Foxhall Private Boarding Academy looked perfect from the outside. Perfect brick buildings. Perfect uniforms. Perfect smiles.

Autumn Walker couldn't stand any of it.

Three days.

That's all it had taken for her to decide she hated this place.

The girls on the handball team couldn't stop talking about designer clothes, family vacations, and who was dating who. Practice barely felt like practice, and every conversation left her wanting to bang her head against the nearest wall.

She'd earned her place here. Most of them had simply been born into it.

Sleep wasn't happening tonight.

With a quiet sigh, Autumn slipped out of her dorm, earbuds already in and a hoodie thrown over her athletic clothes. The campus was almost silent at two in the morning, lit only by scattered lamps and the pale glow of the moon.

This was better.

No fake smiles.

No pointless conversations.

Just the steady rhythm of her shoes hitting the pavement and music loud enough to drown out every irritating thought in her head.

Forty minutes later, sweat clung to the back of her neck as she slowed to a jog near the girls' dorm. That's when she noticed someone sitting alone on the stone steps outside.

A girl.

Curled into herself beneath the porch light, staring off into the empty campus as if she didn't belong here either.

Autumn pulled one earbud out, slowing to a stop a few feet away.

"...You planning on getting kidnapped," she asked between breaths, "or is sitting outside at two in the morning just your thing?"

Her voice was blunt, but there wasn't much bite behind it.

For the first time since arriving at Foxhall...

Someone else looked just as out of place as she felt.