Note: I don't own anything other than my own characters... On with the story! :)

Ch. 1 –

"Come one Kryssi, cheer up! I thought you'd like being out here in the middle of nowhere!" Nineteen-year-old Miranda Grove smiled at her brooding friend while she ran her slim, manicured fingers through her perfectly straight dyed-blond hair.

"I would have," Kryssi replied, "Until I found out that you were bringing some random-ass people that you met two days ago!" She placed great emphasis on the last three words.

"Aw, chill out Krys," their guy friend Dillon Blake remarked as he turned his 2005 Ford F-150 onto a bumpy dirt road. "Just because you haven't sent them through your demonic gauntlet friend test doesn't mean that they aren't okay people."

The fourth passenger, raven-haired, fifteen-year-old Beth Copper, giggled at Dillon's remark and fluttered her eyelashes at him behind his back.

"Besides," Miranda continued, twisting in her seat to look at Kryssi, (Who sat slumped against the back passenger window pouting.) "You can't just have four friends for the rest of your life. You'll have to venture out of your dark little hole eventually."

The shaggy-haired brunette humphed at the older girl's words and scratched idly at a bug bite on her darkly-tanned forearm. "I can still try," she muttered under her breath.

"Jeeze you're such an emo girl!" Dillon teased as he wrestled to keep the truck going in a straight line. The road they were traveling was full of pot-holes and wash boards.

"I am not," she retorted after sticking her tongue out at him. "If I was emo I'd wear all black and be uncommonly pale."

"Well you sure do have the scars to be one," Miranda pointed out with a good-natured chuckle.

Kryssi frowned darkly at the back of the blonde's head and raised her fingers to touch the gruesome scars that marred the left side of her otherwise pretty face. They stretched from her hairline over one emerald-green eye, down past her hard-set jaw, and ended just above her collarbone.

Without replying to the comment, the seventeen-year-old clambered out of the Ford as it came to a stop in front of the deserted Camp Crystal Lake. After brushing food crumbs off of her worn-out camo pants she stretched out her cramped muscles and took in a deep breath of crisp forest air.

"All right!" Dillon crowed excitedly as he, Miranda, and Beth joined Kryssi at the front of the vehicle. "Let's get to camping!"