Full Summary:
Karen's niece comes to live with her and Lucas after getting out of the hospital. Her mother, Karen's sister, is in jail and the mystery as to why the girl has suddenly showed up in Tree Hill haunts all that are around her. Karen, being the helpful aunt that she is, tries to get Nadia to open up to her, even gives her a job at the Café. What happens when Nadia starts acting weird when around her new friends and classmates? Why is the FBI in Tree Hill? And how does Nadia land a spot on the cheerleading squad? Will Rachel spill Nadia's secret all over school?
Nadia Gordon:
Hi, my name is Nadia Gordon and I am seventeen-years-old. Eight months ago, my mother came home drunk and shot me in the back. I'm now going to live with my Aunt Karen and Cousin Lucas at their home in Tree Hill. Everything got turned around eight months ago but I'm slowly starting to turn my life around. I thought my days of dancing were over and that I would never be able to dance again. But moving to Tree Hill has started to change my mind. I've started to learn to live again, learned to love again, and learned to trust people all over again. The only problem was, was that Tree Hill was just getting over a tragedy of their own. Would I fit into their world now that I was the new girl in school? And how would my abilities as a dancer fit into this school and its cliques?
Those questions swam through my head as I sat on the bus headed for Tree Hill from Las Vegas, Nevada. My mother worked at a local casino and was (as far back as I can remember) always a drunk. She didn't seem to care what I did and she only seemed to care about me when sh was home. She was rarely home and I was mainly over at my friends house. At the age of seventeen, I worked three jobs; one was at the local teen club, teaching dance classes. The other two were at a diner, as a waitress and a hotel, as a maid. I knew what it was like trying to fend for myself and my friends always seemed to know I wanted to get out.
My bank account was in my name and nobody but me could get into it. My mother tried once, but she was thrown in jail when I realized that she had stolen my debit card. I had called the cops, knowing that they would soon pick her up. They found her at an ATM, trying to get money out of my account. They confiscated the card, arrested my mother and called me to come get her. I let her stay in jail that night and canceled the card so she couldn't use it again. As I sat on the bus, all my worldly possessions in the suitcases in the luggage compartment of the bus, I thought back to that day, the day I nearly lost my life and my ability to walk.
I had just come home from my job at the hotel, setting my backpack and purse in my room. My mom came home ten minutes later really drunk and with a gun. Apparently she had bought it for protection. Coolden had just left and was barely around the corner when he heard the sound of a gun going off. He slammed on his breaks, did a u-turn and was back at my house within ten seconds. My mother was gone and so was the gun. Coolden picked me up from where I was lying and rushed me to the hospital. He called the cops once at the hospital, but because he couldn't tell them much, nobody knew what happened until I woke up three months later. When I woke up, I told them what my mother did and she was arrested. The gun was never found. And I was told that my Aunt Karen was willing to take me in and I could get back to being a kid.
My mind drifted back from the memory of being shot to being on the bus, where I could see the nature scenes from the window as I took pictures of everything that I knew my friends would want. The last thing Coolden said to me before I left Las Vegas was that he would always be there for me. He had been paying for my cell phone since I had started working for him nearly a year ago. He told me that he would see me soon and that when he did come see me, that he would bring up my car, my dogs and some of my friends.
I was glad that I would have some of my family back, but not knowing how my Cousin Lucas would react to me moving in was a continuous nag on my mind. I so wanted to be liked by the family that my mother had cut out of her life after she had killed my father and gotten away with it. She just hadn't been able to get away with shooting me. My father hadn't been alive to tell them what she had done to him and I had been too young to tell them myself so my mother had gotten away with murder.