Prologue.
...
"Restless hearts-"
She fingers the frayed linen handkerchief in her hand tenderly. She found it in the basement once, while searching for a clue to her mom's identity.
It's her one connection to the mother she never knew. She was probably some teenage trollop who abandoned her for money.
The moonlight streams into her room, and she gets off her bed and walks over to the window to look at it.
She identifies with the moon. It sits in it's bed of stars, isolated, alone in a crowd. But it shines brighter than all of them.
Hearing some commotion below, she lowers her gaze to watch the dark silhouettes of some of her drunken peers stumble into a car parked across the street.
One of the downsides of living near the coolest girl in school is that she's constantly accosted with the harsh reminder of her unpopularity. The fact that she doesn't have a single friend.
And why would anyone ever want to be her friend anyways? For reasons she might never understand, she's unlovable.
Even her own mother didn't love her, and sold her without a second thought like a cheap commodity.
Feeling a tear trickle down her cheek she uses the pale piece of cloth to wipe it off.
She wonders if things will ever get better. If there will ever be a light to the end of this dark dark tunnel known as high school.
Sometimes it seems as if the only thing she really has is her dreams.
But lately, living in her head, living in the future, living in fantasy, isn't helping fill the void as well as it used to.
She wishes that for once in her life, she could know something, feel something, real.
Maybe she just needs to find whatever it is that's missing.
...
"-sleep alone tonight."
He stares at the yellowing baby blanket in his hand.
It's his one connection to the father he'll never know. The hero whose blood courses through his veins.
He looks at his watch. The glowing digital numbers tell him it's just after 1 am.
He's still buzzed from playing too much beer pong at another pointless house party at his girlfriend's house. Sitting on his bed, he wonders if this is all there is to life. If this is all there's ever going to be.
He looks at the moon glowing brightly outside his bedroom window. When he was younger, his dream was to be an astronaut. Mostly because he's always been a little bit in love with the moon...
He likes that it's really pretty in an odd unreal type of way, and the way that its white moonbeams make everything in the night a little brighter, but most of all he likes that it's so strange and wonderful and so different from everything else that it almost seems magical.
He's too old for dreams now though. There's no room for them in a place like Lima.
The adults he knows around town always tell him that his high school years will be the best of his life- to enjoy it while he can.
He wonders if these are really the golden years. If this is all he's ever going to amount to.
Sometimes it seems as if the only thing he has that sets him apart from all the other losers in this place is the memory that his father fought and died for something he believed in.
But lately, even that's just making him feel more worthless.
He wishes he could be that brave, lead that type of life.
Maybe he just needs to find something worth fighting for.
...