Yes and Yes by Jonathan Friesen:

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My daughter is ten now, but when she was five she was an avid soccer player. Better put, I was an avid soccer dad. She'd throw on her bright red uniform, and I'd speed her to each game, talking strategy all the way. Once in the parking lot, she'd jump out, skip onto the field, and find some other girl to hold hands with while they'd bounce around for a half hour. Oblivious to everything except how wonderful life was. Roughly every other game, if the ball came rolling right to her, she'd kick that bugger. Then I'd strut around, point her out to all the other dads with inferior children.

It had been a while since one of those strutting moments, and I was second guessing that soccer scholarship when it happened—the rarest event in kiddie soccer—the breakaway. Somehow, my girl ended up with the ball, the herd was on the far side of the field, and my precious was about to score. She actually dribbled right down to the goal. I was moments away from immortality. She couldn't miss if she tried. The goalie was sitting down, picking grass. All she had to do was kick it.

But she stopped, turned, and scanned the sideline. Her gaze found me and her face lit and she jumped and waved.

"Look at me, Daddy! Look at me!"

"I am!" I started to make kicking motions, and she must've figured them out because she took three steps back (like all kids before they kick big), and was completely engulfed by fifteen screaming children. The next thing I saw was that ball flying the other way, the herd in pursuit. But not my girl. She just stood in front of the goal, that huge smile still plastered on her face.

"Did you see that? Daddy did you see me?"

I nodded, and couldn't help but smile myself because that's when it hit me that every person—it doesn't matter who or what age or what their appearance seems to indicate—every person wants to know the answers to two questions:

1. Do you see me?

2. Do you like what you see?

That's it. End of story. It's our heart's cry. Everyone's.

I write for teens, older ones. But I've been shocked at how many adults have read Jerk, California; at how many of the emails I receive and speaking requests come from adults, for adults. I wasn't prepared for adults to cry at book signings and say, ‘That was me. You wrote me.' The book is in the teen section at Barnes and Noble, and I was ready for lines of, well, teens. Not lines filled with everyones.

But I'm starting to figure it out. YA novels are nothing if not intense—intense emotions, experiences. They are filled with passion because teens are passionate. Of all people, teens may desire most to have the answers to my daughter's two questions: Do you see me? Do you like what you see? Those two questions fill the book, shape the book, even define it. And because these are universal wonderings, it makes sense that so many adults would be affected by Jerk. It makes sense that Sam, the protagonist with Tourette's Syndrome, so desperate to find someone on this earth who likes what they see, would strike such a loud chord.

Every great book I know, the ones that tugged me and jabbed their hooks into me and hung on long after the last page was turned, all those books are filled with characters hungry for the answers to those two questions. Genre doesn't matter. Style doesn't either. This side of Heaven those stories will always find eager readers, themselves searching for the hope that the answers just might be ‘Yes' and ‘Yes'.