Chapter 1

I went down to the beach, one summer’s day. The sky was bluer then I had seen it before. The sun shone so bright, I could feel the rays on my skin. I picked a spot next to the life guard tower and lay down my towel and throw my back pack in the sand next to it. I striped down to my Trunks, applied the tanning lotion and just lay there letting the sun do its thing.

It felt good to get out of the house for a couple of hours; my parents had been at each others throats lately, arguing about nothing. The tiniest thing could set them off, take this morning for instance, I woke up at ten thirty to the sound of my mother throwing a plate at my dad, to witch my dad retaliated to, by throwing some choice words back. I was sick of it. This was to be my last summer holiday before going away for college and it was fast becoming the worst of my life. James and his parents had gone to Rome, Jon was visiting his girlfriend in New Castle and Leon’s dad forced him to get a job so I was all alone for the summer.

As my mind wondered I thought about how my family got into the mess its in now. The problems started spring two years ago, my older brother Kevin ran away from home, he was 19 and just left, didn’t say good bye didn’t leave a note. My mother was frantic until, later that year we got a call from an Inspector Dean of Scotland Yard he informed us that Kevin had been found, dead, in a crack house in London. That was the beginning of the end for my family. I wasn’t too upset by the news of my brother’s death, don’t get me wrong, I loved my brother, but I hated him so much, he was a prick. He had been a jock at school, on all the sports teams; he was popular and loved by all the kids, the girls wanted to date him and the boys wanted to be him. But then the worst thing that could have happened to him did. He graduated, his grades weren’t good enough to go on to higher education and he couldn’t hold down a job, his longest was two weeks in McDonalds. He went months just scrounging off my parents and then things started to get worse, He started drinking, and when he had been drinking he got violent, and when he got violent he took all his pent up anger out on me. I had black eyes, bruises all over my body, bloody noses and all that, but my parents defended him, they said he was only upset because he had no job. That was why I was happy that he left, I didn’t want him dead but I didn’t care that he was out of my life. Unfortunately after the funeral thing got worse, my mother became depressed, my father a drunk and my younger sister a death obsessed Goth. I was the only one who stayed normal……………as far as I could tell.

I started to drift of to sleep, as I lay there on the beach. I didn’t get much sleep at home, what with the arguing and all. I tried to forget about my troubles and just let myself fall away in to a dream world, but that was when my life was about to take a whole new turn. “HEADS!” I heard a girl yell. I opened my eyes in time to see a ball come flying straight at my chest. ‘That Hurt’ I said to myself as I sat up. “SORRY” the voice yelled, I turned to see where that voice had come from. The sun was directly behind her, so it took a few seconds for my eyes to focus, but as they did my mouth dropped. Right there, before me, standing on the beach, was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I knew from that moment the summer was going to change.