Chapter One
Saying Goodbye
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"What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know when I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse."
Catcher in the Rye, J.D Salinger
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Lola had never really been a big fan of her step-mother Amy and Amy had never been a big fan of her step-daughter Lola.
Amy thought Lola was "a spoiled, attention-seeking drama queen who revels in other's misfortunes and who has her father wrapped round her little finger" (Amy had confessed such thoughts to her sister on the eve of her wedding when she had found Lola had died her hair blue just so her green bridesmaid's dress would look ghastly on her). And Lola just hated Amy for taking her daddy away.
There was no love lost between the two and even though it had been 5 years since they married, and Amy had given Lola a little brother (who she adored by the way), things still weren't any easier between the two of them.
So when Lola's friend Jessie had asked her to spend Christmas with her hometown of La Push, Lola had jumped at the chance.
She was upset to not be spending Christmas with her dad and her little brother Eli, but seeing as Christmas in the McQueen house that year was being spent at Amy's parents, who never liked Lola anyway, she realized it was a sacrifice she was willing to make. She was 21 now, an adult, so should be living her own life anyway.
She had promised her dad that she would back at university in February and she promised Eli the biggest best Christmas present ever, and so they let Lola go to La Push, not knowing that she would find her home and her destiny in this small reservation in Washington, and by doing so she would be lost to them forever.
As Lola stepped on the plane from England to La Push, how was she possibly to know that this small visit would change her life forever?