The New Kid Code · Book 1
The New Kid Code
Maya has rules for surviving a new school. Rule one is don't let anyone get close enough to miss.
Also free to read with Kindle Unlimited.
- Series
- The New Kid Code · Book 1
- Readers
- Ages 9–12
- Genre
- Middle grade fiction · Realistic fiction
- Formats
- Kindle · Paperback
- Published
- June 12, 2026
- Pages
- 196
- ISBN
- 979-8180909398
About this book
Maya Reyes knows how to be the new kid. She has done it three times. Study the classroom. Find the safe lunch table. Stay useful, stay friendly, and keep your heart somewhere it can't get left behind. She calls it the Code, and it has never failed her.
Then her family lands in San Antonio for her dad's next assignment, and the Code starts coming apart. Someone refuses to let her be invisible. Someone else notices what she is actually doing. And Maya has to decide whether a system that has kept her safe for four moves is worth keeping if the price is never being known.
A funny, warm, quietly sharp story about moving, military-family life, and the particular courage of letting people in when you already know the calendar.
Book One of The New Kid Code.
For readers 9–12
A quick check for the parent, teacher, or librarian deciding. Book One is the one for a child about to walk into a school where everyone already knows where they sit.
What it is about
- Moving and starting over
- New schools and first weeks
- Military-family life, from a kid's eye level
- Friendship and joining in
- Belonging, and what it costs to hold back
Reading order
Each book stands alone, but Maya's Code grows across the series.
Read the first pages
Chapter One: 1,604 Miles
The state of Texas was enormous.
Maya had known this in a general, map-class kind of way, but knowing it and sitting in the back of a rental van watching it refuse to end were two different experiences entirely. They'd been driving since Dallas — three hours of highway now, give or take, with two still to go according to Mom's phone — and San Antonio still hadn't appeared. Just more Texas. Flat and dry and sun-bleached in a way that made everything look slightly faded, like a photograph left on a windowsill too long.
She had her earbuds in, but she wasn't actually listening to anything. She just found that earbuds made people ask fewer questions.
“That's a lot of cows.” Marco had his nose against the window, breath fogging the glass.
Maya looked. There were, in fact, a lot of cows.
“Mhm.”
“Do you think they know they're in Texas?” He fogged the glass again, deliberately.
She considered this with the seriousness it deserved. “Probably not.”
Maya has rules for surviving a new school. Rule one is don't let anyone get close enough to miss.
Also free to read with Kindle Unlimited.