They Wish They Were Us meets The Queen’s Gambit in this “stunning…unforgettable” ( Publishers Weekly ) thriller set in the world of competitive Scrabble, where a teen girl is forced to investigate the mysterious death of her best friend when her Instagram comes back to life with cryptic posts and messages. CATALYST 13 points noun: a substance that speeds up a reaction without itself changing When Najwa Bakri walks into her first Scrabble competition since her best friend’s death, it’s with the intention to heal and move on with her life. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to choose the very same competition where said best friend, Trina Low, died. It seems that even though Najwa is trying to change, she’s not ready to give up Trina just yet. But the same can’t be said for all the other competitors. With Trina, the Scrabble Queen herself, gone, the throne is empty, and her friends are eager to be the next reigning champion. All’s fair in love and Scrabble, but all bets are off when Trina’s formerly inactive Instagram starts posting again, with cryptic messages suggesting that maybe Trina’s death wasn’t as straightforward as everyone thought. And maybe someone at the competition had something to do with it. As secrets are revealed and the true colors of her friends are shown, it’s up to Najwa to find out who’s behind these mysterious posts—not just to save Trina’s memory, but to save herself. Hanna Alkaf is the author of The Weight of Our Sky , Queen of the Tiles , The Girl and the Ghost , Hamra and the Jungle of Memories , and The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s , as well as coeditor of the young adult anthology The Grimoire of Grave Fates . She graduated with a degree in journalism from Northwestern University and has spent most of her life working with words, both in fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Kuala Lumpur with her family. Chapter One CHAPTER ONE Friday, November 25, 2022 One Year Later INERTIA seven points noun feeling of unwillingness to do anything Most people play casual games of Scrabble in their living rooms, squabbling good-naturedly for points over sets their parents bought them in the hopes that it would be “educational.” No, actually, this is a lie. Most people probably barely even think of Scrabble at all, and the sets they do get wind up gathering dust in the very backs of shelves and cupboards, forsaken in favor of games like Snakes & Ladders or Monopoly or Clue or Twister. You know. Fun games. The tournament circuit is a different world. Here, people play Scrabble as a game of probabilities and cunning strategies, a math problem to be solved. Here, we carry around reams of paper crammed so full of words it looks like they’re teeming with ants; we recite anagrams with such rapid speed that each syllable hits you with the force of a bullet; we can tell you the most probable combination of letters you’ll get on a rack (it’s AEEINRT, for the record) with which you can score a bingo—that is, to use up all seven letters at once and earn an additional fifty-point bonus. Here, we never stop thinking about Scrabble. For most of my peers, words are little more than point-amassing units, each tile merely a stepping stone for building high-scoring pathways to victory. For me, the words aren’t just points: They’re the whole point. I collect them, hoard them like a dragon hoards its treasure, reveling in their strange, alien meanings, the feel of them in my mouth. The words are how I process the world. People like Josh say I waste precious brain space clinging to their definitions. “There are one hundred eighty thousand possible combinations of letters you need to know,” he told me once. “Caring about what they mean is beside the point.” But how can you not? Take AEEINRT, for instance. Picture each letter in your head—the reassuringly symmetrical A, the graceful curve of the R—and rearrange them in your head, over and over again. Most people will settle for RETINAE or TRAINEE, but why go for such clumsy, obvious choices when you have the delicate wonder of ARENITE, a sedimentary clastic rock? That gives you the equally lovely CLASTIC—those bookending hard Cs so satisfying as they roll off the tongue—which means composed of fragments, and to FRAGMENT means to break into pieces, and that’s what I’m doing right now, aren’t I? Sitting here in the driveway of a generic three-star hotel, falling apart. “What are you so afraid of, Najwa?” my mother asks. She’s trying for a gentle tone, but the note of impatience that she can’t keep from sneaking in kills that vibe. My mother has a fondness for things that endure: Birkenstock sandals, melamine dishes, old and usually racist actors who never seem to die. Tough things. Unbreakable things. She likes them low on maintenance, high on durability. This is not me: One year later and I’m still a mess. Tiny things send me into panic spirals. I lose things. I forget things. I walk from one place to another and the