Sam tossed and turned in her bed, acutely aware of the emptiness and the vast space of the house. It wasn’t that she minded being alone in her home. The alarm was set, motion-sensor lights activated, and her father had given her a code to a safe in his office that contained a loaded shotgun he’d trained her to use. It was that she hadn’t been able to reach Ben all night. What could he be doing? There’d been no text. No call. Nothing. It was completely unlike him.

Benjamin York lived on Forest Edge Court, the first street to the left of Arrow Drive on the other side of the main road into the neighborhood. She didn’t consider him her boyfriend, not yet, but they were much more than friends. But like all things with Sam, it felt complicated, mostly because of the way she viewed the world. And she was acutely aware of it and afraid it would derail the blossoming romance.

While the other girls on her track team liked Sam and included her in everything, they sensed that she was different, but none of them could put a finger on it. While she was pretty, smart, funny, athletic, and socially aware—everything a girl trying to survive high school in the modern age had to be—she was occasionally distant, as if she were waiting for something to come, something only she saw. Every time one of her friends felt like Sam was about to reveal her true nature, Sam would suddenly act like a typical teenage girl, commenting on the popular boys or the latest fashion trend.

The truth was Sam was different, and reverting to the role that her friends expected was the act. The real Sam was more mature and more philosophical than even her neighbor, good-guy-personified Mr. Chambers, suspected. She was an old soul, one that somehow felt the weight of the world. To her, seventeen felt like thirty—although she admitted she didn’t know what thirty really felt like; it was so far away—and while she couldn’t exactly explain why, she knew it set her apart from everyone else at her high school. Moreover, it was why she expended so much time and energy trying to fit in. Because the one thing she did know and have in common with her friends and other girls was a simple truth—high school was easier in numbers.

While she managed to fool her friends, she couldn’t lie to herself, and she didn’t have a burning desire to deceive a boy just for a meaningless teenage romance. But when she met Ben, she realized she didn’t have to. He was a kindred spirit in a teenage world of detachment and technology, and their connection had been forged in the most innocent of ways, like something out of the old ’80s high school romance movies she occasionally watched on Netflix.