Dear Wendy

by Ann Zhao

Genres: YA LGBT & Pride; YA Social Themes; YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

Dear Wendy's Sophie and Jo, two aromantic and asexual students at Wellesley College, engage in an online feud while unknowingly becoming friends in real life, in this dual POV Young Adult contemporary debut from Ann Zhao

Sophie Chi is in her first year at Wellesley College (despite her parents’ pleas that she attend a “real” university, rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aromantic and asexual (aroace) identities. She knows she’ll never fall in love herself, but she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at Wellesley. No one except her roommate can know that she’s behind the incredibly popular “Dear Wendy” account.

When Joanna “Jo” Ephron (also a first-year aroace student at Wellesley) created their “Sincerely Wanda” account, it wasn’t at all meant to take off or be taken seriously—not like Wendy’s. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Wendy’s account? Oops. As if Jo’s not busy enough having existential crises over gender, if she’ll ever truly be loved, and whether her few friends will find The One and forget her!

While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo grow closer in real life, especially once they realize their shared aroace identity and start a campus organization for other a-spec students. Will their friendship survive if they learn just who’s behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

Exploring a-spec identities, college life, and more, this platonic comedy, perfect for fans of Alice Osman’s Loveless, is ultimately a love story about two people who are not—and will not—be in love!

Release date: April 16, 2024

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Print pages: 368

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Sincerely SOPHIE


Giving love advice to the chronically heartsick students of Wellesley College is practically a full-time job.

When I started Dear Wendy last semester, I already expected it to take up a lot of my time. But in the months that I’ve been on Instagram anonymously answering my peers’ questions about how to navigate their love lives, I’ve devoted more and more time to this endeavor. Day after day, my mind is occupied with thoughts of how to advise dozens of strangers on their personal lives. I’ve even had a dream or two about it.

I’m crafting a response to my latest question when my roommate, Priya, says, “Hey, Sophie, look at this.”

Priya is still in her pajamas—a maroon T-shirt from high school that reads JOHNS CREEK GLADIATORS and a pair of checkered fleece pants. Her long, wavy hair is a mess, but her brown skin is annoyingly clear despite her total lack of a skin care routine. She looks absolutely indignant.

She hands me her cell phone, open to Instagram, on a profile page with three posts, all slideshows in Comic Sans.

I frown. “What am I looking at?”

“The profile,” Priya says, pointing at the username. “Look at the posts.”

I take it all in. The username is @wandawellesley69. The profile picture is the Wellesley W logo but distorted and discolored. The display name says, “sincerely, wanda,” the bio reads “dm your submissions!!!”, and the account has just over a hundred followers. I grab Priya’s phone from her hand, muttering, “Let me see,” and open the first post.

anon: my boyfriend keeps ignoring me every time i tell him that the way he talks to me makes me feel insecure. how do i tell him to stop???

And on the next picture in the photoset:

answer: omg dump his ass!!!!!!!!! get a partner who can treat you right!!!!! life is too short for you to be dealing with dickheads!!!!!!

The other two posts look pretty similar: an anonymous person asks a question, and the person presumably behind the account answers.

“Okay … well, this is weird,” I say.

“It looks just like your account,” Priya says. “Like, besides the aesthetic and the general attitude.”

She’s right.

Priya is the only person at my school who knows my secret. I won’t lie, it’s wonderful to know that so much of Wellesley pays attention to my advice. I’m used to telling people what to do—I am, after all, an eldest daughter—but with Dear Wendy, I think people actually listen because I’m a disembodied wall of text instead of a petite Chinese girl who sounds shrill if she tries to raise her voice.

This account looks like what would happen if someone with absolutely no sense of professionalism decided to try being me.

Aside from the fact that they’re calling themself “Sincerely, Wanda,” thereby making it very obvious who they’re trying to imitate—Wendy and Wanda are our college’s jargon for type A and type B personalities—@wandawellesley69 offends me because they seriously have no style. There isn’t much worse than Comic Sans on a blank white background.

“Oh my god,” I say, not really knowing how I feel about all this just yet. “Um. Yeah, that’s definitely like me. That’s—that’s so rude of them.” I glance at the clock in the corner of my computer screen. “Hey, it’s almost 2:15. Go to class.”

“I still have time,” she insists as she takes back her phone from me. “And besides, this is important. We need to know: Who’s Wanda?”

I roll my eyes at her. “Dear Wendy has over a thousand followers who don’t know her identity, so why don’t you put this aside for later and try not to be late to class on the second week of the semester?”

Priya sighs. “Fine. But we’re coming back to this.”

While Priya pulls on an acceptable outfit for her 2:20 P.M. English class, I turn back to my computer, to the response I’m supposed to be typing. This is an easy enough question to answer—just another person hesitating over whether their crush likes them or not. I start typing: I’ll admit, the line between platonic and romantic relationships can be pretty confusing—

“Hey, I’m going now,” Priya says, snapping me out of my thoughts.

She’s standing by the door, all bundled up in a winter coat that’s far too long and bulky for the late January weather. (Thanks, climate change.) Her hair pokes out from under a hand-knit beanie—I think her girlfriend, Izzy, gave it to her. She has a tote bag slung over her shoulder.

“Have fun,” I say. “Wait, are we doing dinner tonight?”

“Yeah, I’ll text you.”

She leaves and closes the door.

As soon as I look back at my screen, at the mess of words I just typed, I know I can’t focus. Sincerely, Wanda is on my mind.

I get up and walk across my room. After moving three potted plants out of the way—African violet Fernando, cactus Janet, and crocodile fern Ted—I have enough space to sit down at our window seat. Priya and I accumulated these plants over the course of fall semester, and it’s a miracle they survived in the care of our neighbors during winter break while we were hundreds of miles away—me in Illinois, her in Georgia.

I pull out my phone and look up the username. @wandawellesley69—how very creative and mature. I look through the account, reading the posts over and over again and trying to find some indication of what all this is about. Sincerely, Wanda is definitely trying to be … well … something like me.

I don’t want to start anything, but what exactly is going on?


CHAPTER 2Dear God, I Really Don’t Want to Answer a Sex ThingJO


Wendy Wellesley is a state of being. A mindset. The archetype of the perfect Wellesley student—a high-achieving, no-nonsense young adult of the twenty-first century.

That student who always gets called on by the professor? A Wendy. The one who actually eats three meals a day? A Wendy. Someone who reads nonfiction for fun? Definitely a Wendy.

So, you know … not me.

If anything, I’m a Wanda Wellesley: just trying my best to have fun and relax (most of the time). So that’s what I named the Instagram account I created a few days ago. Everyone knows about the Wendy/Wanda dichotomy, so everyone is going to know exactly what I’m trying to do here.

Funny that I’m getting followers now—lots of questions too—when it was originally supposed to be just one post.

It was all because my roommate Katy Murphy had the shittiest boyfriend to ever exist: Jason Wilmington-Montgomery.

Look: I always hate it when my friends date people. I hated it in high school, the way it made my friendships fluctuate endlessly. I hated it in middle school, when relationships barely count as such yet, because it simply made me uncomfortable. But when I say I hated Katy’s relationship with Jason, I mean it.

You can’t trust MIT frat boys, you can’t trust guys with J-names, and you definitely can’t trust guys with pretentious old-money last names (two of them, at that). Katy met him on Tinder in December. They became official just before winter break and dated through almost all of it—as it turned out, the two of them live two towns away from each other in New York.

The few weeks that they were together were torturous. For Katy, for me, and for Lianne, the third roommate in our triple-occupancy dorm room. We weren’t even on campus. Lianne and I experienced all of it through Katy’s frantic texts.

How do you describe a guy like Jason?

Frankly, he’s an asshole.

When Katy brought up her bisexuality, Jason insisted she was straight but “wanted attention.” After Katy pushed back against that, he started saying that it was “kind of hot” that she liked girls. He tried to pressure Katy to have sex when she didn’t want to yet. Every now and then, he made some vaguely racist comments, expecting Katy, who’s also white, to agree with him, and when she challenged them, he got mad.

She tried telling him that the way he treated her made her feel insecure and generally terrible, and he ignored her. After two weeks of dating him, Katy went back to her high school therapist for an emergency session.

Good on Katy for having her life together; I would’ve just wallowed in despair if I were in that situation. Not that I’d ever be, since I have no interest in dating, but all the same.

With help from her therapist, Katy was already making plans to break up with Jason when I came up with my Instagram idea last week, after we’d all come back to campus for spring semester. She never asked Dear Wendy for help since she’d gone straight to counseling, but I didn’t want her to miss out on the already-iconic Wellesley experience of getting advice from some random person who we all decided has the authority to tell us what to do.

It was easy to fashion a simple Q&A template. I made the two slides, created an account on Instagram, posted the images, and DMed them to Katy, saying “You’re welcome” and adding a silly set of emojis.

When she saw it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Thank you, I think.” I also showed it to Lianne, who responded, “You’re literally the worst. Do one for me.”

Katy broke up with Jason the next day. It’s been nearly a week now, and all is right in room STO-202.

I did end up making a post for Lianne as well, just so she wouldn’t miss out.

anon: i think i am extremely cool and sexy, so why don’t i have a girlfriend? pls help

answer: it’s funny how everybody at this school complains about being single, sees each other complaining about being single, and then you all remain single anyway!

It was funny. It made Lianne laugh, at least. But then Katy shared it to her story, and she has a lot of friends here, so the followers came streaming in.

My school is very different from most other colleges in America. Different, even, from most other liberal arts colleges. It’s part of the historically women’s college charm. (Not just a women’s college. We’re not all women here, despite what our administration often says.) Being in an environment where none of your peers are cisgender men really compels you to be your most authentic self, including on social media. Actually, especially on social media.

Sure, there are many official Wellesley Instagram accounts run by offices of the college. Most of our clubs and organizations have accounts too. But we also have a ton of weird anonymous ones. The one that tells you what ice cream is at what dining hall. The one that posts pictures of various patches of grass. Dear Wendy, the love advice account that only just popped up this year, is the one I modeled my account after.

At this school, as soon as you make an account, people find you. All it takes is one or two students following you to cause a massive ripple effect as the algorithm suggests you to anyone even tangentially affiliated with the college, which is magnified when you follow them back, which, of course, I always do, because that’s just basic internet etiquette.

Since then, I’ve been getting a lot of DMs asking for my take on people’s problems.

I talked it out with Katy and Lianne, and I guess I’m doing this. I’m going to run an advice account. I don’t want people to think of me as a replacement for Dear Wendy. More like … an alternative. A second opinion. Someone fun and honest instead of dead serious and oddly chipper. Someone who’s as much of a disaster as they are, instead of the poster child for the light academia aesthetic, which is outdated and uncool anyway.

I’m making a fourth post to put up. Someone asked me a sex thing, and dear god, I really don’t want to answer a sex thing, but I’ve already replied to their DM saying I’ll give it my best shot.

Except what are you supposed to say when a person tells you their boyfriend doesn’t want to wear condoms? I sure don’t know. I’ve never experienced sexual attraction, and I’ve certainly never experienced sexual intercourse.

There’s only one person I know who’s had sex with a guy before.

I look over at Katy. She’s sitting on our beanbag chair in the corner of the room, sketching on her iPad. Her headphones rest perfectly over her long, straight hair, a few shades darker brown than my curls, and she’s wearing a floral maxi dress that drapes loosely over her curves.

She looks so serene and comfy. I almost don’t want to bother her.

I do anyway. “Katy?”

No answer. Either the music is incredibly loud, or those headphones cancel noise better than I thought.

“Katy!” I say again, waving at her.

She looks up, alarmed, and removes her headphones.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“I have a question,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows. “What is it?”

I take a breath. I don’t know how to start this lightly. “So, you’ve had sex with a cisgender man before.”

What a great way to start a conversation, Joanna. Isn’t it fun to talk about your roommate’s sex life? I love having the knowledge that Katy has had other people’s parts touching her parts. Very cool. Very awesome. Couldn’t be me! I would not like my vagina to be seen in any context except medical. ...