Jeff Hobbs’ book “Show Them You’re Good” focuses on several alumni of Beverly Hills High School. (photo © Alessandra Sanguinetti of Magnum Photos/design by Rodrigo Corral))

Former Beverly Hills High School students are the newest subjects for the author of a New York Times bestseller. Jeff Hobbs’ newest book, “Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College,” focuses on teenagers who were seniors at BHHS and Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Florence-Graham during the 2016-17 school year.

For “Show Them You’re Good,” due out Aug. 18, Hobbs assembled the students into discussion groups after making inroads at the two schools while speaking about his previous book, the award-winning “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace,” which was published in 2014. The book is a biography of Peace, Hobbs’ roommate at Yale, who was murdered in a drug-related crime in 2011.

“I didn’t expect anyone to read it really, because it’s a pretty sad story, but it got more attention than that. Schools started asking me to come visit classes, maybe give a talk, all around the country,” Hobbs said.

In those speaking engagements, Hobbs said he had “all of these really special experiences with young people, and particularly something about Rob Peace and his story kind of empowered young people to stand up and start sharing their own stories.”

Those experiences encouraged Hobbs, who lived in West Hollywood at the time, to dig deeper into the lives of teenage boys during their senior year of high school, which Hobbs said “can be very absurd and silly, or maybe more silly than absurd.”

“You have these repetitive days filled with mundanity and you talk about nonsense, you engage in nonsensical things and girls, and you’re not quite old, but you’re no longer young, and you’re having serious thoughts and no one is taking those thoughts seriously … You’re in this very brief passage of nine months where you’re basically determining not your final future, but a whole lot of elements of what the next five or 10 years are going to look like and feel like, so the stakes are actually really high,” Hobbs said.

Jeff Hobbs is the author of “Show Them You’re Good,” which details the lives of several students at Beverly Hills High School. (photo courtesy of Jeff Hobbs)

After reaching out to school officials and getting the OK to delve into these students’ lives, he started regularly meeting with a handful of students from each school, collecting stories and thoughts from the discussions that began with food.

“I spent a lot of money at In-N-Out Burger that year, and I’d ask them what was going on,” Hobbs said. “A lot of it was very personal, with families and sort of the plight of being 17, 18 years old in America today, things I find pretty powerful and universal, things that are pretty easy to overlook when you’re thinking about young people.”

Braden Schumitzky, one of the BHHS students who worked with Hobbs, said the discussions would sometimes focus on everyday events, classes and the typical conversations high schoolers have, but “other times, it would get really deep and personal.”

These conversations drew the students together, Schumitzky said, adding that “now I know [the other participants] on a personal level.”

“When you see someone at school, they’re kind of a two-dimensional character, and they’re a caricature of a person. Then you get that third dimension and you realize, ‘you’re just like I am’ … Even the guys on top of the world have problems, too,” Schumitzky said.

Bennett Gershwin, another BHHS alumnus, said that “over time, we learned to open up pretty naturally.”

“It was cool because you’d think in a room of a bunch of other adolescent boys, there’d be a bit of a machismo in there, but everyone was very open-hearted. It was a nice environment. I remember when it ended, when Jeff said he got everything he needed, we were kind of bummed out. It was cathartic to talk about everything, and the pizza didn’t hurt either,” Gershwin said.

Hobbs said that “machismo culture” still overshadows the emotions of teenage boys, which “are still overlooked in a big way, culturally.”

“The hope with this sort of work is to make your characters’ stories part of your readers’ stories. I definitely didn’t want to critique systems or teachers or how schools are run … just kind of get into what it looks like and feels like to be that age … For boys to have feelings is hard, and it’s even harder to express feelings and to assume that vulnerability,” he said.

That was especially true during the 2016 presidential election, which he called “unhappy” timing.

“We talked about it in the context of how these individuals were experiencing it. Animo Pat Brown, which is almost all Latino kids, [President Donald Trump’s election] was a surprise. [The atmosphere was] very funereal, November of that year. One of the kids was undocumented, his parents were undocumented and he was applying to DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) at the time,” Hobbs said.

In contrast, Beverly Hills has a “pretty significant conservative presence,” even though “you wouldn’t necessarily know it exists, at least in certain orbits.”

“[Since the 2016 election], it seemed impossible for people with different views to talk about them, whereas these kids would actually talk about what they thought of things,” Hobbs said. “They could express contrary views and they could listen, and maybe those dialogues could get tense in certain moments, but during that time, in 2016-17, to be at a table where people actually talked and listened, was for me personally and selfishly, it just gave me some nourishment.”

BHHS students Schumitzky and Gershwin said they also benefited from the conversations. Not only did they feel better after talking about their hopes, worries, anxieties and families, but they now can now say they have been the subjects of a book.

“I enjoyed it very much,” Gershwin said. “It’s just cool to hear an author talk about you … It was also very flattering. [In a draft, Hobbs] said something like my ‘eyes looked like they are always watching the California sunset.’”

“It’s a ‘cherry on top’ sort of thing,” Schumitzky said. “It’s an awesome thing in life where you feel like you lucked out and you get to say you did it for the rest of your life. I can carry that around. I’m in a book.”