Amy Keller cries in her sleep. She doesn't realize she does it. She wakes up with tears on her face, figuring she has allergies and her eyes watered. But you can here her sobs as she dreams of sadness. Maybe if her parents listened closer, they'd also hear her cries. But they don't. And in the morning, Amy would wake up and put on a cheerful face, and act excited about going off to school. Her clueless parents would ignore any sign of depression. Amy would go to school everyday, and keep her head and eyes low. No one spoke to her, no one ridiculed her, no one really knew she was there. She was your run-of-the-mill good student, she had so much time to study, because she had no social activities to make time for. Amy would come home from school everyday, and go straight to her room, and write for hours. She wrote thousands of stories, some short, some long, some not even really having a plot, just words and ideas flowing off her fingertips.

"Writing's where I store my soul," Amy would say, "It's an extension of my being."

She would graduate in the summer, and she had been anti-social up until her junior year. Amy didn't want it this way, she longed for a friend, but she couldn't see eye-to-eye with anyone that she ever met. But she found one, in the most unlikely place.

It was Mark Leary, Amy's thirty year old next door neighbor, who would befriend Amy and bring her out of her shell.

"Amy's not the kind of person who should be in a shell," Mark used to say, "She WANTS to talk to people, she just....can't."

When Mark and Amy were introduced at a block party, they hit it off and became fast friends. Amy opened up to Mark, and she started to show her true personality.

Mark and Amy were complete opposites. Mark was a single guy, fun-loving and adventurous. He's immature, funny, daring, and somewhat oblivious to reality. Amy is emotional, mature, sweet and sensitive. She's generally misunderstood, and she's extremely impressionable. They even looked completely different, Amy with her short black hair and big blue eyes, and Mark with his spiky brown hair and deep dark eyes. Amy was tall and pale, and Mark was medium height and tan. They both had playful smiles and hearts of gold.

Mark changed Amy's life. Who knows what path she would have taken had Mark not come into her life. Quiet, shy Amy changed when she met him. She became more talkative, speaking rapidly. It was as if years of thoughts all poured out of her at once. She was open to new ideas and thoughts, and more willing to try new things than she was before.

Amy went over to Mark's everyday after school, rarely stopping at her own house first. Mark was home a lot, seeing as he was a musician, and had random gigs. He played a whole lot of instruments, but prominently the guitar. He taught Amy how to play the drums, and they formed a mini-band, with Amy on drums and writing lyrics, and Mark joked about going on tour after Amy graduated, but Amy had her heart set on college.

Amy was a bit worried that when she left New Jersey to attend college, that she and Mark would drift apart. She tried not to think about it too much. Mark always told her to live in the moment.

Amy thought that her last summer before college would be an uneventful one. She thought she'd hang around with Mark and do nothing. Little did she know this summer would change her forever.