Delilah Wong does not arrive at Draycott Academy the way most new seniors do. There is no eager scanning of faces for a potential friend, no selfie in front of the ivy-covered gates, no first-day excitement humming beneath the surface. She arrives with a deliberate blankness, the kind that takes years of practice to perfect. She has learned that drawing attention is a form of danger, that being noticed can have costs she cannot afford. Draycott is a private school in an affluent world she does not quite belong to, and she walks through its manicured grounds carrying the particular wariness of someone who is already calculating exits.

The school itself is the sort of place that announces its own importance: well-funded, well-staffed, populated by students whose confidence is the byproduct of money and expectation. Delilah is neither rich nor at ease here, and she knows it. But she has not come to Draycott for the social experience. She has come because Draycott has the academic reputation and the rigorous curriculum that could, if she plays every move right, get her into a university far away from here — specifically, to Singapore, a place threaded through with memories of her late father, a place that in her mind represents escape made legitimate. College abroad is not a dream for Delilah; it is a survival strategy, and she guards it with everything she has.

From her very first hours at Draycott, we understand that Delilah has two modes: watchful and more watchful. She reads rooms before she enters them. She clocks who holds power, who is performing, who might be useful, who might be a threat. This is not social anxiety in the ordinary teenage sense — it is something harder-edged, shaped by a home life that has made hypervigilance feel like common sense. She introduces herself to no one more than politeness requires. She finds her classrooms, assesses her teachers, and begins the careful work of being unremarkable.