Why Is 'Apathy And Other Small Victories' Controversial?

I was nineteen the first time Cole Whitfield broke me. Not with cruelty. With a single word. Why. Not did you — why. Like the answer was already settled and he just wanted the story to make sense. I told him the truth anyway. He said nothing that mattered. So I picked up my bag, walked out of his apartment, and decided that a man who trusted a rumor over two years of me wasn’t worth a correction. I spent the next two years becoming someone I actually liked. New city. Graduate program. A published paper with my name on it. I was done with Cole Whitfield in every way a person can be done. Then I walked into Seminar Room 114 and he was sitting right there, gray eyes already on the door, like some part of him knew. I sat down. I opened my notebook. I did not look up. Here’s the thing about studying how people form beliefs: you understand exactly why he believed it. That doesn’t mean you forgive it. That doesn’t mean two years of silence disappear because he’s learned how to look at you like he’s sorry. He wants a conversation. I want my degree. But the campus is small, the seminar table is round, and the boy who broke my heart at nineteen is doing everything right at twenty-one — and I’m starting to understand that composed isn’t the same thing as healed. I hate that I still know the exact sound of his voice.

She came to campus to disappear. He rules it without trying. When silence meets fire, something has to burn. Maya Chen has one goal at Crestview State University: remain invisible. A guarded first-year Software Engineering student, she's learned the hard way that closeness only leads to pain. After a public betrayal in high school, Maya keeps her head down, her grades high, and her heart locked away. Idris Vaughan is everything she avoids. Final-year Architecture student, campus debate champion, and magnetic in ways he doesn't have to try. Beneath his confidence, he's suffocating under his father's expectations and a reputation he never asked for. When Maya challenges him publicly, she doesn't fall at his feet like everyone else. And that unsettles him.

Anthony Seymour couldn't wrap his mind around it. He was the one who'd saved them. And yet, in the end, they kept pushing him away. They toyed with him using false confessions, treated him as someone else's stand-in, and left him gravely injured. He never got so much as a scrap of the good fortune he deserved. Instead, after one emotional wound too many, he developed a disorder that stripped away his ability to feel, and little by little, he lost all attachment to the world. Then, one day, Anthony made a decision. He would end his life, and when he did, he'd use his own organs to save seven others. That would be his final goodbye to the world. From that day on, he began searching for strangers who needed help, using death as his purpose and his method of choosing who to save. But once word got out, the very women who'd once hurt him came flooding back, begging him through tears not to die. Anthony, who'd already lost every last one of his emotions, only found it puzzling. After everything that had happened, he wondered—what were they even crying for?

After transferring to an isolated private Academy on his best friends request, Jason steps into a world he never expected to be in. Dealing with flirty teachers and students is a normal occurrence and one he's been good at forever because all his life he’s distanced himself from the illusion of love. Until he meets her. The Aloof Mystery Student. Never before has his resolve been tested in such a way and he finds himself disturbed by her presence and the strange familiar calmness she brings him. Are the strings of fate being mischievous? Could a teacher x student relationship be his downfall? For as long as Atlas could remember, her life's been a series of hurdles and vast walls she had to overcome. After the death of her Grandmother, she's thrown into a game orchestrated by her selfish father. She must fight not only the hatred of her brother, but the disapproving adults all around her. Meeting the annoying Jason Fairchild throws everything off the rails and she finally finds herself. Together, they stand a greater chance to overcome all internal and external wars they've been fighting. Will they be victorious or succumb to the harsh fates that have been written for them? Only Silence will tell...

Yasmine Silva gave everything to Leo Quinton over fifty years of marriage. After he was injured on a mission and left disabled, she left her respectable and steady job as a TV station host to stay by his side and massage his legs every day. He said he never wanted children. She endured ten miscarriages and was left unable to have any. Even then, she never once complained. Everyone said Leo was blessed to have a wife like Yasmine. It was only after Leo passed away that Yasmine, who had cared for him all her life, learned the truth. To him, she had never been a blessing. She had only been a burden that kept him from his wife and son.

Hate You Until I Don’t Ave Carter swore she’d never speak to Blake Monroe again—not after he humiliated her and destroyed their friendship. But when they’re forced to partner for a school competition, old sparks ignite beneath the bitterness. Enemies, ex-best friends… and maybe something more. In a school full of whispers and second chances, can hate turn into something worth risking again?