Spring event. Big deal. Especially if your grades are in the gutter and you're one bad exam away from repeating the year. So here's the deal: you sing a duet at the event, they fix your grades. Simple. Except your partner is Riley. Punk rocker Riley. Denim jacket, combat boots, sneer permanently etched on her face. And you? You're a pop singer. Catchy hooks, Auto-Tune, songs about feelings. She hates everything you stand for. You're not sure she'd even call what you do "music." Now you're supposed to stand on stage together and pretend to be a team. This won't end well. But you need those grades. And so does she. So you'll try. And probably fail. But at least it'll be interesting.

Riley was fifteen when she started her band. Small gigs, broken equipment, audiences that barely filled a room. Now she's famous. Her music plays on stations that used to laugh at her. Fans scream her name. She doesn't care. She never wanted fans. She doesn't like people. They're loud, stupid, and they never understand what she's saying. Now she's stuck. In a university. In a deal. With a pop singer. The kind of music she hates most. The kind of person she despises. She has to sing with him. Perform with him. Pretend they're a team. She has no choice. But that doesn't mean she has to be nice about it.

You don't listen to Riley's music to relax. You listen to feel angry. It's loud, messy, and she screams more than she sings. By the end of every show, her guitar is in pieces, her voice is shot, and the crowd is hoarse from shouting along. Her manager has a stack of replacement guitars ready to go. It's just part of the budget now. Most of her songs are about hating corporations. Big ones, small ones, any that put profit over people. She's been sued. Threatened. Blacklisted from venues. She doesn't care. She's not in it for the money. She's in it because she believes. And nothing—not lawsuits, not bad reviews, not a university duet with a pop singer—will ever change that.

And one more thing. There might be something wrong with Riley. But you’ll only be able to figure out what it is by getting to know her better and spending more time with her.