Chapter One

I had been on the plane for about 2 hours or so. The attendant had walked by numerous times to offer us something to drink, but I was too antsy to think about drinking anything. Not to mention I had one of the terrible headaches I was famous for getting. It wasn’t that I was nervous, I’d moved before. That part I was used to. I was just terrified about moving to New York. I’d lived in some larger cities, but never a city like New York. Not to mention my mom’s job had her working nights. This meant I was at home, alone, for most of the time when I wasn’t at school.

Thinking about school made me nervous too. I couldn’t figure that out. I had gone to eleven different schools since kindergarten. So what made this school different? I didn’t know. It was a private school, with uniforms and the whole deal. It was much smaller than any other school I’d gone to. Which should make things easier, right?

I was 17; I should calm down, little kids worried over school. I needed to stop over analyzing things. It was a habit that I had struggled with for as long as I could remember. Usually though, everything I obsessed over, turned out to be something worthy of obsessing over. It was weird, almost like I had a 6th sense about bad things that were going to happen.

For instance, on my 6th birthday, my mom had rented a moon-bounce and invited all of the girls in my class at school, none of which were actually my friends. But I went through the day acting happy, because I knew that’s what my mom wanted. All of us were on the moon-bounce and I was having a decent time. All of the sudden I got a terrible headache. I went to sit at one of the picnic tables that were in the yard. My mom came to check on me and I tried to explain to her that I was really nervous about Dad. That I felt like something was going to happen when he came. She tried to calm me down; she tried to explain that my dad wasn’t coming. He was in New Jersey, in jail, where he belonged.

My dad, who used to live with us, had started hitting me and my mom. At first my mom didn’t say anything to anyone. She told me it was ok, that he was just stressed because of work. She said he would stop soon. He didn’t. He didn’t stop, and she didn’t get help, not for two years. By this time, my mom and I had bruises all over our body, but none on our face. He knew better than that. My mom finally got help, and they took him away. We hadn’t heard from him since, and by this time, my birthday, we had moved…again.

But I didn’t calm down, I started crying and I wouldn’t listen to anything she was saying. She called all of the moms and sent them home and tried to talk to me again. I kept telling her that he WAS coming, and we needed to leave. She didn’t believe me. I went to bed that night knowing he was coming. I knew it and I was terrified.

The next morning, after not closing my eyes once the night before, my mom fed me breakfast and was sitting down with a cup of coffee and the paper when there was a knock and the door. At that exact moment my head was throbbing and my stomach turned. It was him. I begged my mom to not go to the door, to sneak out the back. She didn’t listen. She went to the door and it only took half a second for her to realize it was him. She slammed the door and turned around and looked at me with fear in her eyes. I grabbed the phone from the table and we ran into the back bedroom’s closet. We called the police; they came, and took him away.

My mom, being the over cautious person she was becoming, decided we should move she he couldn’t find us. That didn’t work though. We moved and a year later he found us. He never actually got 

to us, but he always ended up in the same state as us. The police always reassured us that he wouldn’t get out again, but I knew that was a lie. He always got out.

To this day I don’t have a clear picture in my mind of what my dad looked like. Whenever I ask my mom she says I look exactly like him, which then leads her on to her rant about how “she carried me for 9 months and I look exactly like him.” But it’s not like we have any pictures of him either. My mom insisted we got rid of them the first time we moved after he followed.

So now we were moving to New York, in hopes that I could finish my junior and senior years in high school peacefully. I had my doubts.

The strangest thing though, was that I wasn’t nervous about my dad. This headache was because of school. I didn’t know what yet, but something bad was going to happen at school. It was only a matter of time before I figured out what.

Summer coming to a close meant that most of the people on the plane were families returning from vacation. The screaming kids crawling under the seats and running down the aisle weren’t helping the headache. I looked across the aisle and saw a guy about my age that was staring at me. I looked away quickly without meeting his eyes, my face turning red. An annoying character flaw I had yet to accept.

I could feel him still looking at me as I pretended to read my worn out copy of Pride and Prejudice. I didn’t want to look him in the eye. That would only cause trouble. I didn’t want all of that in my head on top of everything else. Whenever I looked someone straight in the eyes that was it. I knew them. I knew everything they were thinking and everything they’d ever thought. It was a lot to think about and I avoided it at all cost and that didn’t help when trying to make friends.

He was still staring at me as the pilot told us to fasten out seatbelts over the intercom. I gathered all of my things and stuffed them in my bag.

I hurried off the plane leaving my mom behind wondering where I was going. I walked into the warm airport and saw the guy standing there, only 2 feet from me. I almost screamed. Hadn’t I just left the plane in front of him? Our eyes met, three seconds passed, and my mind was flooded with thoughts, his thoughts. I hurried to focus on something else, trying to forget everything, something I’d almost perfected over the years. I quickly looked away, hoping he didn’t notice my red face that had betrayed me yet again.

I glanced back up to his face and saw him smile.

“Gemma,” he said still smiling, “It’s good to see you. We’ve been waiting.”

We’ve? What was he talking about? Who was he? I looked down and quickly tried to remember anything I’d just learned about him, but I couldn’t. Everything about him was suddenly a mystery to me. I glanced up to say something to him, but he was gone. I quickly scanned the section of the airport I could see hoping to find him, but I couldn’t find him.

“Gemma, are you ok?” I heard my mom call from behind me. I turned around and smiled.

“Yeah, sorry, I was feeling a little claustrophobic on the plane. You ready to go?”

“Yeah, let’s go. We need to get a cab.”

We walked to the front of the airport and stepped outside. I pushed my sunglasses down onto my nose as my mom tried to get a cab. I could tell living in New York was going to be an adventure to say the least.