Prologue
I swear, if something else goes wrong today, I am going to throat-punch the next person I see, I thought as I turned to see my best friend walking toward me. Well, maybe not the first person I see.
“Bre, why are you soaking wet?” Callie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I decided to get out of bed this morning?” Things like this happened to me all the time. I was just trying to get some water from the drinking fountain and it wasn’t working. I tried and tried and as soon as I was completely frustrated and about to give up, it came shooting out like a cannon. Now I was completely soaked. Several other students had been around to witness my personal shower of humiliation.
Unfortunately, this was not unusual for me. My entire life had been filled with awkward, and most times unexplainable, situations. My name is Breanna Hunter and I am a magnet for crazy. Not just crazy situations, but crazy people, too. One day last summer when Callie and I were hanging out at the lake, a homeless-looking guy wandered out of the woods and just stood there staring at me. We decided to leave after about fifteen minutes of this, when he came up to me and said the weirdest things. He rambled on frantically about how he had been waiting for me and I would save our people. What in the world? We quickly ran to my car and left. A few weeks later, I was at a local coffee shop and someone abruptly turned around and ran right into me with a very hot cup of coffee. We collided and the coffee should have ended up all over me, but for some strange reason it ended up all over them. It seemed to bounce off of me and back onto them. They had to go to the hospital with second-degree burns. Yes, this was my life, and it had been for as long as I could remember.
I was so glad to make it to the last day of my senior year, as high school had not been kind to me. Being five foot three with plain, straight brown hair, you would think it would be easy to go unnoticed. I tried to keep to myself, but it never seemed to work out. I consistently wound up in the middle of some catastrophe and there always seemed to be several witnesses. At least I had my best friend Callie. She made high school bearable. She was my sanity. Callie was short like me at five foot four, but we were completely different in looks. She had beautiful, light brown skin with jet-black hair; she got her looks from her Japanese parents.
Callie and I had been best friends since elementary school. I was the weird kid that no one wanted to be friends with, and Callie had just moved here from Japan with a funny accent that no one could understand except for me. We hit it off on the first day we met and had been best friends ever since.
I had just finished my last final and was ready to get out of there. Callie and I were heading to the local spa for mani-pedis. I had been looking forward to it all week!
As we walked down the hall toward the parking lot, I asked, “How do you think you did on the Chemistry final?”
“Good, I will probably end up with a B in that class. But it doesn’t matter, because we have already been accepted at Appalachian State. North Carolina, here we come!”
Callie and I were heading to the same college. We both wanted to get out of the Midwest and decided on the mountains of North Carolina. I was looking forward to going somewhere no one knew me or the insane things that happened to and around me. I couldn’t wait to start over somewhere new.
As we stepped off the curb into the parking lot, I felt a chill run down my spine. I suddenly had the overwhelming feeling someone was watching me. A sense of dread immediately overtook my entire body as I frantically looked around to find who was causing it, but no one seemed to be paying me any attention. I looked to a group of students huddled near the gym entrance, but they just seemed to be talking to each other and weren’t even looking our way. A couple of teachers near me were discussing their plans for the summer. Everywhere I looked, I couldn’t see anyone even acknowledging our existence.
“Bre. Bre!” Callie yelled and snapped me out of my panic-induced trance. I looked at her bewildered face with wide, scared eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. I just had an eerie feeling that someone was watching me.”
Hand on her hip, she said, “Well, they can watch us leave to get mani-pedis. Let’s go!”
Callie and I finally reached my car and got in. I was lucky enough to have a pretty sweet ride. For my seventeenth birthday, my parents bought me a brand new Mustang GT. It was solid black with a tan interior. I loved it. My dad owned the local Ford dealership, so I got to pick out anything I wanted. My car was my baby. My parents wouldn’t let me have pets and I was an only child, so I bonded with my car. Yes, I knew that was weird, but it was beautiful. I even talked to it sometimes. I had not gone so far as to name it, but I was thinking about it. It would definitely be a girl name and very badass.
“High school is finally over!” I yelled to Callie. We high-fived and started toward the spa. The two of us chatted about the upcoming summer and how we wanted to decorate our dorm room. Callie wanted pink everything, but I hated pink. I was more of a navy blue kind of girl. We were about a mile away from the school when Callie unbuckled to grab her yearbook from the back seat.
“I have to show you what Ian wrote me in my yearbook. I think he might actually like me,” Callie said. She had been in love with Ian since middle school. He was a cute, but quiet guy. I told her hundreds of times to just go and talk to him, but she never did. She was talkative and outgoing with me, but like me, she tried to stay out of everyone else’s way.
She was leaning into the backseat to grab the yearbook when, out of nowhere, a red pickup truck abruptly changed lanes and hit us head on. I had no time to react or try to get out of the way. One minute, he was in his lane driving normally, and the next he swerved into my lane and hit us head-on. I screamed as my face slammed into the airbag.
Dazed, I saw the deflating airbag in front of me, but could only hear ringing in my ears. It took me a second to comprehend what had happened. I reached up and felt a small bump on my forehead, but otherwise felt okay. I turned to Callie and asked if she was okay. She was still half in the front seat and half in the back. She didn’t answer me and I could see that she was covered in blood. Shit, I forgot she wasn’t buckled in. Oh no, no, no. Callie! She had to be okay. She was the only one, besides my parents, who cared about me. She understood me when no one else did.
“Callie! Callie! Callie!” I screamed her name over and over again.
She never responded.
She never would.
My best friend was dead.
My heart was broken.