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.
Celeste Laurent has the life everyone else is supposed to want — student body president, top of the class, a boyfriend who looks perfect next to her in every photo, a friend group that moves like a unit. Her twin, Y/N, has volleyball, one best friend who plays beside her on the court, and zero interest in performing for anyone.
Y/N hasn't slept — not really — in over a year, not since her father died suddenly. Grief hasn't shown up the way she expected; it's not tears so much as the nights, an unbearable quiet that never used to unsettle her and now feels like it's waiting for something. Her mother knows exactly what the insomnia is and where it comes from, has watched her daughter go hollow with it for a year, and worries without knowing how to fix it. Nobody else does — not the neighbor, not Wells. To them, Y/N is just prickly and unreadable; they have no idea what's underneath it.
Y/N is seventeen, seven placements deep, and done being surprised when a family sends her back. It's never really been about her — it's the ADHD: the fidgeting, the noise, the inability to just *sit still and be easy to love* — and now that she's aged out of being "worth the paperwork," the group home is just where she waits out the clock until eighteen.
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.
Y/N is twenty-one and beautiful in the way that makes people forgive her things before she's done them. She smokes on the fire escape, keeps a vape tucked in her sleeve, drinks from sundown until the night goes soft, and gets high enough that the world turns down its volume. She is also sharper than anyone gives her credit for. She chose community college over university for no reason other than that she didn't want to go, and she has stopped explaining it to people who assume it means she couldn't. She is clever when she wants to be, and she rarely wants to be where anyone can see.
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.
Y/N transfers to a college with a strong hockey program and no women's team. She's spent her whole life in the crease, and the only way to keep playing is to try out for the men's team. She makes it, and not because anyone wanted her there. The starting goalie graduated, the backup is a liability, and she's simply the best option.
Y/N is a junior at a mid-sized university, three years into the kind of life that feels solid because it was built slowly: two best friends who know her before-coffee moods, and a boyfriend who has become less a person she's dating and more a fixture of her days — the one who saves her the good seat, texts her the second something's funny.
**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.
