{"product_id":"when-the-rule-bends-a-sterling-rebellion-novel","title":"When the Rule Bends: A Sterling Rebellion Novel","description":"October - One Year Earlier\u003cp\u003eIt rained on the night \u003cb\u003eKit Sterling\u003c\/b\u003e decided to stop caring.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe was fifteen then, a freshman with a backpack too heavy and ambitions too light to be properly measured. She stood in the parking lot of a house she barely knew, rain flattening her hair against her cheeks, watching headlights carve through the dark as car after car pulled away. \u003cb\u003eJulian Vane\u003c\/b\u003e had not come out.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe waited twenty minutes because that was how long it took for the humiliation to fully arrive-not a quick, hot flush, but a slow, cold settling that seeps under the skin and stays. She had done exactly what he'd asked. She had gone to the party. She had worn the dress. She had let it happen-the thing she hadn't meant to let happen-because everyone else seemed to think it was fine, and she had not, then, trusted her own sense of what was \u003ci\u003efine\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe front door of the house opened. Light spilled out. She looked up, but it was not Julian. It was two of his friends, laughing about something, oblivious to the girl in the parking lot who had been soaked through. They got into a truck and drove away. The door closed. The light was gone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKit pulled out her phone. No messages. She looked at the last thing Julian had sent her three days ago: a string of emojis that had seemed, at the time, to mean something. She saw now that they meant nothing; they were the linguistic equivalent of a shoulder shrug.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe walked home. It was four miles, and she walked all of it. Somewhere around the second mile, in the stretch between a closed laundromat and a gas station that smelled like old coffee, something in her chest changed texture. It didn't break-that is a word she would have rejected as too melodramatic. It did something more subtle and more permanent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIt hardened.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eNever again\u003c\/i\u003e, she told herself, the rain collecting in her eyelashes. \u003ci\u003eNever again for someone else's sake.\u003c\/i\u003e Never again because everyone else was doing it, or because a boy asked nicely, or because she wanted to be the kind of girl who said \"yes\" to things.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe meant it. She meant it for a year.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe did not know, that night, about \u003cb\u003eJax Thorne\u003c\/b\u003e. She did not know about her sister \u003cb\u003eMaya's\u003c\/b\u003e plans, or her father \u003cb\u003eArthur's\u003c\/b\u003e rule, or the fact that someone was going to show up at her school with a guitar and make everything she'd decided about herself suddenly feel negotiable. She did not know about \u003cb\u003eLeo Vance\u003c\/b\u003e, either-the new boy who would arrive in October rain, smitten and hopeful, and whose own clumsy love story would somehow become the hinge on which her life swung open.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut that is the thing about the rules we make for ourselves in parking lots in the dark. They feel permanent. They feel like architecture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSometimes they are only walls. And sometimes, someone knocks.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51936691028199,"sku":"9798252695204","price":9.36,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0449\/4075\/5096\/files\/imageloader_103b9f32-5ff5-4b28-8f7a-9d9b4fd40229.jpg?v=1774982979","url":"https:\/\/arvidabookco.com\/products\/when-the-rule-bends-a-sterling-rebellion-novel","provider":"Arvida Book Co.","version":"1.0","type":"link"}