Lee Parker has a system. Straight A's, a girlfriend, a class rep badge pinned straight. Senior year mapped out like a blueprint — nothing left to chance.
Then the principal slides a folder across his desk.
Wade Turner. More schools than haircuts. A scar along his jaw. A posture that reads like a permanent provocation. Parker's job is simple: show the new student around. Help him acclimate.
He fails spectacularly.
Because Wade doesn't acclimate. He doesn't follow scripts. And no matter how hard Parker tries to keep him at arm's length — out of duty, out of reason, out of sheer survival — the distance keeps disappearing. What begins as irritation becomes fascination. What begins as fascination becomes something Parker has no name for yet, something that lives between his ribs and makes it hard to breathe.
Over the course of one senior year, everything Parker thought he knew about himself will be taken apart — slowly, deliberately, one certainty at a time — by a boy who never read the script and set it on fire just by existing.
You never feel the first fracture. That's the cruelty of it.
But sometimes, what breaks open is exactly what needed to.
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The complete edition of The Problem With Wade Turner — collecting Off Script, Fault Lines and Smoke Between Us in a single volume.
