Everything you need to understand or teach The Carnival in My Mind by Barbara Wersba.
Harvey Beaumont is fourteen, short, and lonely. He spends his days at a New York City prep school being tortured by the other boys, and he spends his evenings dreaming of residing in the midst of a carnival because his mother favors her prized Irish Setters far more than Harvey. All this changes, however, when Harvey meets Chandler Brown, a struggling, would-be actress who befriends Harvey one afternoon on a city bus. Life alters drastically for Harvey when he decides to run away from his upper east side apartment to live with the twenty-year-old Chandler in the bohemia of the East Village.
The Carnival in My Mind was selected for both the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults and the Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices in 1982.