hi can this be like the official first chapter? loL my actual first chapter was sucky. ok bye. also, it's like three am so if you see the name grade instead of grace, that's a typo. sounds weird but it has happened way too much already.

Oh hush my dear, it's been a difficult year

And terrors don't prey on innocent victims

Imagine Dragons, Bad Liar

Forks was wet – and Grace knew it would be. After all she had done her research, she wasn't an amateur. But half-awake four in the morning articles and a little blurry slightly off-centered photo on a pintrest moodboard could hardly prepare you for the real thing. The sky was a murky thunder-cloud creased horizon –

A storm was coming.

Or maybe it had already past, wreaked its havoc and trembled away pitifully.

The radio belted out a somber grating melody of static, Grace had stopped receiving service an hour ago but she couldn't bring herself to flick the dial. She figured ambient, awful, jarring noise had to be better than the innocuous silence that accompanied unsure, hasty decisions.

And this was unsure –

That had been made clear when a patriotic, All-American family of four had caught her brushing her teeth at a water fountain. With strands of wild and untamable red hair slightly damp from the loose spray of water, and a glamorous dribble of homemade cinnamon-clove toothpaste (courtesy of her mother) slipping down her chin.

The memory alone brought a curious heat that prickled indiscriminately at Graces scalp. She tapped her hand against the vinyl steering wheel feeling a certain easy familiarity at the roughness.

Forks, Washington was disappointing –

So far all it had to offer was a wishy-washy medley of olive evergreens and pools of cloudy brown water that speckled the sidewalks almost at random. A spontaneous burst of eyesores. And the green traffic signs all had the nautical mileage stamped into the faded caustic metal, which really just seemed, irrelevant.

By the time Grace had reached the outskirts of Forks and the rusty yellow watch for deer signs were all that remained visible out of her peripherals she'd counted at least three bait and tackle shops.

Which was fine, if you were into that kind of thing.

But, Grace was most definitely not into that kind of thing. On the flipside for every strange, outdoorsy, do-it-yourself, I'm-a-man-and-I-fish store there was an equally matched number of conventional café's with fancy imported coffee beans.

Grace followed the curve of the road, marveling at the vibrancy in the dotted yellow lines separating the cemented lanes of traffic. How often did they retouch them? Was it because of the rain?

For a moment Grace imagined freshly scribbled chalk cartoons from her youth always destined to become faded smeared outlines of memory after a hard rain. She blanched. All of this driving was making her poetic.

Grace slowed at the break of trees and the sound of her robotic assistant's taciturn voice –

"Your destination is on your right."

Forks, Washington was disappointing –

And the house, well, it was disappointing too. It was small, which was fine – it didn't have to be big. But between the rotting wood porch and the broken cardboard covered windows a deep pang of regret stirred in her belly. Paint clung to the house desperately, yet greedy hungry chips dotted the paneling like freckles revealing the beige trim underneath. It looked like it could have had been red once, maybe burgundy.

Large, ugly, cinderblocks gathered chaotically at the bottom of the stairs. A turbulent assortment of ferns, and weeds, and almost hedges formed a makeshift garden near the foundation.

It's rustic, an optimistic voice reasoned, no, it's fucking old.

It looked like a house straight from a horror movie. What would her parents say? Probably suggest it was an omen. Undoubtedly bad, things that fell apart at the wind could only be bad. Or karma? She could have been a serial killer in her past life.

Grace didn't necessarily believe in omens, or past lives for that matter, yet, she did move thirty hours away based on a feeling and the disastrous need to play detective. A cold rousing resentment traveled up the length of her esophagus, maybe she was more like her parents than she thought.

She pulled into the driveway, well, if you could call a harsh collection of broken tumbleweeds and two crude tire marks a driveway.

When Grace turned the ignition and pulled out her car keys a languid silence finally – finally falls over her. She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee, it tasted bitter and raw but it's better than unbuckling and trying to figure out how she's going to fix up this shit show of a house.

She rummaged through her purse in search of the keys she'd picked up on her way through town, she shudders at the thought of her landlord and his hungry gray eyes. He had been the first person she'd met in Forks, Washington and the greeting had been a stiff and uncomfortable one. Bad omen.

"I haven't been down there in so long; hell if I know which key is which," He had shrugged obtusely and dropped a collection of keys into her hand. They weren't even on a real fucking keychain. They were being held together precariously by a frayed old string. Bad omen.

Yes, Forks, Washington was disappointing –

Grace stepped out of the car, the heel of her boots sunk low into the earth. As far as Grace could tell it wasn't raining, yet the air around her was wet and a repelling sheen of moisture clung to her skin.

Arizona had been hot, irrepressibly so. The sun always sat heavy in the sky, unrelenting in its heat. Sticking to your skin in that dry, unapologetic way. And it was –

Suffocating.

But one good thing, the ground always felt solid beneath her feet. Here the earth was wet and each step felt like sinking. She gathered an armful of boxes and headed for the front door. Grace wobbled across the uneven terrain all the while berating herself for her appalling choice in footwear –

They had been dubbed rain boots on the Forever 21 website, and they were cute, even if they were making her journey difficult. She'd suffer the ache in her heels a thousand times over before she'd be caught dead in those large clunky yellow rain boots of fisherman.

She warily climbed the porch steps, hyper aware of the creaking wood. While Grace was fairly small she didn't trust the so called sturdiness of her front porch. She balanced the cardboard boxes on her forearm and pressed her chin to the top of the box in order to jiggle a key into the door knob.

Luckily the first key she tried fit perfectly and twisted beautifully, good omen. She leaned into the door expecting it to give way easily. After a few adamant shoves that would surely leave her shoulder sore tomorrow the door creaks open and it's like every generic horror movie ever.

Forks, Washington really was disappointing –

Light from the doorway filters onto the dusty wooden panels, and a very large rodent scampers across the wood. Perfect, rats, she thought dryly. At least now she had an excuse to get a cat. Grace pushed the door open wider revealing cob-webs, and walls that could have easily been white thirty years ago.

A putrid retch-inducing smell filled her nostrils. Tantalizingly slow water dripped from the ceiling, landing on a wretched pile of ruined wood. A hearty lump formed in her throat and she found it hard to swallow, hard to breathe.

A deep coiling massacre of regret traveled down her spine, bad omen.

Grace thought back to when her parents had brought home Reggie, a disintegrating run-down RV that had overtime grown extremely precious to them. It had been lifeless and ruined once, but with a year's worth of coaxing and care her parent's had successfully revived it.

"There's a reason broken things are cheap my dear," Her mother's voice rung heavily in the air around her, "hard to fix, and they don't come without sacrifice. But, it's always worth it to see it come alive before your eyes. "

Grace did not sign up for this, nor did she want to spend the next year fixing up a decaying old house, never mind how much it might cost her. She'd already spent a large chunk of her savings on the deposit alone, which had seemed like a good idea at the time. But it always seems that way at first, doesn't it?

Good, and golden, and easy –

For a solid, devastating moment she contemplated making that thirty-hour drive home and forgetting the whole thing. Going back to her boring life, her brittle, stupid life.

Forks, Washington was disappointing, yes –

But Grace Navarro was nothing if not determined. So, she rolled up the sleeves of her button down, and tied her untamable hair back with a bandanna, which was basically the equivalent of swiping battle paint across her cheeks and going to war.

And it did feel like a war.

She kicked her boots off at the front door and trudged through the murky, wet mud to her car in search of cleaning supplies. Her cat socks would never be the same, sure, but she'd cut the walking time in half and saved herself from a sprained ankle.

The majority of her belongings ended up strewn across the hood of her car and the grass surrounding it, and had anyone stumbled upon Grace in her frenzy perhaps they would have thought she was insane. But there was a method, so to speak, to her madness.

The kitchen was disgusting, but at least there was running water and electricity. Slowly, much more so than Grace would have preferred she scrubbed away at the floors and walls. Luckily, she was no stranger to monotonous cleaning, and her parents had armed her with homemade bleach sealed away in a box full of mason jars.

Grace was always skeptical when trying some radical new product her parents claimed worked wonders, but she had to hand it to them. Their bleach worked miracles. An unnatural medicinal lemon wafted throughout the house, and yeah, it smelt awful, but it beat the cob-webbed, rotten odor that came with decrepit old buildings.

A few hours into her state of mass cleaning Grace felt the pangs of hunger scrape greedily at her stomach. It gurgled angrily, restlessly.

She weighed her options; she'd made a good dent in her cleaning. It had felt impossible before, now, it just seemed tedious and hard. She figured she could bring all of her stuff inside and then go get some food, she deserved that at least.

By the time Grace had successfully transported all of her belongings from her car to the house it was nearing six pm. The sky was now predominantly orange, but a prolific collection of brilliant red's, and purple hues blended seamlessly together. Complex in its ways.

The diner Grace ate at was simple in nature but reminded her exponentially of home, of course, it wasn't home anymore. But this wasn't home yet either. Grace resided in an outlandish middle ground. Not entirely there, but not necessarily here either –

A wanderer, then.

At any rate that sounded cooler than scared twenty-year-old who may be way in over her head. Not that she'd ever admit that. She finished quickly and escaped unscathed. Grace had prepared herself for the, I'm new in town talk, but it never really came. Which she was incredibly thankful for.

Grace wanted a chance to compose herself, at least get her house function, so she could begin sussing out Forks' secrets. And while, yes, Fork's was disappointing –

Grace was positive something strange was happening. The people wandered the streets solemnly, something akin to the first half of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. (I swear I am a serious writer, lol.) And maybe she wanted so badly for something to be happening, to prove this wasn't a waste of time, that she was trying to breathe life into the cold dead things around her.