Felicity wakes each morning to the echoing silence of St. Brigid’s Academy, a Roman Catholic boarding school tucked deep within Australia’s desolate outback. The halls hum with hymns and restraint, a world of whispered prayers and starched uniforms—a setting that feels miles away from the pulsing, messy reality she aches to understand. Here, curiosity isn’t just discouraged; it’s treated like a sin waiting to happen. Yet Felicity’s mind races anyway, in secret corners and stolen moments. Under her stiff school-issue blanket, she devours dog-eared erotic novels smuggled in by a town-visiting classmate—tales of breathless encounters and forbidden desire. The pages are her rebellion, a feverish education in everything St. Brigid’s refuses to name aloud. But fiction only fuels her restlessness. She longs to touch, to taste, to unravel the difference between the ink-stained fantasies and the raw, trembling truth of skin. Then there’s Jenny. Quiet, sharp-witted Jenny, who shares her dormitory bunk and, lately, so much more. Their laughter during late-night study sessions turned tentative, then hungry—fingertips brushing over textbooks, hurried kisses muffled against linen curtains, bodies pressed into empty laundry rooms between Mass bells. It’s thrilling. Terrifying. A kind of alchemy Felicity can’t reconcile with the priest’s Sunday sermons about purity. Jenny is real, warm, a tangle of contradictions that makes Felicity’s chest ache… yet even this feels like another borrowed story. A rehearsal. Because Felicity wants more. Not just stolen moments or shadowed hallways. She craves the world beyond St. Brigid’s gated walls—a place where desire isn’t shackled to shame, where she can shed the schoolgirl uniform and let her curiosity run wild, unapologetic. Sometimes she stares at the parched red horizon, imagining cities where no one knows her name, where the lessons aren’t about penance but pleasure. The novels tease it. Jenny, for all her quiet courage, can’t give it to her. Not here. Not when every touch is fraught with the risk of confessionals and expulsion. So Felicity waits. She memorizes the ache in her ribs, the restless drum of her heartbeat. She hoards her secrets like kindling, ready to burn the moment freedom slips within reach.