Prologue

June was always the hardest month for Aiden, though he'd never admit to it. The moment the days passed into July, he suddenly felt inexplicably lighter, and remained in such a good mood even when school had started and it began to get colder. It was only when the month became more near and less far off that he began to mope about again, and became that unpleasant antisocial personality that most people who met him instantly labeled him with.

It was not as if it were one of those strange quirks that many people seemed to discover, as if it were something he had seen on TV and unconsciously applied to himself. Nor was it biology, a natural development of his body. Aiden wasn't that sort of person. He was, at the very least, genuine in his oddities, and his genes were, as he was often reminded, perfectly pristine. The source of this problem, however, had always hovered just beyond his reach, so there was never any hope to solve it. Finally, rather than live such a bipolar existence, and being unable to force good cheer when he honestly had none, he decided to simply live the life of a bastard, and everyone who knew him from then on couldn't stand him.

Aiden Didier, as he is called by those who have never met him, grew up in the country on the shores of Lake Marauder, which no one has ever heard of because that was the name Aiden gave it. He spent many days on the rocks at the beach, as a child and a teenager, learning obscenities from the grizzled fishermen who drifted past in their little rusty boats, wandering home after dark smelling like dead carp and alcohol. His favorite days were the chilled ones, where the wind blew up cool mists and fog shrank the world, so he could stand on the beach and see only a few feet of sand to three sides, and the gently lapping waves to the front, before the world faded into white. It seemed almost as if the places he had known all his life were gone, and he was in some bizarre new world with no idea how he'd arrived there.

It was ideas like this that made him so thoroughly unpopular, though there was no one who would deny his popularity. He had an imagination coupled with such longings that it had eaten into his schoolwork and social life, so that his grades and friends suffered greatly, one of which he abandoned and the other which eventually abandoned him. Still, there was no one who would turn down a date with such a pretty face if he had ever decided to ask for one, and his bad grades never bothered anyone but his mother and father.

His parents, who had wanted a girl, or at least a child who's first words weren't so colorful, were never very pleased with him. As an infant, he cried too much, and as a child he was over active. As a teenager he shut them out completely and accidentally sank their speedboat. It seemed that, the older he got, the less happy with him they were, so it was little surprise that when he announced at his high school graduation that he wanted to be an actor, his mother promptly fell over, dead on the spot. Aiden, never one to let other people's opinions affect him, attended his mother's funeral and left home for L.A. on the same day, a warm one, in June.