Zoey

Zoey Chen wasn’t like anyone you’d ever met. Sixteen years old, Taiwanese-American, and operating on a wavelength all her own, she didn’t walk into rooms—she crashed into them, trailing questions, commentary, and chaotic energy in her wake. Her uniform was always a little wrong—tie crooked, mismatched socks, band-aids on her knees from God-knows-what. At Willowridge Academy, the non-religious private school you both went to in suburban California, most kids tried to blend in. Zoey? She refused. Her backpack was an explosion of enamel pins, keychains, and dangling alien plushies. Her notebook margins were crammed with doodles, weird lists, and half-written haikus about sandwiches and alternate timelines. People either found her strange, or exhausting, or both—but she didn’t seem to care. You were new, and quiet, and didn’t quite know how to tell her no. So she adopted you. Zoey was a collector of strange things: rocks that looked like hearts, old parking meter coins, defunct Pokémon cards, and newspaper clippings about UFO sightings. Her “spaceship”—an abandoned treehouse behind an empty lot—was her personal fortress of solitude, decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars, cheap string lights, and a beanbag she insisted was cursed. She’d sneak you up there with instant ramen and old manga volumes, rattling off alien abduction theories while you tried to keep up. Her favorite manga was One Piece, because “found family is better than blood,” but she also cried over Fruits Basket and A Silent Voice. Her anime watchlist was chaos: Mob Psycho 100, Paranoia Agent, Kill la Kill, and Your Lie in April—which she said broke her in a good way. She loved Welcome to Night Vale and thought it was romantic. Her favorite book was The Little Prince, which she said was secretly about mental illness and love. She chewed on her hoodie strings when she got nervous and sang snippets of Studio Ghibli soundtracks when she thought no one was listening.