A Song in a Picture [ONC 2022]

Jenna struggles to balance her parents' impending divorce with her terrifying and seemingly unallowed feelings for the new girl at school.

~*~

After her dad moves out of the house, Jennavieve Nass refuses to accept the possibility of her parents divorcing and blames her mom for not even making an attempt to make things go back to the way they were.

Attempting to distract herself from all of it, Jenna falls into music more than she ever has before, coming to rely on her carefully curated playlists to get her through each day. It's all fine - Jenna has her music, and the animals at the animal shelter she volunteers at, and, to an extent, school (because of her friends and her on-and-off boyfriend of two years). And she also has her dad, even though he may not be living with her anymore.

Then Aislinn Garcia moves into town. Aislinn, a girl who is pretty and smart and friendly, a girl who carries a camera everywhere and takes pictures of practically everything, and a girl who makes Jenna's heart race in a way she desperately tries to ignore.

Suddenly, everything Jenna thought she knew about herself - and her parents - gets upended in a dizzying spiral until she's left floundering for a foothold in a cliff that's constantly transforming, changing shape before she can even begin to understand it.

To Jenna, the solution is simple: Ignore everything she doesn't want to deal with (which turns out to be a lot of things). But that, as she's quick to find out, proves harder than she'd originally thought.

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[ trigger warnings: homophobia, both internal and displayed by side characters ]

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( Cover credit goes to @Lueur_laVespine )