Audre & Bash are Just Friends

Published in 2025, Tia Williams’s Audre & Bash Are Just Friends is a young adult romantic comedy. The novel follows 16-year-old Audre Mercy-Moore—junior-class president, debate captain, and budding author—who is stuck in New York City for a “boring” summer with her famous novelist mother. Determined to gather real-life material for her first book, Audre hires transfer student Bash Henry to help her complete five daring “Experience Challenges.” Their plan is strictly professional, but sizzling chemistry, family complications, and a scorching Manhattan heat wave make it hard to remember that they’re just friends. The novel explores themes including First Love as a Source of Self-Discovery, Navigating the Pressure of Family Expectations, and Learning to Embrace Authentic Experience.

This study guide refers to the e-book edition published by Little, Brown and Company in 2025.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of bullying, antigay bias, animal death, mental illness, child abuse, death by suicide, self-harm, substance use, addiction, sexual content, cursing, illness, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Sixteen-year-old Audre Mercy-Moore is the junior class president and debate team captain at Cheshire Prep, an elite school in Brooklyn, New York. She lives with her mother, Eva, her stepfather, Shane, and her one-year-old half-sister, Alice. Eva and Shane are both accomplished authors, and they dated in high school. Audre and her mother used to be best friends, but lately, Audre feels that Alice has replaced her. 

On prom night, Audre has a panic attack when her date, a boy named Ellison, tries to initiate sex with her. Ellison and his friends record the panic attack. Months later, Audre has another panic attack on the last day of school when Ellison sends her a text message promising that he deleted the video and asking her not to say anything about what happened, lest it damage his college prospects.

Audre wants to study psychology at Stanford University and plans to set herself apart from the other applicants by writing a self-help book for teenagers over the summer. To make her advice book more realistic, Audre decides to engage in a series of “Experience Challenges” that will push the perfectionist outside her comfort zone. She recruits a 17-year-old transfer student named Bash Henry to help her complete the challenges because he has a reputation for being wild and carefree.

Bash used to live in California with his father, Milton, who obsessively trained him to be one of the nation’s top track athletes. However, he was forced to move in with his mother in Brooklyn when his father disowned him during the second semester of his senior year. His mother, Jennifer, is a wealthy white woman whom he has seen only a few times in his life. Bash dreams of becoming a tattoo artist, and a successful tattoo parlor owner invites him to apply for a job at his business in South Carolina.

For his first outing as Audre’s ‘fun consultant,’ Bash takes Audre to Rockaway Beach and offers to teach her how to surf. She lingers on the shore but dives in when she thinks that he’s drowning. Bash is unharmed and was searching underwater for a Smurf lunchbox, which is something of a local legend for the beach. Back on dry land, Audre senses the onset of a panic attack and runs away. Bash follows her and helps her to regain a sense of calm and safety. On their way back to Audre’s home, the teenagers open up to one another about their complicated relationships with their parents and find joy in their new friendship.

Audre forgets her phone on the beach and arrives home hours after she told her mother that she would be back. Eva grounds her daughter for the weekend, but the teen remains determined to complete the Experience Challenges. When Bash goes back to the beach and retrieves her phone for her, Audre is elated at his thoughtfulness. However, she tells herself that Bash doesn’t return her crush.

On the Fourth of July, Audre tells Bash that they shouldn’t see each other outside of the challenges anymore because she’s afraid of developing feelings for him. Bash is stunned and hurt, but he agrees that this is for the best since he is still emotionally vulnerable from his painful past in California.

In an attempt to get over Bash, Audre resolves to complete two Experience Challenges in one night by staying out past 10 pm and kissing a boy at a party. At the party, Audre sees Ellison and tearfully tells Bash that he recorded her having a panic attack. The two boys get into a fistfight. This incident causes Audre and Bash to realize the strength of their feelings for one another, and they share their first kiss.

When Bash brings Audre home, Eva and Shane are upset because Audre didn’t answer her phone that night. Eva is especially angry that her daughter was alone with a boy. Later that night, Bash calls Audre, apologizes for causing problems between her and her mother, and says that they should stop seeing each other. Audre asks Bash to open up to her about his past, but he only says that he ruined someone’s life in California and cares about her too much to do the same to her.

For as long as Audre can remember, her mother has told her that the women in their family achieve greatness, and this has been a significant source of pressure and stress in the teen’s life. Whenever Audre seeks specific information about her family’s history, Eva evades her questions. Seeking answers about her mother’s mysterious past, Audre sneaks into Eva’s bedroom and reads the prologue of her upcoming memoir. The document reveals that Eva had an addiction when she was a teenager and never knew her father, grandfather, or great-grandfather.

Dazed, Audre goes to the beach and reflects on how the memoir overturns everything she thought she knew about her mother and their family. The teenager longs to stop demanding perfection from herself. To complete the final Experience Challenge and prove that she can take action for herself rather than for others’ approval, she retrieves a Smurf lunchbox from the ocean. She leaves the lunchbox outside Bash’s front door. Thinking about the courage that Audre demonstrated by retrieving the lunchbox from the beach where she had a panic attack gives Bash the strength to finally confront his mother for abandoning him.

Bash finds Audre and tells her about his father’s physically and emotionally abusive behavior. When he first came to Brooklyn, he didn’t want a serious relationship because Milton disowned him for kissing a boy. However, his experiences with Audre have helped him to face his past and realize that he doesn’t want to give up on his connection with her. Audre feels as though her connection with Bash is the only part of her life that she’s certain of. She asks him to give her a tattoo of the number 333, which refers to a method used to soothe panic attacks.

After the tattoo is complete, Audre checks her phone and sees a message from her mother, demanding to know if she read her manuscript. She returns home to face Eva. Eva opens up about the generational trauma that has impacted the women in their family and her own fraught teenage years, and Audre forgives her mother for hiding the truth from her. The two regain some of their former closeness and trust, and the teen tells her mother about Ellison and her panic attacks. However, Eva is furious when she learns that Bash gave Audre a tattoo and orders her daughter to break up with him.

Bash finds closure by sending his father an email in which he forgives Milton but also stands up for himself. Later that afternoon, Audre breaks up with him, and both teenagers are devastated. Audre pours her heartbreak into her self-help book, which is about the importance of learning from personal experiences rather than following arbitrary rules. She takes steps towards healing by blocking Ellison’s number and resolving to tell her therapist what happened at prom.

Eva realizes that it’s unfair for her to judge Audre and Bash’s relationship based on the mistakes that she made as a teenager, and she invites Bash to her and Shane’s wedding. At the reception, Bash surprises Audre by revealing that he has secured a job at a tattoo parlor in Brooklyn and asks her to complete a new set of Experience Challenges with him. The teenagers voice their love for one another for the first time and kiss, ecstatic that they are no longer just friends.