AN: No lie, I was too scared to check the reviews for a bit. Thank you everyone for reviewing! This chapter is one of few that will focus more on the OC in this equation, as I wanted to flesh her out and not have her be the generic love interest. After this chapters will probably focus on both of them equally, but I felt it was important to establish who she is and how they got into this mess of a relationship first.

See room for improvement? Is there anything you'd like to see addressed in the future? Is there anything I'm doing wrong? Feel free to tell me via either review or PM. This is my first story. I need feedback right now to grow as an author. I don't want to review whore, I want to get advice to give you all a better story. No comment is stupid or bad. Never feel intimidated or like you can't tell me where I'm messing up. Reviews are how I grow.

Imagine spending an entire lifetime alone.

Not without people, no, but without someone who truly looked at you as a person. Parents aside, days went by, devoid of true conversations. Words were exchanged, video games were gushed over and jokes were made, and yet at the end of the day, some part of you whispers you're only there because you're useful. A geek. Geeks are good tools to use in ghost hunting and they're good fodder for jokes and an icebreaker of a third wheel. Tucker had sat down with his friends time and time again and felt invisible. Alone. He wasn't really being heard. They didn't understand. So after a while he'd learned to keep his serious thoughts inside where they couldn't be mocked.

He was alone. He was a genius, his computer skills were so amazing he'd been offered college scholarships already. Tucker was working on those. Danny and Sam could handle ghost hunting without him; they'd proven that lately. He wasn't missed. He wasn't important enough to be missed. One time he skipped out on meeting them and just hung out in his room, watching the phone. It never rang. Tucker was a third wheel. He wasn't needed. Not one girl in Amity Park found him worth talking to. He spent more than a few nights alone with his computer.

Tucker had wanted to be a paranormal investigator before Danny came along. He'd had all these dreams, spots he'd go look into, equipment he'd build, things he'd do. He would be famous and he would debunk those horrible people who pulled off hoaxes. When Tucker was younger he'd watched shows on various paranormal entities. He'd had his own dreams once. He would solve things with technology, prove them or disprove them with his inventions. He would patent things and he would be known as somebody, as a real person.

And then there was a blog. About science, yes, but what made it stand out was the underlying theme of loneliness. Every post was laden thickly with the pain of someone who had no one who considered them a real person. These were the posts of a girl who had no friends and so many dreams her heart was about to burst, someone who wanted to help the world with science, help create technology. Her plans were laid out in details, without the clinical attachment of an average scientist, with the passion of someone who truly was trying to help. She wanted to examine ghosts in an ethical manner. She knew they were people. Why other people didn't believe her, why they treated them as menaces, she didn't know, but she had all this documentation of perfectly harmless ghosts. She cared. She wanted to help. And no one would give her the time of day even online.

He'd sent her an email. And then another. And then he found himself pouring his heart out in one long tearful message about how he knew what it was like and he was here if she wanted to talk, they didn't have to keep their heads up and act like it was all okay all the time. She wasn't alone. Tucker wasn't alone.

She responded. He had almost been too afraid to read the email. Once he opened it, though, he scarcely spent a minute that weekend not talking to her. They had lived the same life. It had been an existence that had faded to gray, and now a bit of the color and warmth was returning with her every message and line. He opened up more than even he knew he could. He'd never thought he had it particularly hard, but underneath his smiles there was so much bottled up inside he couldn't stand it. Things spilled out. Conversations went from whether or not Equilibrium was a good movie to darker things like those frightening moments they felt invisible and worthless to the world.

Of course he asked where she lived. And of course they exchanged pictures.

That was why, in the distant north, almost on top of the world, Imaani Akiani Uqumaittu of Cape Dorset, Canada had a picture of Tucker James Foley of Amity Park, USA on her phone. She ran a thumb over it to swipe the snow off time and time again when she was outside, smiling at the cheesy grin on his face. He was a dork. That was good, because so was she. The same day Tucker had his first fight with Sam, Imaani fiddled with her iPhone under her desk, sending him a link to the latest ghost hunting podcast she'd found as well as a link to a video discussing ethics and technology. Other people always laughed at her for what she was into. The people in her town were still sewing animal hides together and their blankets were made out of fur, and she was a freak holding delusions of a scientific future that hadn't even hit the States yet. She was a fool. She wasn't living in reality. People pitied her.

But Tucker made her feel like she was a genius. It got so lonely, and she tried so hard to be normal. She did her chores, she helped sew things, she repaired little things around the house, she could even do some beadwork, and she spoke her Inuktitut loudly and rapidly when accused of turning white. She believed in spirits and helped with the online project to catalog their language. Imaani worked so hard sometimes she thought she was going to collapse. She wrote down story after old story, keeping a reference of the past preserved. And it wasn't enough. It was never enough. When she tried to join in the games the other girls played she was always laughed at and pushed away. She was stuck watching at the best of times. Nothing would ever make her fit in. The only place she felt safe was in the glow of a computer screen.

Tucker was the only one who didn't think she was doing it wrong. She wasn't bad at being Inuit or bad at being a girl to him. She was just a friend. A person. He treated her like a normal person. It was natural and comforting to curl around her phone and talk to him until the battery gave out. They didn't need other people. They had each other. They weren't alone now. Romance didn't enter into either of their minds for a long time. Neither of them was aware it was anything more than a real friendship at long last. It was such a relief to speak and be taken seriously that they didn't even realize the kind of things they were confiding in each other. They shared everything. Their secrets rushed out like dams breaking. Speaking was as natural as breathing. They could talk about bad music and stupid people at school and all the things that made them lose sleep at night and those awful moments they'd been the butt of jokes at school. It was like something missing had finally clicked into place.

It was only when she hung up on him one day she made the mistake that tipped them both off to what was really happening. She didn't say goodbye to him, which would have been 'takulaarivuguk'. She said, "Nalligusuktunga, Tucker."

I feel like I could love you, Tucker.

And she'd have taken it back, but while Imaani was many things, she wasn't a liar. She hung up and flung her phone at a pile of laundry, burying her face in her hands. No, no, no. This wasn't supposed to happen and they both knew why. This was one of the oldest and most traditional communities left to the Inuit. She was not in any way cleared to fall head over heels for some American boy right now or ever. Even if his voicemails were what got her out of bed sometimes, this was just never going to work. Even though he was the one she Skyped in to talk to weekly, even though he knew everything from her personal experiences with ghosts to her favorite food, there was one major thing standing between Imaani Uqumaittu and Tucker Foley:

She'd been arranged to be married since she was four.