Odette Xanders was a sixteen-year-old girl living on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Her great great grandparents had moved here in the roaring twenties. Since then the native people had come to respect the Xanders. Now, in the year two thousand and two, Kauai was the least prosperous it had been since the Xanders had moved. After 9/11 people were scared to fly, and therefore did not vacation in Hawaii. The tourist trade had just started back up, but it was going slow. It was a lot more prosperous and beautiful than before they had come, though. Back to the point.

Odette was a very down to earth teenager, but she also knew that some situations required a joke. She resented being named after the fairytale Odette, but otherwise loved her name. The only things that Odette loved more than swimming in the ocean were gardening and brewing. Even though she spent hours in the saltwater and the sun, Odette’s hair never bleached. Her hair was the same almost black brown as her eyes. Her skin tone was somewhere between the ‘ideal’ tan and her mother’s permanently pale skin. Around her neck, no matter where she went, hung a crystal with just a couple gold impurities.

Right now Odette was covered in sweat, plants, and goo. She had been making homemade medicines. Odette finished bottling the Aloe Vera. She went to shower. As she came out of the bathroom and walked down to the living room, clean, her parents yelled up the stairs, asking what she wanted to do tomorrow, it being Saturday.

Odette replied, “Why don’t we go to the Glass Beach. In all of my sixteen years, we haven’t gone there. When we get back, you two can go have a date while I mark those medicines.”

The next day, they drove to Port Allen, and found the Glass Beach. The first words out of Odette’s mouth when they saw it were, “This sucks. Let’s go home.” The beach was right next to a chemical plant, and on the ridge to her left was a graveyard. A creepy, not very well kept, graveyard. She really wanted out of here. “We can stop by the fast-food joint and I’ll get ice cream instead.” With that they were back in the car, driving the one and three-quarter hours back to her home. When they got back, Odette’s parents, whose names were Wade and Bernadette, dressed up to go to a fancy restaurant.

When they left, Odette was back in the medicine lab, labeling and putting dates on everything that she had done yesterday. Around seven, there was a knock on the door. “Just a minute!” she called, putting her marker down. The knocking became more urgent. Odette walked quickly to the door. There was a cute boy a couple years older than her standing in the front door.

His jeans were tattered. His shirt had been torn of, which had been a good idea, because his whole torso was covered in second-degree burns. Odette looked back at his face. He was panting. Then she saw that he had fangs. This stranger was a vampire.