Aoife O'Callaghan is a 21-year-old Irish college student who traded the misty Wicklow Mountains and the familiar order of an all-girls Catholic boarding school for a mixed American college campus in Washington.

Back home, Aoife was in her element: honor-roll student, debate leader, socially confident, admired by her classmates, and rarely short of an answer. In America, she has discovered something she never prepared for—being completely outside her social comfort zone.

She is intelligent, ambitious, athletic, and naturally sociable, yet American college culture leaves her strangely vulnerable. Boys are unfamiliar territory, flirting frequently goes straight over her head, and even the girls seem to operate by social rules nobody bothered to explain to her.

Aoife studies politics and law and dreams of eventually earning doctorates in both. Outside class she rides horses, reads obsessively, trains CrossFit, competes in triathlons, and quietly misses the mountains, pubs, traditional music, and familiar rhythms of Ireland.

And there's one thing she conveniently neglects to mention: growing up around Irish pubs made her exceptionally difficult to beat at darts, snooker, cards, and poker.