Chapter 1

I glanced away from my video game for a second to pick up my cellphone when it started to ring. I looked at the screen only long enough to notice that it was my best friend Lars Wilton calling.

"Hey," I said simple, propping the phone up between my cheek and shoulder. I took a moment to wipe the sweat from my palms before picking the controller up and turning most of my attention back to the game. It was the newest installment in the Modern Warfare game and I was playing online at the moment.

"You still coming over tonight?" he asked. Lars and I had been planning a sleep over for about a week now. Our parents didn't mind too much as long as we didn't do it to often. It wasn't like we caused much trouble anyways. We mostly stayed in the bedroom and played video games and ate pizza. Tonight wasn't going to be any different. I preferred Lars' house, he had a huge TV in his room. It was much easier to play co-op on it than the little one I had.

"Yeah, of course," I said. I flipped joysticks on the controller, trying to duck into a building before an enemy players bombardment found me.

I didn't make it.

"Fuck!" I cursed at the TV.

"What?"

"Oh nothing, I just got raped by an air strike. My fucking teammates need to learn to not die. I'm sitting here with 15 kills and 2 deaths and my closest teammate has 7 kills and 10 deaths. I'm the only one doing any work on this team. Hey, why aren't you on right now? You should be helping me out."

"Ah, I had to do some homework. My mom's been getting on my ass about my grades. She told me today that if I don't improve she is gonna start limiting my Xbox time or take it away completely."

"Dude that sucks," I sympathized. I really hoped my mom wouldn't do that to me but unlike Lars I was able to keep my grades up. "I told you I could help you with the work any time you needed it. Fuck dude, we take half the same classes anyways."

"Yeah I know I just hate doing all that crap. Anyways, I didn't want to have to do any work while you were here so I took care of all my chores and homework already too."

"Awesome, are we doing anything tomorrow?" I bit off a curse as I took more damage, the screen going red and pulsing in a virtual imitation of pain. Fortunately, I didn't die this time. I ducked through a building, ran around the corner and came up on my attacker from behind. He was dead a moment later. My enemies didn't seem to be that great but I was cursed with morons on my own team.

"Yeah, my dad offered to take us down to play laser tag. Do you think you could bring like $20 for that?"

"Ah, sure," I said. "I'll have ask my parents before I head over but I'm sure they will lend me some this time. Hey, is Eva gonna be there?"

"Umm, I'm not sure. I don't think I heard her say anything about going out. She's probably gonna sit in her room and listen to that shitty music and cut her wrists or something. Why do you ask?"

To be honest I had a bit of a crush on his sister, Eva. She was actually his stepsister since Lars' mom had married Eva's dad a few years ago and she was a year younger than us. I don't think Lars knew or even suspected that I liked her and I didn't really want him to know either. They weren't the closes of siblings, even compared to other stepsiblings.

You see Lars was a bit of an athlete. He wasn't in any super popular sports like football or basketball. He competed in Track and Field so he was built lean and wiry. I was always a bit jealous of his athleticism but my body and temperament never ran in that direction. I was always much more comfortable in front of a computer. Nonetheless we both loved video games and much of the time we spent together was in front of the Xbox.

Eva, on the other hand, was unlike either of us. While I dislike using labels, it's a little hard to describe her without doing so. You see she is a bit of a ... well a Goth. Now I'm not talking about Marilyn Manson style or anything extreme like that but there isn't really any other easy way to describe her and she certainly wasn't emo or into wrist cutting as Lars had sarcastically said.

She had long black hair that was so black it gleamed blue and shimmered when she moved. I sometimes wondered if she actually had dark blue highlights but I'd never asked her. I rarely ever talked to her at all, just saying the occasional 'hi' in passing. Her eyes were large and vibrant blue and seemed to pop out of her face, hypnotizing, like an anime character's. Her skin was very pale and completely smooth and flawless. I felt like I fell in love with her again every time I saw her, which was often since I was over at Lars' house three or four times a week.

Lars tolerated her because he loved his mom and thought his stepdad was an all right guy but he had never grown close to her or tried to bond in any way. They were just too different to find any common ground together. It didn't help that she felt like Lars and his mom were taking away her freedom. Before they'd come into her life there'd been a lot less rules for her to follow. They mostly avoided each other and because of this I'd had very little interaction with her. I mostly just saw her from afar, catching glimpses of her as she walked into or out of her room. I don't think I'd ever seen her smile, which always made me a little sad for her. I always wondered why she didn't have anything to be happy about.

"I don't know, I was just wondering who was all gonna be there tonight."

"Um, just the usual I think." He paused, thinking. "Yeah, I don't remember hearing anyone say anything about being out tonight."

"Alright, I'm gonna head out in a few minutes and bike over to your place. See you in a bit."

"Awesome, see you then." I heard the call end and released the phone from its position on my shoulder, letting it fall to my lap. A quick glance at the clock let me know I had time for another match or two before I'd have to get ready. I turned my attention back to the game in time to catch someone darting around a corner in the distance. I whooped as I scored another point for my team.

Lars' house wasn't to far from my own but it still took me about fifteen minutes to bike there. Fortunately it was flat the whole way. We lived in a small city in the suburbs of Esterbrook, Oklahoma, creatively named South End. Since it was in the Great Plains of the US the whole area was pretty much flat as a board. If you stood on the one hill in town you could see all the way to the towering banking buildings and the neon signs that adorned their tops in the Esterbrook city center a number of miles away.

I had to ride through what passed as downtown in our little parish, past our meager high school, and behind the one supermarket within an hours drive, before I got to Lars' neighborhood. It was pretty much the same as mine except that the houses all had a slightly different look.

This whole area had been built up after a company in the nearby city struck it rich during one of the recent Internet booms a number of years ago. A number of other firms had sprung up to cash in on the company's success. The city of Esterbrook and the surrounding towns had been built to attract the upper-middle class families that came to the area looking for tech jobs. However, when someone had realized that no one actually wanted to live near Esterbrook and TeliTech, the tech firm that had attracted so much attention in the first place had decided to pack up and move out to Silicon Valley where all the real action was happening, the hype of the area had dropped off significantly.

Needless to say, after the cost of moving here, my parents couldn't afford to sell their house for so much less than they had paid and move again. My dad had been forced to take a job at the local steel mill a half hour away rather than the website design job he'd gone to school for. My mom had followed a few years later when I had started junior high school, deeming that I could be trusted to walk from the bus stop to the house by myself. She had picked up a waitressing job at a 24-hour restaurant just off the major highway that passed through our town on its way up through Esterbrook and beyond. It was a popular little eatery, just outside the city to be quite but close enough to the highway to attract much of the truckers that passed through.

Lars' parents had been a little more fortunate than mine. They'd moved to the area sooner than my parents and had both managed to snagged tech jobs with the new companies that had sprung up to fill the void left when TeliTech had moved. These companies hadn't offered the most lucrative careers but they did supply a need for the locals that kept them in business but only just. As such, both of Lars' parents had needed to stay on with their jobs even after they had merged their households together.

Both our parents tended to work long hours to support their families in this area and so they typically didn't get home until around seven in the evening. It was almost five when I pulled up to the Wilton's house. The driveway was empty. I parked my bike outside next to Lars' and knocked on the door.

"Eva get the door," came a shout from inside.

There was a reply that I couldn't quite make out and then the sound of feet moving quickly over a wooden floor. The door swung open suddenly and Lars, red faced and breathing a little harder than usual, moved to let me in.

"Sorry dude, fucking Eva wouldn't get off her ass to open the door for you."

"It's cool," I said, stepping through the doorway to get out of the warm September heat. The a/c felt wonderful after the long ride over here. Eva was sitting on the couch in the living room as we passed on the way to Lars' room. She was watching some cartoon and ignored us.

"Hey Eva," I said, smiling towards her. For a moment I thought she was going to ignore me but she turned and gave me a long look before returning to the cartoon.

"She's such a bitch sometimes," Lars said. I didn't respond, not wanting to make him any angrier by contradiction him. They had their differences and nothing I said was going to change that. I followed him to his room. He had already set up his Xbox and we sat down and immediately got into a game of Call of Duty, trying to break our old difficulty record through the missions.

"So did you ever talk to that girl, what was her name ... Chelsea or something?" I asked Lars. He had a crush on some cheerleader that kept coming to his races but he hadn't, as far as I knew, gotten up the nerve yet to talk to her.

"Casey and ah, no, not yet. I'm waiting for the right time, you know? Besides, I hear she has a boyfriend."

"Hey! Just because there is a goalie doesn't mean you can't score," I teased.

"Says the guy who's still a virgin," he retorted.

"Fuck you," I turned my gun on him in game and shot him before we could complete the mission. An enemy NPC popped over a wall and finished him off. "How do you like that!"

"Ah fuck dude, we were almost done with the mission," he swore. We could have continued and maybe we would have beaten one of our records but after killing him the time quickly ran over and we had to restart the game.

"Let's not do that again," I said, glaring at him. We jumped into an online match, backing each other up as we blasted through a sea of faceless zombies.

"You're the ass that started it," he responded.

"Your the ass that made a comment about my virginity. You know I hate that."

"Well whose fault is that?" he asked. "If you want to get a girl you need to put yourself out there and try at least a little."

"Oh yeah? Is that why you haven't talked to Chelsea?" I bit out.

"Casey," he glared at me. "And I don't want to get involved in a spat between her and her boyfriend. Better to just wait until she breaks up with him."

"You know she's probably waiting for you to show some interest in her before she leaves him. Why would she leave him if she doesn't know she's got another one lined up already? Teenage girls are to fragile to handle rejection like that." I wasn't an expert in dating girls, I'd never dated one myself, but it seemed obvious that if she came to his races and did the things he said she did that she must like him. It was just as obvious to me that she wouldn't leave her boyfriend if she didn't know Lars' feelings for her. Sometimes infatuation can keep people from thinking straight, I suppose.

"I just don't want to mess anything up with her, you know?"

"Whatever, hey, if you think I should go out there and talk to girls, maybe I should go talk to your sister." I knew he wouldn't like the idea but I enjoyed digging into him every now and then.

"Ew gross. She probably has some disease or something," he spat in disgust.

"I doubt it. She's only had a few boyfriends and her last one, Tommy, said she wouldn't put out at all." I'd kept up with her social life as much as I could. It wasn't difficult amidst all the gossips in high school. Everyone seemed to want to know the latest with everyone else, thinking it would give them power or prestige or something.

"So what makes you think she would put out for you? Your not even her type, not by a long shot."

"Dude, I'm so her type. I just need to put on some black, maybe some fangs or something. She's into that Twilight stuff right? Besides, maybe she's just waiting for the right man," I joked. I'd seen a copy of Twilight laying around the house once but I'd never thought she'd be one to get into all that sappy vampire stuff.

"Oh right, and I suppose your that man?"

"Sure fucking am," I flexed my scrawny muscles, kissing each bicep in turn. Lars laughed at my antics. "I've got a regular old immortal physic here."

"Whatever dude." The match we were playing ended, both of us scoring highly, and Lars put down his controller. "Let's get some pizza now, I'm starving."

"Sure, we going to ride to get it?" I asked.

"Na, it's to hot out there."

"Sure is," I pulled my cellphone from my pocket and dialed the number for Pizza Hut. I put in our order for two large pizzas, one pepperoni and one sausage. We joked around for the next fifteen minutes until the pizza arrived. Lars used some of the money his parents had left him for dinner and we sat down at the table to eat. Eva walked in a moment later and I got my first real look at her tonight as she loaded up two slices of pizza on a plate.

She had on a dark blue and black dress that was bound around her waist and flowed down to the tops of her knee high leather platform boots. The boots had about two inches of soul under them and were edged in silver studs. The laces were red and black and laced up through gleaming silver eyelets. The dress showed off her arms and dipped low across her chest, showing a bit of pale cleavage and the fact that she was not wearing a bra. Her dark hair gleamed as she moved under the dim lights of the dining room, flowing about her shoulders like water over a fall.

"Be careful sis, that pizza will make you fatter. I mean fat," Lars snickered. One of his favorite ways to tease her was about her weight. She was a very healthy weight, a bit on the slim side in fact, but nowhere near the skinny that the popular girls tried to be. None of them would ever be caught eating a slice of pizza much less two. I admired her for this but Lars liked to tease her since his tastes in women tended to run towards the anorexic.

"Dude leave her alone for a bit," I said, frowning at him. I knew he enjoyed making fun of her but it was starting to annoy me and I felt bad for her every time he did it.

"Fuck you poser," Eva said to Lars, it was the first thing I'd heard her say today. Her voice was deep for a girl and raw and throaty, like she didn't use it much. 'Poser' was her favorite insult towards Lars. It put him on edge every time she used it since she liked to insinuate that he wasn't quite the popular jock he pretended to be. "And I don't need you defending me either dweeb. I can handle my asshole stepbrother on my own." If she ever spoke to me, she usually referred to me as dweeb thanks to the fact that I was taking the hardest classes and had the best grades of the three of us. It wasn't like either of them was dumb, quite the opposite in fact. Lars was more concentrated on his running than school and Eva ... well she listened to a lot of music and tended to stay to herself at home and her small clique of goth friends at school.

I blushed, embarrassed that I had jumped to her rescue when she had neither needed nor wanted it. Why did she always make me feel this way? In a whirl of black and blue cloth she turned and left the room. Strangely enough her boots made hardly a sound on the wood floor and I thought I saw her glance back at me over her shoulder but I couldn't be sure since I was more concentrated on the sway of her hips and the way the fabric of her skirt swirled as she walked, flipping up to allow fleeting glimpses of her fishnet stockings.

"Dude, what the fuck was that," Lars asked me after she'd left, snapping me out of the trance she'd left me in.

"What?" I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about. I was getting a little annoyed with his attitude and the pizza was going cold.

"You defending Eva. Why the hell did you do that?" he demanded. I should have known he'd be pissed at me for that but I'd felt bad for her and I'd wanted to protect her.

"Sorry dude, I'm just a little tired of you ragging on her all the time. She seems sad to me. How would you feel if someone treated you like that all the time?" I wasn't trying to provoke him but it seemed to have that effect.

"She brings it on herself," he almost yelled, a glint of anger in his eyes. Maybe he fought with these questions himself. "Do you see the way she acts? The way she talks? How she does nothing to help out around here? She's pretty much begging to be made fun of with that crazy get up she wears all the time. And those boots. It's all just a pathetic mask she wears to make people think she's all tough and shit." He was getting louder and more worked up. I wanted to calm him down before he embarrassed himself. Also, I didn't feel like riding home this late at night. Besides, I didn't think he'd take it to well if I tried to explain that I thought his reasons were simply excuses he used to make himself feel ok with messing with her.

"Whatever dude, I just don't think you should do that. I mean how would you feel if she actually did go and cut herself?" I said instead, hoping a douse of reason would mollify him.

"Good, the world would be rid of her and maybe my mom wouldn't have to bust her ass so much to support this family."

"That's not even funny and you know it. Stop trying to act all tough, you'd feel awful just like any other sane person."

"Shut up, I hate the bitch and you should too," he snarled and lurched angrily from the table, storming off to his room. I heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway over the noise of Lars slamming his door. It was almost seven; the car was probably his parents coming home from work. A moment later the front door opened and they walked in together. Kevin and Cindy Wilton came home together most nights they worked together since their office closes at six o'clock.

"Oh hey Stevie. How are you doing tonight?" Lars' mom, Cindy, asked when she saw me at the table, eating the pizza.

"Good, how are you doing Mrs. Wilton?" I answered pleasantly, schooling my features so as not to give them any hit of the fight we'd just had.

"Oh, the usual. Tired from work and all. Where are the other two?" she asked as she took her shoes off in the entryway and pulled her hair back. Mr. Wilton kicked his shoes off, nodded to me and went on up to their room. He wasn't much of a talker.

"They're both in their rooms, they kinda had a little fight," I said sheepishly, pushing the whole incident onto them. It wasn't unusual in this household.

"Again?" she asked, rolling her eyes. She walked over to the table and picked up a pepperoni slice. It was still warm enough that the cheese stuck to the slices next to it and she had to pull it apart, lumping the cheese on top of her slice and licking the grease from her fingers. I took a second to watch her tongue dart out to clean her fingers and wondered briefly what Eva would look like doing the same. I smiled as I realized whom Eva got her eating habits from.

"Stevie?" Cindy's voice brought me out of my daydream and I blushed when I realized she was watching me.

"What?"

"Oh you're so cute when you space out like that," she teased me. "I asked if you guys were finished with the pizza."

"Oh, ah," I looked down at the boxes, there was about half left of each pizza. "I should probably take another slice or two to Lars but I think we are finished besides that."