Sketches & Scoreboards

Grace Selene has always been good at staying inside the lines.

Advanced Placement classes. Perfect grades. Art competitions. Tutoring sessions. A carefully organized future she fully intends to reach, even if getting there means carrying far more than anyone realizes.

Steve Rogers has never had much trouble being noticed.

Senior. Hockey star. Hawkins High's golden boy. The kind of person everyone seems to know, whether they've actually spoken to him or not. College scouts are watching, his final season is beginning, and everyone already has an opinion about where his life is headed next.

Grace and Steve have been circling each other for years.

Same school. Same hallways. Same crowded cafeteria. A hundred almost-moments that never became anything more.

Until one class project puts them across a table from each other.

And suddenly Steve discovers the quiet girl with the sketchbook is funny, stubborn, fiercely talented, and considerably more complicated than the "good girl" reputation Hawkins has given her.

Grace discovers there's more beneath Steve's golden-boy smile than hockey scores and school popularity.

What starts with research assignments, shared lunches, and conversations neither of them expected slowly becomes late-night phone calls, cold hockey games, paint-stained afternoons, victory fries, family dinners, and the terrifying realization that somewhere along the way, almost became something real.

But junior year is asking everything from Grace, and senior year is already pulling Steve toward whatever comes next.

They were always going to cross paths.

Neither of them expected to become part of the other's plan.