Authors Note: This is my disclaimer. These characters are not mine. I do not own the characters. Now go away and be happy. Please R&R.
Lily sat in her desk during study hall, half hoping that maybe a tornado would rip through the school and save her from dying of boredom. It was a wasted prayer, however, they never got any tornados in Arizona.
Maggie Turner, a girl that sat across the row from her was showing off a magazine clipping featuring Orlando Bloom, while Josh Dario was belching the ABC's as loud as he could. Lily longed to escape from the juvenility of it all, and couldn't help feeling like a trapped animal.
The room slid in and out of focus as she struggled to keep her eyes open when...
WHAM!!!
The next thing she felt was considerable pain in her head. Her head had hit the desk remarkably hard when she fell asleep. It would have been funny, if it hadn't hurt so much.
Every head in the class turned and looked at her, but Lily had suddenly become fascinated with a crack in the ceiling. She sighed, could life get any worse?
Lily trudged home from school that day with an army of homework. It didn't help that she had to walk the two miles to her brother's house in the Arizona heat.
"It wouldn't feel so hot if you didn't insist on wearing that God-awful black all the time," her brother's fiancé was always telling her.
Lily's response was usually a rude hand gesture followed by a word like "ditz", "airhead" or "dyke". It wasn't that Lily disliked her sister-in-law to be; she despised her with a passion beyond what words can express. She would never forgive Daemon for falling in love with that obnoxious slut.
Not that her brother cared what Lily thought; all he cared about was beer, football and his scum of the earth fiancé. Lily knew that he only let her live with him because he had no choice. Being her only living relative, he was her legal guardian until she was of age. When that day came, it would only be a matter of minutes before he chucked her out.
If her parents were alive, things would be so much better, and Lily would still be living in her beloved England. Now it seemed as though she was doomed to live out her life in the Arizona desert with a brother who wouldn't have minded if Lily was kidnapped on the way home. He probably wouldn't even notice she was missing.
When Lily was nine, she and her parents were involved in a terrible car accident. Her parents had been killed immediately, but Lily had survived suffering only minor head injuries. Since she had no other relatives, she was forced to leave her home and friends and move to a desert with a brother she hardly knew.
That was three years ago and Lily was now twelve and just finishing up the sixth grade. In two weeks she would be on summer vacation.
"Yippee." Lily thought darkly, "A whole three months living on spaghettios and watching my brother and his girlfriend make out on the couch."
She couldn't have known, of course, that what the summer had in store for her would change her life forever.