Y/N is a junior writing major at Briar University. She’s never had a boyfriend, never really wanted one—she’s too busy living inside the novel she’s writing to worry about real life romance. Dean Di Laurentis has never had to work for anything. Until he spots a girl at a party who’s typing on her phone in the corner, completely unbothered by his existence. She thinks he’s shallow. He can’t stop thinking about her. And the more he teases her about having her nose in a book, the harder he falls without meaning to.
Y/N rolls into Ironwood Lake rich, polished, and clearly slumming it—sent to live here because her dad’s new job. Nobody clocks her as a threat. What they don't know: she's been racing since she was twelve, trained by a disgraced ex-pro, and she's better than the whole town combined. Tension builds as something forces her hand—money, someone she's started to care about, a threat to the racing scene she can actually beat—and the mask starts slipping.
Freshman year was supposed to be your reset. In high school you were that girl—the one whose name was on every invite list before the party was even planned, the one who walked into a room and felt it tilt toward her. Guys, attention, the whole exhausting, glittering machine of it. You were good at it. Maybe too good. College was going to be different. Briar was going to be different. You’d decided that you were going to be a student first. Normal. Unbothered. Someone whose GPA meant more than her social radius. And then you met the hockey team.
Everyone at camp gets claimed eventually. Y/N doesn't—and it's starting to feel less like bad luck and more like a warning nobody's willing to give her. Then she strings a bow that's sat untouched in the armory for years, one even Chiron couldn't draw, and puts an arrow dead center on her first try. The room goes silent. Because that bow has a name attached to it—Odysseus. Not a god. A mortal legend so cunning and so dangerous that the gods themselves once bent their own rules just to keep him alive—and just as carefully made sure he never had descendants who could inherit what made him great. Except he did. And she's been training in Hermes cabin for months without a clue
Five kids from completely different cliques get busted for five completely different reasons and end up in Saturday detention together. A burnout who set off a smoke bomb “for science.” A overachiever who hacked the grading system to give herself a lower grade. A jock who released the biology frogs. A transfer kid nobody knows anything about. And the teacher’s pet who won’t say what she did. They’re forced to clean out the school’s abandoned music room — and somehow, killing time, they start messing around with the dusty instruments left behind. Turns out they’re actually good. Like, weirdly good. Now they have to decide: was this a one-time thing, or do they keep showing up?
Y/N doesn't date—hasn't, won't, everyone at Briar's accepted it by now. Best friends Hannah and Allie are settled with Garrett and Sean; Y/N's still the one guys try and fail with. What nobody knows is that she writes—full drafts, notebooks stuffed with the kind of love she's still waiting on. Only Hannah and Allie are in on it. Then she loses one. Left it somewhere—she doesn't know where—and spends days quietly panicking, re-tracing every step, terrified someone's going to find out. Someone already has. Dean Di Laurentis picked it up outside Garrett's place, meant to give it back immediately—until he read the first page. Then the second. He tells himself he'll return it tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes a week. He reads it slow, a chapter a night, half in awe and half like he's found some cheat code to a girl nobody's ever actually gotten close to. By the time he finally hands it back, he's not just returning a notebook—he's confessing. That he read it. All of it. That he knows things about her she's never told anyone. And that somewhere in those pages, he started wanting to be the guy she was writing toward.
Y/N thought love was supposed to fix her. It didn't—and Mateo Riddle was just standing close enough to catch the fallout. He didn't break up with her because he loved her less. He broke up with her because he was tired of being the thing she expected to save her, and watching that expectation collapse every night was more than he signed up for. He called it noble. She calls it leaving. Now she's stuck rebuilding herself in the same common room as the boy who couldn't wait around for her to figure it out—Draco watching like he already knows how this ends, Lorenzo not bothering to pretend he's neutral, Blaise treating the wreckage like a spectator sport.
Briar University is your clean slate. Music composition major. Practice room booked every morning at 6 AM. Fellowship application in progress. No distractions. No detours. No drama. Then you hear your name through the locker room wall. You don’t know what they’re saying. You don’t care. You just know you didn’t rebuild yourself from scratch to become the hockey team’s latest conversation topic. So much for no distractions.
Y/N just moved to Encino with the kind of money that makes everything easy—except she's bored, restless, and tired of being underestimated for being rich and pretty. What nobody at her new school knows is she's been trained in karate and kickboxing since she was six, and the second she hears about a scrappy, half-legendary dojo running out of a strip mall, she's in. Cobra Kai isn't looking for a rich girl playing dress-up—and Johnny Lawrence isn't in the market for another student with nothing to prove. But Y/N doesn't want sympathy or a sob story. She wants a place where being good at something finally counts without an asterisk.
Y/N doesn’t do anything halfway. She rebuilt her life from the ground up — packed up Philadelphia, took a job in San Jose, and arrived with two careers, a published book series, and zero interest in starting over again anytime soon. She’s done the hard part. Now she just wants to settle in, do good work, and find a decent bar that plays the game on a big enough screen. She finds the bar. She also finds him. He’s charming, stupidly good-looking, and clearly used to a very specific kind of attention. He plays hockey — she knows hockey — and somehow that still doesn’t save him, because Y/N has never followed the San Jose Sharks closely enough to recognize Will Smith when he sits down next to her and smiles like it’s supposed to mean something. It doesn’t. Yet. Will has never had to try this hard in his life. He’s also never been more interested in someone who couldn’t care less who he is. His teammates think it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened. Y/N thinks it’s mildly embarrassing for everyone involved.
One karaoke night at Malone’s changes everything. She was nobody—a girl with songs in her notes app and a dare she almost didn’t take. But when she stepped up to the mic at Malone’s on a random Tuesday, something happened that she never saw coming. The room stopped. The phones came out. And by morning, the whole campus knew her name. Now Garrett, Dean, Tucker, and Logan are suddenly very interested in the girl they never noticed. The school that ignored her can’t stop talking about her. And everyone wants a piece of someone who just wanted to sing one song. The only question is—who does she want to be now that everyone’s watching?
When 19-year-old Y/N posts a casual two minute voice memo on a Tuesday night, she expects maybe a thousand streams and a good night’s sleep. She gets 6 million views, a repost from Walker Scobell, and a DM inbox that reads like a celebrity contact list. Suddenly everyone knows her name — and everyone wants her attention. Now she has to figure out how to stay herself when the whole world has decided she’s theirs.
Y/N is nineteen, fearless, and completely ordinary — until a morning run changes everything. Spotted by casting agent Marcus Hale for her athletic build and natural beauty, she lands an audition for The Maze Runner on a whim and walks in with zero experience and zero nerves. Somehow, she gets the role. Thrown onto a Hollywood set with Dylan O’Brien, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Ki Hong Lee, Will Poulter, and Blake Cooper, Y/N has no idea what she’s doing — but she owns every second of it. The boys don’t know what hit them. A story about stumbling into the life you didn’t know you wanted, and the people you find once you get there.
When Y/N transfers to Everett Academy — the most elite music school in the country — she expects to fly under the radar. Instead, on her very first day, she’s thrown into her teacher’s infamous improv challenge against Marcus, the most talented guy in class. The theme: fired up. Marcus is brilliant. Y/N is something else entirely. One performance later, the whole room is silent and Mr. Calloway wants to talk after class. She just arrived — and she’s already changed everything.
A college girl who doesn’t follow hockey sits in the wrong seat at a Thursday night game and ends up next to the star winger’s mom. His mom loves her immediately. He’s annoyed, then curious, then in trouble. She transferred junior year to start over from something she doesn’t talk about. He’s got a pro contract offer sitting unopened in his email and no idea what he actually wants. They keep ending up in the same place and they’re both too messy to pretend it isn’t becoming something. He’s a gentleman who teases her relentlessly and she’s the first person who’s never been impressed by him—and that’s exactly the problem.
Y/N has spent three years convinced her best friend Michael is the safest person in her life—steady, reliable, always just... there. What she doesn't know is that he's been quietly, completely in love with her since the night they kissed freshman year and she told him she just wanted to be friends. He said okay. He never stopped meaning something else. Then her boyfriend cheats on her, and she's back where she started: alone, humiliated, and sure she'll never find what she writes about. Michael is the one who picks up the phone. The one who shows up. The one who has quietly rearranged his entire life around being exactly what she needs—and has wanted her, all of her, the whole time.
Y/N has spent her whole life in LA — the kind of life that comes with recording sessions, city lights, and a future that felt like a sure thing. Then her dad takes a job in Millbrook, Pennsylvania, and everything changes. Population 4,200. One stoplight. A high school music room with a water-stained ceiling and a piano missing an F sharp. The audition is supposed to be a formality. Four teachers with clipboards, six kids on a signup sheet, low expectations all around. Y/N walks in looking like a girl who got lost on her way somewhere better — and maybe she did. But when she sits down at that old piano and starts to play, something shifts. An original song. Her own words, her own melody, every mile of that cross-country drive packed into four minutes. By the end, nobody’s writing on their clipboards anymore. Millbrook wasn’t the plan. But Y/N is starting to think the plan might have been wrong.
Y/N just wanted to survive another shift at the front desk of a dental office. Instead, she watched the Avengers get outmatched by something that shouldn't exist—and did the one thing she swore she'd never do again. Now Earth's mightiest heroes want her on the team. She just wants her old life back. She's not going to get it.
Y/N has always been able to manipulate how people feel. Not their actions, just their emotions. When she calmly disarms a robber at the store where she works without laying a hand on him, the security footage goes viral, and the Avengers take notice. What they see isn't luck, it's a level of control they can't ignore. Now they need her, and Y/N, who's never answered to anyone, has to figure out what that means.
