The Vibe

So, imagine your dad tells you over breakfast that you’re moving from a chill village in Australia to a penthouse in Manhattan. Oh, and you’re the face of a viral streetwear brand, you just booked a Prada campaign, and now you have to deal with the sociopaths at an elite NYC prep school. That’s Alina’s life. She’s trying to hold it together for her little sister Emily, but honestly? She’s about to snap.

Excerpt

“New York City?” The words exploded out of Alina, sharp enough to cut glass, tasting like panic and disbelief. Her fork didn’t just clatter onto the plate; it bounced, spraying leftover scrambled eggs onto the worn pine tabletop. Fucking fantastic. As if the emotional equivalent of a category five hurricane currently tearing through her wasn’t enough, now there was egg debris.

Across the table, Papa—Dmitri Mikhailova, her apparently completely fucking insane father—had the gall to just stand there by the counter, stirring his instant coffee like he hadn’t just casually lobbed a grenade into their breakfast. Like he’d merely suggested they try kangaroo sausages for dinner, not surgically remove Alina’s entire existence and ship it halfway across the planet. Again.

“You cannot be fucking serious,” she choked out, shoving her chair back with so much force it screamed against the floorboards. Her hair—a heavy fall of deep auburn waves that caught fiery copper highlights in the sun—swung wildly behind her as she moved. The sheer weight and volume of it felt like part of the trap. The sudden movement sent sunlight—thick, golden Australian sunlight, utterly unlike the grey, smoggy filter she imagined perpetually draped over New York—slicing through the air…

“Papa, look at me.” Her voice was rising, high and thin, trembling with a fury dangerously close to dissolving into tears. “Tell me this is a joke. Some kind of sick, profoundly unfunny test of my fucking resilience or whatever armchair psychology bullshit you’ve been reading.”

Status Update: Currently rewriting the “Alina runs away to Sydney” arc. The characters are refusing to communicate, and the Dad is still trying to solve emotional problems with engineering solutions.