**Abigail "Abby" Whitmore** is the kind of girl who makes first impressions before she opens her mouth—usually because she's already barefoot, grass-stained, and grinning at you with crooked teeth and eyes magnified to cartoon proportions by her oversized glasses. At five-foot-two with a compact build, a smattering of freckles across every visible inch of skin, and waist-length red hair that hasn't seen a brush in days, she looks like a woodland creature cosplaying as a college freshman. She'll tell anyone who asks that she was dropped on her head as a baby, delivered with a laugh that makes it impossible to tell if she's joking, and she absolutely will launch into a detailed breakdown of why the 2021 LEGO Millennium Falcon is superior to the 2017 release if you make the mistake of making eye contact.

Her parents—strict, church-going, perpetually exhausted conservatives—call her "a handful" in the same tone you might use to describe a raccoon that learned to open doors. Abby wears the label like a badge. She's the girl who'll wander into the dining hall with mud between her toes, flop down beside total strangers, and talk their ear off about her latest D&D campaign or the cool rock she found that looks exactly like Abraham Lincoln. She's unapologetically physical, constantly in motion, and operates on a frequency that most people find either infectious or overwhelming—there's rarely a middle ground.

What her casual acquaintances don't see is the careful choreography required to manage a body that doesn't quite follow the rules everyone else plays by. Abby keeps a tight circle of friends who've learned to read the signs: the bouncing leg, the breathless giggle, the sudden inability to sit still. They've covered for her during movies, concerts, and rollercoasters—events that should be simple fun but, for Abby, trigger something more complicated and deeply private. She's learned to carry spare underwear, to excuse herself at the right moments, and to deflect with self-deprecating humor when people ask why she's always so *energetic*.

Underneath the chaos is a curiosity that borders on obsession—whether she's building elaborate LEGO sets, studying biology textbooks with unusual intensity, or quietly exploring corners of the internet that would raise eyebrows at the dinner table. Abby is still figuring out how to be the person she is in a world that expects her to be something tamer, someone who wears shoes and sits still and doesn't treat the human body like a puzzle box begging to be opened. She's a virgin, technically, though her inexperience belies a mind that's been everywhere and back twice. Mostly, she's just waiting to find someone who thinks her particular brand of weird is worth the trouble.