For two best friends desperate to escape their dead-end town, a viral online persona becomes a dangerous game of control in a twisting psychological thriller about class, power, and identity.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Charlene Wang’s I’ll Follow You, which releases on October 1st 2025.
Faith and her charismatic best friend, Kayla, always vowed to escape their trailer park together. After their social media persona, Hannah Primrose, goes viral, their fates seem more entwined than ever. But when Faith is accepted into prestigious Harkness College, she must decide whether to keep her promise to Kayla or learn to tell her own story.
By the time Faith arrives on campus, Kayla is no longer speaking with her. Struggling to fit in with her wealthy classmates, Faith reinvents herself, drawing the attention of her enigmatic art history professor. Then Kayla shows up outside her dormitory one night. I need to stay with you.
Having Kayla on campus is thrilling—and dangerous. Posing as a student, Kayla charms everyone she encounters, and soon enough they’re posting together again. Hannah Primrose, after all, is perfect for a place like Harkness. But as Faith risks her future for the persona she helped create, she begins to realize that Kayla is playing a deadly game…and it may be too late to regain control of the narrative.
Kayla and I always said we’d get out of Gator Park together. It was the promise we made to each other, back when we thought promises meant something. Now, as an adult, when someone tells you—I promise I’ll call you back! Or Promise we’ll go someday!—you just roll your eyes. Promises, after all, are just stories—stories of how we see ourselves, stories of how we think the future should unfold. And in the story Kayla told over and over again, it was always us together.
LA after graduation. Roommates in a run-down apartment in a good neighborhood, where most of our rent went toward having a good sushi spot within walking distance. Sometimes the details changed—New York instead of LA, bagels instead of sushi—but our roles stayed the same.
Kayla was the architect of our futures, the getaway driver. I just pumped the gas and filled the tires.
For so long, I stuck to my plot beats as the sidekick. Only once, as a joke, did I ever bring up what to Kayla was the ultimate betrayal: Leaving Gator Park without her. Leaving her behind. I can still see her now: The pure gleam of fury in her eyes. The rubber band snap of her Bubblicious gum. Over my dead body, she swore. Over my dead body you beat me out of here first.
Now, after all these years, after everything that has happened, Kayla’s words haunt me. Last night, at a party in a city thousands of miles away from Gator Park—a city Kayla would never live to see—her words taunted me in the mirror when I caught my reflection. My eyebrows shooting up in surprise that it was me there with all these checkmarked names instead of her. That in the end, I did what I did.
Over my dead body. In that chillingly astute way of hers, Kayla had been right.
***
The first time I met Kayla, I was twelve. There I was in the back office of Gator Park’s property management office, counting the rent that the lady in lot 57 had paid in ones and fives, listening to my uncle, Randy, explain on the phone that no, we weren’t the one located in Florida, and no, there weren’t any actual alligators, when in walked the new girl who’d driven from Biloxi last night with her mother. Randy had stayed up late to check in Gator Park’s newest long-term residents, who carried with them a whiff of seedy glamour. Biloxi was only six hours away on the Gulf Coast, but it might as well have been the Caribbean to me back then.
“We need two sets of keys made,” the girl announced in a queenly tone. This made me both hate her and like her in equal measure.
“Right behind you.” I nodded toward the corner of the office, where a key-copying machine was maintained as a courtesy for the residents. It flashed $10 for 1 KEY, 2 for $15! across the screen. Then I returned to counting while keeping the corner of my eye on the new girl, who’d sauntered over to the machine and begun jabbing at the buttons on the screen.
She wore denim cutoffs and a blue-paisley bandanna that she’d repurposed as a halter top. It showed off her tan lines—something that struck me as impossibly adult.
At the time, it should be said, I was going through a massive upheaval in the friendship department. Eunice Lee, whose father ran the Chinese grocery in town, had been my best friend since kindergarten, but I’d gotten restless. All we did was do our homework together, sometimes sneaking episodes of Gossip Girl on her mother’s iPad. But I didn’t want to watch dangerous games of social deception; I wanted to live them. When I tried to explain it to Eunice, she just gave me a funny look; it was the same look she gave me for months after my mother died. Things got more and more strained, precipitating The Incident at Eunice’s twelfth birthday party, i.e., her bursting into tears and telling me not to come over anymore. We hadn’t talked since.
The girl gave one last yank, a long curtain of red hair falling in front of her face.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I called out: “What’s Biloxi like?”
Kayla looked up coolly. “The beach sucks. But the casinos are pretty cool. Brenda was a cocktail waitress at the Beau Rivage, so they always let me in.”
Now I was double-impressed, having worked out that Kayla called her mother by her first name. “You have to put money in,” I told her, flustered by the silence that followed. “It doesn’t take cards.”
Kayla’s face flickered. “Do I look like I have a card? Do you have a card?”
A nervous giggle escaped my lips. “No.”
Kayla glanced at the cash I was counting. Then, as if we both just knew before the other had said anything, we looked back at Randy, who was still on the phone.
“What if you gave me a five?” she asked, her voice low and amused.
I stared at her. “This isn’t mine,” I said.
She laughed, as if that wasn’t the point at all. “C’mon,” she said, and there was that dangerous coaxing tone I’d come to know so well over the years. “You’ve never once thought about it?”
***
I ended up slipping her a twenty that day. She got her two keys made, and with the leftover cash we bought two Cokes and a packet of Sour Straws and ate them while sitting on the curb outside the Circle K across the highway, our tongues turning cherry red as we drew the judgmental stares of the Baptist ladies on their way to church. It was easy to laugh it off with my new friend, this dazzling girl. But as soon as I got home, I went into my piggy bank, where I’d kept all the money I’d saved up helping Randy out, and counted out twenty dollars. That night I put it back.
I didn’t care that it fell to me to clean up after Kayla. Twenty dollars seemed a low price for what Kayla was offering me: danger, excitement, that electric charge of possibility beyond the dusty edges of our trailer park. But over time, the messes I’d be stuck cleaning up would get bigger and bigger. Breaking open my piggy bank wouldn’t be enough. It would take all my nerve and cunning and wits to be Kayla’s accomplice, to help her get away with whatever she set her sights on.
And the summer we turned fourteen, it would nearly take my life.
Copyright © 2025 by Charlene Wang. From I’LL FOLLOW YOU by Charlene Wang. Reprinted by permission of Mindy’s Book Studio, a division of Amazon Publishing.
