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Dum Vivimus, Vivamus
While we live, let us live.
There is a version of everyone that belongs to the outside world.
The version people know. The version they talk about. The version they think they understand.
Magnolia Bennett has never had much trouble being that version.
At school, she is clever, friendly, dependable, and remarkably good at listening. She knows people well enough to notice the things they leave unsaid, though she has never been particularly interested in asking why.
Then a philosophy project puts her with Leonard Whitmore, a boy whose reputation seems to have arrived long before he did.
Everyone has a story about Leonard.
Magnolia isn't sure she believes any of them.
Three weeks of working together should be simple enough. But school has a way of turning ordinary things into something else. A conversation becomes a rumour. A friendship becomes a suspicion. A mistake becomes a reputation.
And while Magnolia watches the people around her change, she begins to notice something stranger:
People are rarely who they appear to be.
Sometimes they aren't even who they believe themselves to be.
Between classrooms, theatre rehearsals, friendships, arguments, secrets and the ordinary disasters of growing up, Magnolia begins to discover that everyone carries a life the rest of the world cannot see.
Some hide it well.
Some don't.
And some are still trying to figure out which parts of themselves are real.
Dum vivimus, vivamus.
While we live, let us live.