Imperfect, Casual, Simple
With the exception of the first and last chapters, which are written in the present, the entire book is a flashback told through Torey's Creed.doc, which is the document containing his entire story of searching for Chris Creed that he sends out to people whom he thinks might be Chris Creed, living under a new name in an attempt to build a new life for himself. What we're reading, in other words, is a personal document, one written by a teenager and for a teenager, with nary a concern for whether an English teacher would approve of it.
In other words, we are officially hanging out with a casual and imperfect writing style. What we're reading is written by a perfectly bright teenager, but one who's also not concerned with all the formalities an adult professional might pay attention to. This means there's plenty of slang in the mix, and also some imperfect word choices, such as when Torey tells us, "I mushed tears off my eyes so I could see my way home" (21.6). We don't know about you guys, but we usually wipe/dab/rub our tears. But then again, we're also kind of adult professionals.
Imperfections aside, though, it also makes the writing style pretty straightforward. After all, Torey is young, so he generally keeps things pretty simple. So as he steps into his transformation, for instance, instead of communicating this to us through flowery metaphors or multisyllabic postulations, he just says he felt:
[…] alone and kind of strange, like I didn't know who I was all of a sudden. (12.5)
It's about as simple and straightforward as depictions come. We know exactly how Torey feels in this moment, and we don't have to do any mental digging to sort it out. Luckily for us, this is true throughout the book, which makes it pretty easy to plow through, and allows us to focus on the details of the mystery as it unfolds.