In the Orbit of You is a YA story of enduring love from acclaimed author Ashley Schumacher, where a personality test reunites two friends and makes them second guess their careful plans.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ashley Schumacher’s In the Orbit of You, which releases on March 19th 2024.
It’s been years since Nova Evans last saw Sam. She was too young then to understand why he had to move away―and what it had to do with the cuts and bruises he got from home and never wanted to talk about. All she knew is that they promised to find each other when they were older, something she thought was impossible thanks to her and her mom moving around constantly. Until she bumps into Sam in her new school, and realizes he has clearly forgotten their childhood promise.
Sam Jordan has a plan for his life: accept his college football scholarship, date his girlfriend Abigail, and―most importantly―hide how much he wants to do something, anything other than The Plan™ his parents and coaches have set before him. It doesn’t matter if sometimes he finds himself thinking about the new girl he met in the cafeteria, a girl who reminds him of a past that hurts to remember.
When a school-wide personality test reveals Nova and Sam to be each others’ top matches―not only that, but a match of 99%, the highest in the school―they begin to remember why they were such close friends, all those years ago. As well as the myriad of reasons this new-yet-familiar, magnetic, sparkling thing between them will never, ever work out.
In the Orbit of You is a story about the enduring and changing nature of friendship, of the strange struggle between who you are and who you want to be, and finding your voice after trauma.
I know that everybody staring at me as I walk into the lunchroom—the most high-stakes entrance for a new kid—is sizing me up, but for once I’m not formulating who I want them to see, how I want them to react.
I don’t want them to react. I don’t want to be perceived at all.
Because this is going to be my shortest stint yet, just under two months, and I’m not going to try out any new personas. Partly because of he-who-shan’t-be-thought-of from my last school, near Seattle. Because I’ve been too busy pushing the pieces of my broken heart around in my chest to figure out which Nova Evans I want to try on next.
And also—most importantly—because I’m tired. I’ve never tried coasting at school before, just getting through, not making waves, simply … being me, whoever she is.
God, that sounds cheesy.
But college is knocking, and if I can’t figure out who I want to be, where I want to go, I’m going to continue to be a pattern breaker, but not the good kind.
Mom was a first-generation college student. My grandparents didn’t even finish high school, dropping out their senior year. Education has always been super big to my mom.
“I don’t care where you go,” she’s always said. “So long as you go, get in, get out with a degree that means something, something that will earn you a secure income.”
It’s the secure-income thing that is really tripping me up. Because so far, from what I can tell, my only strengths are chameleoning from school to school and knowing how to pack my boxes exactly the same way every time (if I bother unpacking them at all).
How am I supposed to know what will (a) make me happy and (b) make me money when I’m not even sure how to tell the difference between what I actually like to do and what I “tried on” or did just to fit in at all my previous schools?
I went to a career day last year where the principal made this speech over the feedback of the cheap microphone. It was hard to make out with the chatter and the mic acting up, but I heard her last line loud and clear: “You might not be able to turn your hobby into a career, but if you can figure out what part of your hobby calls to you most, what part of it makes you tick, you’ll have a clearer avenue for what you want to do with the rest of your life.”
I’m pulled out of the chaotic jumble of my brain when I feel too many lunchroom eyes burning into the back of my chosen first-day-of-new-school outfit: jeans, a T-shirt from a bookstore I visited once in Michigan, and my super-comfy-but-not-actually-great-for-sports sneakers left over from my athleisure phase three schools ago.
Even though I’ve resolved to simply exist for the next two months, I still have to find somewhere to sit. What I really need is a corner seat with no one around, but this cafeteria is too small. I can see mismatched chairs pulled up alongside the plastic ones attached to the long skinny tables. It’s one of those schools where the infrastructure is stretched to the max to accommodate everyone, which leaves me nowhere to hide and nowhere to sit without making a statement.
I end up on the far side of a table of football players—I hope the only statement I’m making is trying to not intrude. Their letterman jackets and general demeanor of being gods of the school are part of another predictable pattern, and these guys are no different. Loud and boisterous, even their lunch trays sound amplified when they thump them on the table. Nobody seems to be paying attention to the noise, though I catch a number of people looking toward them like they can’t help but watch the minutia of school celebrities. I swear I see a girl walk closer, like a comet drawn into a planet’s orbit, before she corrects her trajectory and walks away.
It’s refreshing, actually, that no matter where I go, jocks are king: hockey, basketball, football—it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same when they sit in groups in cafeterias and have adoring entourages around them at all times.
But at least I can count on them not speaking to me, thank god.
Maybe if I was in my “hot-girl summer” outfit from two schools ago they’d care, but I might as well be invisible for all the attention they pay me.
In a flash, I can see how the next two months will go: I’ll sit and read a book or scroll on my phone during lunch. In between classes, I’ll say hello to the one or two people who have deemed me interesting enough for small talk, but otherwise I’ll float through the day, do my assignments, and go home to … I haven’t figured out that part yet, but whatever it is, I’ll be doing it alone while Mom finishes up her twelve-hour workday.
I can see it so perfectly—and it’s a comfort, the whole coasting-while-figuring-out-a-hobby-and-life-direction thing—that I almost don’t notice when he sits beside me.
At first, I don’t see him at all. He’s handsome, sure, but lots of boys are handsome. He’s not a pattern disruptor. He’s stereotypically cute: curly darkish hair, brown eyes, tall, the kind of broad-shouldered that is probably half genetic, half a result of lifting weights.
I’m about to look away when he smiles at something one of the other boys says, and it makes me pause. There’s something about the way he smiles, a curve of the mouth that makes every cell inside me feel like it has been electrocuted at the same time.
I hardly know this feeling. It’s one I almost never have in a life that has been a rootless, patchwork existence of places and people I won’t ever see again.
It’s recognition.
And just like that, every plan, every persona, every me flies out the window and I am dragged—fingers clawing at dirt and hours and grains of sand in an hourglass—across space and time to an old oak tree, a broken wooden fence between his house and mine, and a pit of snails that we named Snailopolis.
Sam Jordan.
From In the Orbit of You, by Ashley Schumacher. Copyright © 2024 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
