a poet and hopeful-future-writer, raised a trailer park trash dropout and obsessed with the morbid and mundane.when he was a tiny child, he had an imaginary friend named symphony who started to act more and more frightening over time before disappearing.later, due to their family's mistreatment and their lack of social skills, they started to hang out online to avoid loneliness. they reconnected with their childhood friend huxley, who is happy to meet them again but acting... strange.she soon begins to think a serial killer is hacking into huxley's account. she talks to the killer, and their conversations get increasingly friendly, personal, and reckless until the killer in question shows up at harlow's trailer and whisks her away to a roadtrip of violence and horrible games.the killer eventually reveals itself as a shapeshifter, orchestra, once her friend symphony.quiet, paranoid, and emotionally dependent, harlow is too self-sacrificial and self-loathing for her own good. her love and fear towards orchestra get in the way of protecting her friends until she realizes just how much danger they're all in. however, seeing the beauty and good in everything - no matter how ugly - is both her strength and greatest flaw.

quite the intelligent pianist, dancer, and mathematician, lilith aims to outsmart the shapeshifter and any other problems that stand in her way.when she was too little to remember, her father died in an accident. she only knew him by the photos around her house - and one day, when she's still very young, the man in those pictures knocks on her door.he claims he never died in the first place, but makes her promise to keep his visits a secret, saying she'll "understand it all someday."and she does.over the years, he visits regularly, playing chess with her, making her lunch, helping her choose her name when she transitions (at the end of the story, she decides to change once more, to lilian). but over time, he gets a little careless about sticking to the story, and she figures it out.the man who walked in that door was not her father, and not even a man. it is a monster, and it has been training her to help it.she fights it, and is stubborn with it, but still completely fascinated by it, wanting to learn more about its origins and life. but she has to put aside her intrigue when the kid she used to babysit, harlow, gets involved.lilith is high-strung and detail-oriented, wonderful at picking up new skills by observation. she struggles with some social skills, and putting priorities in the right places, but she lends as much time and energy to her friends as she can to tell them that they matter.

a multimedia artist and animator who went to kindergarten with harlow and is currently awaiting his acceptance letter for art school.when he and harlow went on to the next grade, they ended up in different classes and did not see each other much until after she dropped out.before junior year, his boyfriend, asad, moved out-of-state, and they both decided a break from their relationship might be helpful. soon after, another boy started flirting with huxley, and they entered a mess of a rebound relationship.it started off nicely, just fun and sweet, until the rebound started to ask about asad. about harlow, about other weird details of his past. hux brushed it off, took it as a sign to reconnect with harlow, but soon began to wake up in places he didn't remember.surprise, surprise, his boyfriend was orchestra all along. (see the running theme here?) huxley's body was possessed and used as a vessel to hurt people, and a means to contact harlow.while lilith has brains for days, huxley is typically the common sense one of the group, as he is orchestra's newest target and most grounded in reality. he's laid-back and friendly, always a close comfort to those around him. unfortunately, he sometimes gets so caught up in the moment that he forgets to actually act.