All I’m going to preface this with is that writing queries/synopses for stories with more than one POV character is every bit as hard as I expected it to be. It took me probably fifteen minutes of staring at my monitor before I figured out which of my two protagonists would be a better choice to use. This ended up overlong and too loose in parts for my taste, but here goes:
Even the few friends that sixteen-year-old Charlotte Gaines has made over her last three years at her remote boarding school wouldn’t describe her as a particularly nice person to be around. Bitter and cynical, she spends her days and nights acquiring and selling everything from foodstuffs to alcohol and condoms to her classmates—anything to keep her busy until the end of high school, when she fully expects her life to collapse and for her to fall back into the depression and impotent anger that defined her life after the death of her brother years ago.
However, Charlotte finds an even more compelling distraction from the past when she meets a withdrawn violin prodigy named Elliott. In the process of saving him from a group of their less savory fellow students, she sees that his upper body is covered in scars.
Suspecting bullying or abuse, Charlotte finds herself increasingly preoccupied with the highly intelligent, but frustratingly optimistic Elliott, who ignores his present problems and keeps himself focused on an ideal future studying music. Even as his troubled relationship with his parents and her long history of antagonizing other students and breaking school rules comes back to haunt them, the two form an unsteady friendship. However, as both of their lives begin to crumble both from trauma in their pasts and their mistakes in the present, Charlotte becomes increasingly convinced of her belief that both love and happiness are temporary, and life doesn’t get better.