High school senior Maya, soon to be an MIT student, continues her deceased mother's work on pheromones and attraction, using a stranger, a platonic friend, and her ex-boyfriend as subjects.
When Marisol, a self-confident eighteen-year-old lesbian, moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work and try to write a novel, she falls under the spell of her beautiful but deceitful writing teacher, while also befriending a shy, vulnerable girl from Indiana.