Chapter 1

It should have been an ordinary day. Just an ordinary day like any of the hundreds of others Alexandra Marie Johnson (Alex to everyone she met since about two hours after she was born) had spent at school in the 2/3rds of her life that she had been attending that institution. It began just like any other normal day, just as it was supposed to. But by the end of the day, her life had been irrevocably altered.

Alex Johnson's life up to this point had been incredibly prosaic. Well, pretty much anyway. Her intelligence was above average, her height just average, and as for her body... well, she was a jeans and a t-shirt kind of girl, and her clothes were generally baggy enough that her figure was a mystery to the outside world. She had hair that was a tawny golden shade of brown cut so it just brushed her shoulders, a pretty face that could have been just a touch thinner, and dark blue eyes that were carefully concealed behind a pair of glasses. She could have gotten contacts, but Alex didn't really see the point to contacts. They were a lot of trouble to go to just to see and you always had to fuss with them to make sure that they were clean and wet enough that they didn't stick to your eyeballs. Glasses, on the whole, were much simpler things to deal with - you put them on, cleaned them occasionally, and that was it. Glasses also offered the additional benefit of placing a veil between the windows to her soul and the rest of humanity. Alex was very fond of anything that put barriers between her and the rest of the world. Baggy clothes, glasses... whatever helped to get her noticed as infrequently as possible. The intelligence unfortunately got her noticed from time to time, but Alex was proud of her intellectual abilities and refused to hide it, even if it had the negative effect of focusing an uncomfortable amount of attention on her.

The day started out normal enough. Alex woke up and performed the usual chores she always did to prepare for school. A shower, a quick run of the blow-dryer on her hair, hair and teeth subsequently brushed, pajamas exchanged for blue jeans and a black t-shirt, and cereal poured with milk and eaten. It was a familiar regimen, one she'd performed so often that the whole thing only took about half an hour of her time. Then it was a quick look at the clock before she gathered up her book bag, jacket, and keys before heading out the door for class. She never saw her parents in the morning. She was an only child and her mother, Jan, was a nurse who left the house before Alex even woke up. Her father, Bob, worked the overnight shift at the post office and didn't even get home until after she left for school.

Alex didn't mind too much really, it gave her time to herself alone in the house that she relished and no one was subjected to her bad mood when she woke up. Alex hated mornings. The only time she ever liked mornings was when she either slept through them or when she saw sunrise because she hadn't been to bed yet. Plus, she had all the hot water she could use in the mornings with no one to complain. Alex needed her morning showers desperately. There was no better way to wake up in her opinion. Especially if she had to do the waking bit before noon. The soothing hot water flowing over her was relaxing and refreshing enough that when she got out of the shower, she was ready to face the morning.

After she locked the door behind her, she moved down the steps of the blandly unremarkable house and over to the transportation she depended upon to take her to school. Her tiny, aging VW Rabbit Convertible was her pride and joy. She loved her car, even with all the headaches it gave her. Sometimes it was inconveniently small, it had a distressing habit of leaking oil like a sieve, and it ate gas at a rate that astonished her, but she adored it. It was a lovely shade of hunter green, she could put the top down on nice days, but best of all... it was hers. She'd had it ever since she got her driver's license on her 16th birthday almost two years ago. It had been a present from her parents and she had been very careful with it. She'd never had an accident in all the time she'd had both her license and vehicle.

Once she coaxed her somewhat recalcitrant car into starting, she made her way across town to pick up Sean, her closest friend in the world. She had picked him up for school and driven him home every day since she'd received her car. She relished the few minutes of time she got alone with Sean every school day, and she certainly wasn't going to leave him to languish and suffer by himself on the long bus ride to class when she didn't have to do it. Sean Patrick Devlin lived in the shoddy, 'wrong side of the tracks' (although there were no railroad tracks going through town), section of the mid-sized Midwestern town they were both born in. He lived in a trailer park in a dilapidated single-wide trailer that was too small to comfortably house himself, his parents, and his two younger siblings.

His father, Patrick (there was a custom of the eldest son taking the father's first name as his middle one in his family), was a construction worker who worked hard and drank harder. He had red hair, hazel eyes, a veritable veil of freckles, and the famed Irish temper. This temper, in addition to the copious amounts of alcohol he consumed, made him frequently abusive to both wife and children. Sean seemed to frequently bear the brunt of his father's anger, perhaps because he was the eldest of the three children and had been around to be abused longer than the others. Most likely, though, it was because Sean looked nothing like his father. Instead, he looked like a near carbon (masculine) copy of his mother, Maggie. It was a handsome look - the black hair, verdant eyes, and pale skin that burned with remarkable ease. Sean was always slightly scruffy in appearance. He seemed to always have something askew in his attire. It was a perpetual part of his personality that was either endearing or annoying. His father found it particularly irksome and many of the beatings Sean had received in his short lifetime had been due to his father objecting to some less-than-perfect aspect of his appearance.

Sean, like his friend Alex, preferred clothes that were loose on his slender frame. In fact, he liked his clothes more baggy than she wore hers. They helped hide the bruises and it was less painful for him if his clothing wasn't constantly rubbing against his injuries as he moved. Sean was 18, but he hadn't yet moved out to escape his abusive household. He was patiently marking down the month and a half until his high school graduation so that he could escape to a college that was as far away as he could manage. He wasn't sure how he was going to pay for college yet, but he was certain that he wanted to go. Sean had briefly thought about joining the army in order to take advantage of their college benefits, but had rejected it due to his dislike of authority figures. His 18 years of experience with authority figures in the form of his father had made it impossible for Sean to willingly subject himself to the harsh control and structure of military life. But Sean was willing to do almost anything to find a way to college and away from his family, so he wasn't too worried about it. He had only stayed after his 18th birthday out of a sense of obligation to his mother and siblings and to earn money without having to pay for rent before college.

He was already outside and waiting for Alex when she drove up on the narrow road in front of his trailer. The more time he spent away from the house and his father's fists, the safer and happier he was. His father was slightly less likely to hit him while he was outside where the neighbors might see and report him to Child Services. Before Alex even came to a complete stop, Sean was beside the passenger's side door, waiting impatiently for her to unlock the car so he could get in. She did so after she completely stopped, remaining indifferent to Sean's impatient fidgeting in front of the door. After she finally did that Sean opened the door, threw his backpack into the tiny back seat, and sat down with a heavy sigh.

Alex turned to her best friend with a look of concern. That sigh hadn't sounded good. "Is everything all right?" she asked, as she began the maneuvers around the trailer park that would let her get back to the road.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he reassured her. "Just the normal stuff with my dad and everything, that's all." Alex was the only person he'd ever trusted enough to tell about his father's abuse. They'd been friends ever since the day they met in Mrs. Marshall's first grade class. She'd lost her pencil and was on the verge of crying when Sean offered to share his. Sean had no plans to tell anyone else of the abuse he suffered at home - he had no faith in the system that was supposed to keep him safe from abuse and was ashamed of telling anyone other than Alex, out of fear that they might judge him.

Alex gave a sigh of her own. She really wished she could help Sean and solve his family problems. She simply couldn't think of any way to get his father away from the rest of his family or Sean away from his father. She had simply resolved to wait. The day they both graduated from high school and went off to college was one that she was looking forward to almost as much as Sean was. She, too, was looking forward to going to college as an escape, not from an abusive parent, but from the town and landscape she'd seen every day of her entire existence. She was tired of the flat prairie grassland and the bitterly cold winters; she was ready for a change of scenery and pace. She had applied to a few colleges in California among others and was nervously awaiting the acceptance or rejection letters that were scheduled to arrive in her mailbox within the next couple of weeks.