SR

California, 2005. Seventeen-year-old Jay Ashford has everything money can buy. Designer clothes. A luxury car. A family that adores him. The kind of life most people would kill for. Yet instead of attending an elite private academy, he walks the graffiti-covered halls of one of California’s roughest public high schools, where everyone knows his name—for all the wrong reasons. Jay is arrogant, spoiled, and brutally cruel. He thrives on making enemies, starts arguments for fun, and acts like the world exists to entertain him. Teachers dread seeing his name on the attendance sheet, students either fear him or hate him, and he couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. At least, that’s the image he’s spent years creating. Only a handful of people—his two sisters and his closest friends—know about the part of his past he refuses to acknowledge: a battle with drug addiction that nearly destroyed him before he was old enough to graduate. He survived it, but the guilt, fear, and anger never really left. Now, in his final year of high school, Jay is determined to keep everyone at arm’s length. Cruelty is easier than vulnerability. Sarcasm is safer than honesty. And if people hate him, they can’t disappoint him. But senior year has a way of forcing people to grow up. As family expectations rise, friendships are tested, old mistakes threaten to resurface, and new relationships challenge the walls he’s built around himself, Jay must decide whether he’ll keep hiding behind the persona of the untouchable rich kid—or finally face the person he’s been running from.