Professor

I loved Lia Rockefeller for ten years, and it cost me everything.
When she said the cheerleaders were ganging up on her, I charged in and took the punches for her.
When she cried that her stepsister would ruin her at Yale, I tore up my acceptance letter right then and there.
When she held me tight in the middle of the night and whispered, "I'm so lucky to have you"—I thought it meant forever.
Thre...

On my first day at St. Clair University, my roommate Lysandra laughed at me in French.

Wrapped in designer logos, she called me a nobody who did not even recognize luxury perfume.

She thought I could not understand her.

She was wrong. French was my first language.

I was also Iris Russell, the hidden heir to the Russell Group.

But I kept that to myself.

Then Lysandra set me up at a Michelin-s...

I'm a folklorist. Folk traditions are my field.
At first, I thought it was just an ordinary rhyme, a scrap of oral history set to a tune.
"A rag doll in the mire, swinging high up to the sky..."
We all thought it was just a prank.
Until the first person drowned in the bog. Then the second fell from a tower crane. Then the third somehow drowned in a bathtub.
I stared at the black symbol surfacing o...

My mom runs a laundromat, and that afternoon she had to step out for something urgent.
Before leaving, she made sure to remind me: don't forget to finish the load in machine number seven.
I found the old clunker tucked away in the back room and bent down to reach inside the drum, trying to straighten out the tangled clothes.
That's when my upper body suddenly wedged itself in tight—I couldn't p...

During our first month at university, my half-vampire boyfriend, Darien, claimed he couldn't adapt to the human campus. The bright lights gave him vertigo, the sensory overload wrecked him, and even a drop of a classmate's blood pushed him to the brink of losing control.
For him, I promised to drop my elite program so we could transfer to a dreary, isolated northern town together. To keep him stab...