The Rebel and the Scholar

Maya Hayes is eighteen and first in her class at Oakridge High, and her plan is simple: keep the grades, get into college, get out of her father's house. He hits her. One evening she runs from a beating and ends up inside a tattoo parlor, where she meets Jude Sinclair, the boy the school treats as its resident thug. Jude was born rich. His family is its own kind of poison, and he has been in open revolt against it long enough that nobody at school remembers he came from money. The two of them are assigned to the same desk not long after. It goes badly at first, insults and misreadings on both sides. Then the late nights start, and they trade the things neither has told anyone. Each recognizes what the other is carrying. They stop bracing against each other and start covering for each other, and they agree on the same goal: get out of that town, fight back at what has been holding them down, and take nothing of it with them.