When someone is born, you gather a great sense of what they are. They will grow and be funny, athletic, intelligent, beautiful, but you never know how they are going to act. Nobody could have guessed that Alexandra was going to be a werewolf. Or a vampire.

I guess you could say that I am unique in a few ways at the least. I adore school, I love to learn things and put my knowledge to the test, as well as show my creativity in different forms. My mom says that I have this 'creative energy', and that she can see it in my 'aura'. But, after all, she is a hippy. What can you expect? Class A nutcase she is.

My father abandoned us when I was six, apparently he had 'important business' to attend to. He never came back. The night he left, he told me he loved me, twice. He read my favorite books to me, all three of them. I thought it had been wonderful! To me, it was extra story time, he must not have known that I had eaten his strawberry cupcake earlier that day. But as the days went by, my mother got sadder and sadder, until she started getting these strange, dare I say it insane thoughts.

My father leaving pushed my mother to the brink of insanity and back. She started to believe in mythical creatures; vampires, werewolves, and so on. She started to search the histories of vampires specifically, and the spiritual relics that came with them. She joined a group of vampire hunters. Yes, that is what I said, vampire hunters. I know that this is just her way of being the over- protective mom, and I like that. Not many people can say, "my mom is trying to kill vampires for me", with a straight face.

The strangest part is that sometimes she will send me these sideways glances, and shake her head with tears in her eyes. Like I am terminally ill. You know, those looks that express, "I can't help you. I love you, but I can't help you. no one can help you now."

When she sends me these looks, I can not help but feel angry. It makes me feel odd, strange, like my mother thinks I don't belong with her, but instead in some hospital, with a warden watching me, day in and day out. A few weeks ago she bought a pistol. She is a very gentle, kind, and peaceful woman, but she would protect her daughter above all and everything else, which frightens me more then it is comforting me.

But anyways, the bell just rang to signal the end of the school day. Today also just happens to be Friday, which is great. The first place I go on Fridays is Cole's. that's right, I am fifteen years old and spend my Friday nights at the bookstore, and loving it.

I usually go with my friend Valentine. Now, when I say best friend, I don't mean best friend in acronyms like BFF or anything ridiculous like that. I'm talking about hardcore like, played in diapers, dieted together when we were twelve, and I was with her when she used to cut herself.

She started cutting when her father called her a freak. I remember the day fully. "You're a freak," he had shouted accusingly, ignoring the frightened looking, thirteen year old companion. "You shouldn't even be alive. You were a mistake, that's why your mother left. She fled from you hideous face. You supernatural freak of nature. You shouldn't even be alive!" and the hatred in his voice had brought her to tears. She wept and wept and wept for days. There was no stopping her. She didn't actually start cutting until the day after I left her house. She is my next door number, when we were younger, she lived to the left of me, but now she lives on the right side.

Her father's sister had lived on the right said of us, and when she heard the news she took Valentine in immediately. I had left her house late Saturday night, and heard her screaming on Sunday morning. This was around the time that my mother started behaving strangely. Valentine had found her father, cold and un-breathing on the kitchen table. His throat was slit deliberately and jaggedly, by someone strong and forceful is what the police were saying. He was found on the table with a note nailed to his forehead, it read, "what's for breakfast?" Yes, who ever did it was masochistic indeed. Valentine took it before the police were called. She still has that note in her dresses drawer, underneath all of the socks and what not.

She believed that her dad didn't mean what he said, and I believed that too. He was just stressed, tired, and angry, not at Valentine though. I don't think that he meant to take it out on her. She has the picture of him, her beautiful mother and her sitting in her dresser, on top of the bloody note.

She has been very sick lately though, and I worry about her. She stopped cutting, she realized that it was not her salvation. We have shared our good and not so good times, including when we accidentally ripped a book in Cole's and had to sneak it into the bathroom and use soap and toilet paper to glue it back together. We sat there for an hour trying to repair the torn book. We had been play fighting, her holding one end of the cover, and I the other. When we heard the rip, our eyes widened and she pulled the book from my hands and hid it behind her back.

One of the teenage employers were looking at us calculatingly, almost accusingly. I probably looked like a deer in the headlights, so I said the only thing that made sense. "Hey, Val, why don't we go to the rest room and try to fix your pants. She blushed like mad, and her hands being behind her back already made it look very believable. After we finished with the book, it looked like it had been massacred. So we left it sitting on the toilet cover and quietly snuck out.

She is my best friend, and I am so worried about her. Right now she is at my house with her aunt and my mom. Her aunt smokes so it is better for her at my house. She's been having raging fits, where she will shake and scream and throw things. She will collapse and scream in agony, then calm again. My mother refuses to call a hospital, she says that it will make things harder on all of us. A lot harder. So we haven't tried. Maybe she will get better, I mean, hopefully she will get better.

I hope that my mother is right.