Chapter One

"Goodbye, my baby! Make sure you come back and visit us really soon and call right when you get there!"

"Okay, Mom..."

"And make sure that your room mate isn't a nutcase."

"Okay, Dad..."

"And be good."

"Okay, Mom..."

"And we love you."

"I love you guys, too..."

I hugged my parent's goodbye for about the twelve millionth time that morning, and waved. Jumping into the front seat of my graduation present and revved the engine. My best friend, Tom, was in the passenger seat, his sneaker-clad feet on the dashboard, headphones over his ears. He looked up at me with that crooked smile I'd known practically all my life. His eyes were the constant biting green, and he sported the same haircut he'd had since kindergarten, shoved under a black fedora. I put the car in drive and waved to my parents again. Soon, we'd rolled out of my driveway and down the street.

"Tom, take off those godforsaken headphones! I'm not going to spend the whole drive up there not being able to say anything!"

"Fine..." He rolled his eyes and pulled the headphones out of my stereo. 'Minority' by Green Day instantly blasted out of the speakers.

"HOLY FLERKING SCHNIDT, TOM! TURN IT DOWN!"

"MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Tom was laughing but I could hardly hear him over the deafening bass.

/I want to be the minority

I don't need your authority

Down with the moral majority

'Cause I want to be the minority/

Were we really driving away from our little home town? Had we truly graduated and faced the hell of high school without shrivelling up into prunes? Had we survived? Were we really going to college?

I turned to look at Tom, who was wailing on air guitar. He had a garage band that played at the local club Stardust once a week. He lived for that. I loved to ask him when he was going to become famous, but he'd always said that he was never going to grow up. That he'd just spend all of his time tuning his guitar and eating pork rinds. I told him that it sounded nice. With bitterness (always with bitterness...) he would say that it was better then pushing to kids.

His dad had been a real ass hole. For most of his childhood, Tom had practically lived at my house. I always understood why because his father scared me too. He made his living pushing drugs to middle school kids, gambling, and anything else illegal. Tom's mom had been an angel, but when Tom was ten, his parents got into an argument about him and Walter pulled a gun on his son. Angela tried to fight him off, tried to protect her son. The gun went off and her funeral was two days later. A true angel...

Tom was always a little strange after that. Granted, he'd always been a very dark, depressed child, but he changed, obviously. Now, I looked at him again. He sighed and pressed his face against the window. Soon, he felt my gaze and turned to look at me.

"What?"

"Nothing..." I turned away. But, damn it all if Tom couldn't always read me like a book.

"I'm happy we're leaving too..." He reached over and took my hand. "But he's gone. And so are we." Tom's dad had died two years before in a car accident. Best thing that ever happened to my best friend.

"Hey, Ishuzu..."

I turned to look at him again.

"Don't worry... We're gone, honey. The sky's our limit. And nobody's gonna know us, or ask about us, or look at us funny or anything... Nobody..."

"Right..." I nodded.

One little thing I forgot to mention: Tom and I might have never become so close if we didn't share on very important thing. Tom controlled fire and he could teleport. I had telekinesis and telepathy. I know, I know... It sounds like one of those crappy comics, a rip-off of all the others. But when it happens to you, suddenly the comics don't even compare. We tried to find out where it had all come from, and why we had it, but nothing ever seemed to fit. Trying to put two and two together, we always came up with nothing short of sixty-seven, and that can never be good. The point was that we were different. Everyone in our small town knew that there was something strange about us (though no one could really ever say what) and we were sort of shunned. Sometimes, I would lie awake and wonder if all the crap we went through had any purpose.

And sometimes I dreamed... Dreamed about a man in a long black coat, his large hands jammed in the deep recesses of his pockets. The wind would blow his soft midnight hair in all directions and when he would notice me he'd smile. A cigarette lingering between his fingers, the end burning like his intense eyes. His irises were like chocolate and it entranced me. Every time he appeared before me in a dream, he would always say the same thing...

"You have found only one of your equal spirits. Two more shall soon appear."

"And then?" I would ask breathily, enamoured of his foreign dialogue and mysteriously handsome features.

"And then... the rains will fall, death will roam the streets, and the earth will bleed."

Tom knew about the dreams but he didn't say much of them. He always seemed to get annoyed when I talked about Mystery Guy.

"Ishuzu..." He was beside me. The car was speeding forward, far away from everything. My eyes locked with his and I smiled.

"We are gone..." I gripped his hand. "And we'll never look back."