and Sasha. Sasha, it turns out, is also a high school student in a boy’s body, who is discovering they are a trans woman. When Nathaniel and Sasha, still embodied in their personae decide to meet up, Nathaniel must turn his skin black. Only a high school student would try this. Sasha, born in a boy’s body, has to appear to be female. On the day of their planned meeting Nathaniel disappears. (That’s not a spoiler. His disappearance is announced in the opening chapter.)
So we are left with a ringside collection of characters all related to the missing Nathaniel. They wander the nursing home, sweat at the boxing gym, mature in the miasma of two high schools (Newton and Austin), drive across the expanding city of Austin, and work in Austin’s police force. Every one of them has regrets, secrets, wishes, and desires. The Slip is a wild 12-rounder of a boxing match. A lot like life.