“No Matter What” is the account of Nick and Joey, fourteen and fifteen year old best friends growing up in a small town. Both come from low-income situations and are largely invisible to the world around them. Their futures are as bleak as the Southern landscape of their upbringing. While Nick is dealing with having lost his mother years before, Joey’s mother is alive but essentially absent in his life due to substance abuse. Early in the story she abandons him completely and Nick, as an extension of his own grief from losing his mother, decides that they should find her. What follows is a series of misadventures dotted with colorful encounters that help to shape Nick and Joey’s perspective of the, until then, unseen world outside of their small town lives. These experiences are pivotal to their journey in that, when they do find Joey’s mother and she has no intention of returning with them, they venture farther into the world instead of going back. It is a tale of friendship and of two characters who, having been given nothing in their lives, must find their own source of hope.