At eighteen, Y/N is the youngest American snowboarder to qualify for the Winter Olympics, known for her fearless style and refusal to play it safe. The pressure is relentless—coaches demand perfection, sponsors demand discipline, and the U.S. team makes one rule painfully clear: no relationships during the Games.
Five years since the world ended. Y/N was nineteen when it happened — now twenty-four, and she barely remembers who she was before. What she does know is this: she built something. A settlement tucked deep in the woods, walls reinforced year after year, a community of survivors who trust her judgment without needing to be told why.
Y/N has always been invisible — intentionally so. Since freshman year, she’s buried herself in oversized hoodies and baggy jeans, a walking contradiction that nobody bothers to look past. It’s armor, really. A way to move through the halls of Westbrook High unnoticed, undisturbed, and unbothered.
By day, you’re just another ghost in the city — grease-stained hands, bruised knuckles, and a reputation whispered through underground garages. At night, you become something else entirely. Behind the wheel of your blacked-out street car, you own the illegal racing circuit that snakes beneath the city’s industrial districts. You race for money, for freedom, and for the adrenaline that makes you forget everything else.
**tags:** slow burn, unrequited (for now), best friends to lovers, troubled youth, found family vibes, pining, he falls first, she's more broken than she lets on
Y/N has spent three years at Westbrook High perfecting the art of invisibility. She sits in the third row — never the back, never the front — takes meticulous notes, and communicates mostly through the worn-out notebook she keeps tucked under her arm. Born with profound hearing loss, she’s worn her cochlear implant since she was seven, but that doesn’t make the world any less exhausting to navigate. Voices still blur in crowded hallways. People still talk at her instead of to her. So she stopped trying to keep up and started observing instead — sketching the world in the margins of her notebooks, reading lips like poetry, existing quietly in the spaces others forget to look.
