The Top Student's Whimsical Playbook

At Ace High, an elite academy that admits top scorers on full scholarships, a brilliant orphan enrolls with one goal: survive on the money and whatever the school's garbage dump offers. She collects discarded bottles and luxury castoffs, counting every dollar, while the wealthy students around her mock her strange habits.

When a red-haired girl warns her that naïve girls do not last, she simply asks for the empty bottle. She soon meets Wesley Chance, a fellow special admissions student scavenging the same scrap piles, and the two become uneasy allies. Then a humiliated classmate, Bruce Felton, becomes her first paying student, and she begins selling tutoring sessions in secret.

Poor, proud, and sharp, she has no intention of being swallowed by the system. But the elite school has its own rules, and its students have families and resources she can only envy.