Chapter 1

The sky hung low and gray over Forest Hills, New York—not particularly the best weather for a Friday afternoon in May for most of the teenagers that lived there. It was an ominous beginning to the summer season and certainly an awful beginning to the weekend. It blanketed all good moods and hopeful plans for beach trips that arrived with the heat, but others hated the clouds for their own personal reasons that didn't always revolve around social affairs.

Grace Hunt sat on the bench outside the school and toyed with the end of her long blonde braid, reading a new book she'd picked up from the school library that afternoon. Instead of sitting in the boiling cafeteria—that still somehow lacked air conditioning after all these years—and watching her two best friends getting macked on by their boyfriends, she fabricated the excuse that she had a precalculus exam to study for and ditched them. It was getting rather tiring: watching the two girls she'd once called her sisters obsessing over and double dating with two boys who—in all honesty—weren't all that great. They were skinny, short, awkward, average…Grace had never seen anything special about them. Sure, they were nice when they wanted to be and always seemingly polite to Grace, but a high school relationship was not one of her priorities. She'd rather focus on getting into college and getting as far away from the city as possible, since it had done her no justice in her seventeen years of existence. As a matter of fact, it had only made things in her life worse.

It was why Grace hated rainy days: not because she couldn't go to the park or visit the piers, but because the sudden threat of a torrential downpour trapped her inside of her tiny apartment with her father. He was mentally unstable, and the littlest events could set him into a spiral of rage that Grace did not know how to control.

The clouds rumbled overhead and she glanced upward, her toes curling anxiously inside of her sneakers. They seemed to move faster than usual, engulfing whatever was left of the blue velvet sky and replacing it with nothingness. Grace rubbed her temples and attempted to focus back on her novel—some larger chapter book about the future and whatnot that was actually pretty decent—but her heart wasn't in it.

It wasn't that Grace didn't love her father, her friends, her life, it was just that she struggled to manage it. Her father abused the legality of alcoholic consumption most times and, although he didn't beat her physically, would sneer comments at her when she ran past his room. "You're just like your stupid fuckin' no-good mother," he'd say, lying on his unkempt bed and staring at the ceiling, his tie undone and a whiskey bottle in his left hand. "You can run mighty fast but you never got anything good to say."

Grace had never known her mother, but she was still a living part inside of her, and it hurt her to hear her father talk about her in such a rude way. Had he forgotten that she gave him a daughter, the only thing he could really hold onto in remembrance of her? Had he forgotten that at one point he'd loved her enough to create something new with her from that love? Had he forgotten that Grace was not fully his? No, apparently not, because most times, Jerry Hunt did not hold back.

Yet when he was sober, he did not mention her. He stayed away from the topic of Jessica like a cat stayed away from water and most times pretended like he was unphased by her. Of course, Grace knew better than to so much as bluntly ask him about her mother, but when she was younger, she did not understand the concept that there had been another family figure in her life, even if it was for a few days. She would ask him questions on end like little kids often did, and he would give her curt answers such as "yes" and "no" and "maybe someday." They were always the same, and eventually Grace just gave up.

Over the years, Jerry had become progressively worse, taking up alcohol and sometimes drugs to solve his problems that often revolved around Jessica and the business he worked for at the piers. He always went to work—whether he was hungover or not—but when the storms came in and the loading docks were closed, he stayed home and resorted to other things.

Rain dotted the sidewalk now and seemed to dampen Grace's attitude the more she thought about everything that was wrong. She tried very hardly to focus on the book, to do more than just read the words on the pages without comprehending what they meant all together, to bring her mind away from something that she knew would only upset her…it was hard, though. Two of her best friends—Teagan and Dara—were too preoccupied with their boyfriends to take time in helping Grace, and the other—Seth—was at an ice hockey showcase in Connecticut with the rest of his team. She had other friends, but they were "in-school" pals that Grace could not confide in. What was the point in that? She hated the clear distinction between "in-school" and "out-of-school" because it made her seem like she really had nobody at all, especially during this time.

Someone cleared their throat behind her, and Grace wrinkled her nose, dog-earing the page she had just finished mindlessly scanning and turning around. A boy from her physics class—Peter, was his name—was standing there, his Jansport backpack slung over his shoulder and his messy brown hair sticking up every which way. She'd been in school with him for eleven years and she still felt as if she'd never even spoken to him, which was rather silly, but she still greeted him warmly as if she had everyday.

"Hey, Peter."

He nodded, his eyebrow raising curiously. "I have a question about the physics homework."

"Shoot."

Peter slid onto the bench beside Grace, pulling his physics notebook out of his backpack and opening to the page of that night's homework. He pointed to a problem involving centripetal force, which they'd learned millions of times, but Peter always did seem to daydream in class. He was smart, though, and Grace wondered why he was asking her.

"I don't understand how to find the velocity," he said, staring at the page, his eyebrows furrowed.

"Well, you need to plug in the number that we have for the force and then the radius of the turn and the mass. And just solve for 'vt'." She circled the little variable that had been scrawled in Peter's handwriting and handed him his pencil. "Or, that's how I do it."

"Thanks," he said, a relieved smile crossing his face, but he didn't get up and leave like Grace expected. "So what book are you reading?"

She pursed her lips and glanced at the cover, shrugging. "The Hunger Games. Teagan and Dara were ranting and raving about it so I just decided to finally get it from the library and dig in." Before they got their boyfriends, Grace then thought.

"Oh, yeah, I've heard about that, too. It's about those kids in the future that have to fight each other in an arena, or something, right?"

"I haven't gotten that far yet, but that's what's going to happen," she said slowly, turning the worn black book over in her hands. "It's pretty good so far, though."

"Nice." He smiled at her, his eyes sparkling slightly in the dim light that the clouds allowed. This was rather odd, and she couldn't help but continue thinking that. Peter Parker wanted something from her, and she didn't know what it was, but she wasn't so sure she wanted to find out.

"Do you need a ride home?" he asked, finally standing up after a painful two minutes of sitting in silence together.

"No, I'm close, so I'll walk…" She raised an eyebrow as he took his bike off the rack and wheeled it to the sidewalk, his backpack still hanging over his shoulder and the most innocent look on his face. Grace decided to leave it at that instead of wondering aloud how he would even get the two of them home on one bicycle.

"I'll see you tomorrow, Grace," Peter then said, hopping onto the seat and keeping on foot sturdy one the ground so that the bike didn't tip with his weight. "Thanks again."

"Bye, Peter." She watched him ride off down the street, then make a left at the light and disappear behind a few buildings. A crack of thunder sounded above her, and she instinctively looked up to see that a storm was, in fact, rolling in from the west. She sighed and began walking home, kids riding past her on their skateboards and people bustling by in the heat of the afternoon. The storm threatened most of the outdoor markets and shoppers that came with them, so many people were running around and searching for their cars before the rain came. People moved past her quickly, yelling to one another in foreign languages or accents that she couldn't understand. They bumped into her inconsiderately and stepped on her toes. Thunder again. And then the panic arose even more.

After the third time she'd been bumped into, Grace slipped into an alleyway that she and Seth had run through while pretending to be superheroes when they were little. They played hide and seek, tag, and red rover, but Grace was best at hide and seek. While all the other kids lowered themselves behind crumbling stairs or tucked their dangling legs into a fire escape along with the rest of their bodies, she didn't need a good hiding spot to win. She used an alternative that should have been considered cheating, if anybody besides Seth even knew.

Grace's reminiscing was brought to an abrupt end when she climbed through the crack between two buildings and heard a whooshing noise above her. She glanced up, expecting to see a flock of pigeons scurrying from a building ledge, but there was nothing there. Thunder rumbled again and she continued to move, more quickly now than before, her legs taking her as fast as she could go without tripping over the debris and garbage that was clustered throughout the alley. But then, it was there again—a subtle yet audible whoosh that sounded like something was swooping through behind her. She paused and turned around, her blue eyes darting around nervously, as she debated whether or not to call out. Would it be better to summon whatever was following her, or to simply avoid it? She'd never been followed before. She didn't know.

Whoosh. There it was again. And then again. And again. It was flying above her, crisscrossing over the roofs that were separated only by six feet. Grace broke into a run, glass and paper and gravel crunching beneath her sneakers as she sprinted. Her backpack moved tumultuously against her, bucking like a wild animal and weighing her down.

She rounded a corner and plastered herself against the wall, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth just as her basketball coach had told her to do when she felt tired. There was nothing but utter silence for a few minutes, and she closed her eyes and let out a sigh of respite. Whatever had been on her tail was hopefully lost in the sharp turns she'd taken through the maze of brick walls that towered above her, and she began walking again, slowly at first but then surely.

The clouds seemed to dissipate as she came closer to the back of her apartment building, and the sun was fading in and out. Grace felt a bit more comfortable now, but suddenly, the whoosh sounded again as fast as the shooting of a machine gun. It was coming closer, closer, closer and she was so near to her building, to her bedroom window that she kept unlocked in case of emergencies like these, but she was never going to make it. She was going to be tackled to the ground and wind up cracking her head on the concrete. She was going to be raped. Kidnapped. Mugged. She didn't know, but then she knew an easier solution.

And as fast as the idea dawned on her, Grace vanished into thin air.