Prologue

Butterflies. Everyone loves butterflies. Butterflies flying around the field, hiding in the flowers and flitting among the wild grass.

"Jacob!" a little girl yelled, chasing the butterflies around gleefully. "Jacob! Look at me!"

A little boy came out from his hiding place in some tall grass and began chasing the butterflies also. The perfect picture, two little kids playing in a field with some butterflies. Next thing you know, some bunnies and squirrels will join in and the whole field will be dancing in a happy frenzy.

The little boy ran farther out into the field, chasing the insects. He knew he wasn't supposed to go that far, but they were so pretty….

"Amy!" the boy yelled, stopping in his tracks and staring in awe. "Come look at this!"

The girl ran up and stood beside him. "What?"

He pointed to the butterfly resting on a flower in front of them. "I've never seen one like that before." He said. "It's all…..black."

"Oooo, it's pretty!" the girl said, before leaping in front of them and trying to catch it.

"Hey! I saw if first!" the boy yelled, trying to catch it also. They chased it farther and farther away from the town, not knowing that they were completely lost, oh no, they were much to preoccupied by their find. And the butterfly, not knowing what was going on, just flew as fast as its little wings could take it. Trying desperately to get away from these strange creatures chasing it.

If it could, the butterfly would have breathed a sigh of relief. It was home. It was safe. Its master would protect it now….

The children's screams rang across the field, the high-pitched sound traveling for miles in all directions. But as quickly as it started, the screams were put to an abrupt stop. No one had heard, at least not enough for them to realise what had happened. No one would know what happened; no one would suspect a thing.

After all, everyone loves butterflies.

Sarah stood looking at the locker in front of her. Her locker. It was covered in graffiti, like every other locker in the school, and seemed to have a weird looking dent in it. And she didn't need to open it to know that it probably smelled funny, just like the rest of this place. The smell was everywhere; the stink of B.O, the combination of all the perfume and cologne the students wore, the old meatloaf being cooked in the cafeteria. The food tasted like it had been on the menu in the 70's, not to mention that it didn't even look like food in the first place. Her locker wouldn't open properly; her math book was missing pages one through twenty-seven. And she'd found all this out in a mere fifteen minutes.

Charming.

By the end of the day, she'd found out that the classes sucked, the students were loud and messy, and that the music teacher had a strange obsession with Dido. Not at all like her old school.

Her old school was a performing and visual arts school; the best one in the country. Two thousand dollars a semester. They didn't allow graffiti, they didn't allow swearing or vulgar gestures, and they sure didn't allow the lunch room to serve expired food. But now that her Dad is gone and there was no more money coming from him, she couldn't afford to go there anymore. No, she had to go here. To a public school.

And I have to live here. In dumb old Hazelton. With Aunt Tiff and her poodle and the unfinished basement and creaky attic.

She hadn't slept a wink last night, or the night before. Actually, she hadn't had a decent sleep in over a week. She could just sense something…wrong. With the house, that is.

The static was wrong, all wrong. Professionals called it an aura, Sarah called it static. Coloured static that covered everything from furniture to trees to animals. And especially people. You could tell if a person was nice by the static; you could tell if a person was sick or upset. The static was usually pretty to look at, it was usually colors like yellow and blue and green. But not the static at Aunt Tiff's house.

Sure, the stuff around Aunt Tiff was fine, and the stuff around her dog and fish. But the other stuff wasn't; it was grey, it was ugly, it was unhappy. And sometimes she could see figures in the static, figures she knew weren't really there. How many times in the last month she had thought she was going insane were countless, yet she still found a way to go on. But still…. What were those strange shapes? The shapes that always seemed to hover around her room at night? The ones that almost looked to be taking a human form?

Sarah slammed the door as she entered her Aunt's house. "Hello!" she yelled into the vast entryway.

"Hi Hon!" a voice answered from somewhere within the house. The kitchen.

Sarah walked into her Aunt's kitchen and sat down at the table. Other than her bedroom, this was the only room in the house she actually liked. Unlike everything else in the house, the kitchen was far from spotless. The shelves were crammed with decorations and pots full of wooden spoons, and there were countless jars full of jams and peaches and other fruits lining the counters. The whole room was filled with a comfortable clutter.

"How was your first day of school, Sarah?" her aunt asked as she stirred something in a large pot on the stove. Whatever it was, it smelled good.

"Fine." Sarah lied. It's not that she was snotty or anything, but she definitely preferred her old, private school in Toronto to this little wasteland in the middle of the prairies.

"Make any new friends?"

"Not yet." Sarah peered out the large window overtop of the sink. She knew what was awaiting her outside. Flat, barren fields as far as the eye could see. No buildings, no hills, not even any trees. Why someone would want to live somewhere as boring as this was beyond her.

Aunt Tiff noticed the sad look in Sarah's eyes and came and sat beside her.

"I know this is hard for you, sweetie." She said. "No one knew your father would go and do something like that. Now all we can hope is that the police will catch him."

Poor Aunt Tiff. Her own brother, killing someone…

"Don't worry about me, Sarah." Tiff said, as if reading her mind. "You just worry about yourself."

That night, Sarah didn't sleep. It's not that she couldn't, she just… didn't. She didn't try.

At first she just lay awake in her bed, staring up at the slowly moving static above her. Then she got up and paced her room, before sitting down at her desk in the dark, watching the static. What was it that bothered her so much about this place?

The shape was starting to come up again. Among the grey, there was… a black? Brown? She couldn't quite make out the colors. Maybe there weren't any colors, or maybe it was a color no human had ever seen before.

It shaped itself into an almost human form. She sat staring at the shape in front of her closet door until the sun rose.

"You're having issues, Sarah." The voice on the other end of the line said. "Simple as that. Issues. But you'll get through them."

"I know that, Brian." Sarah replied. "I just want to know when."

Sarah was on the phone with her best, and one of her only real, friends. Brian. For the longest time people had thought they were dating; the society today just couldn't accept that two people of the opposite sex could be friends. Brian was the only person who knew she could see the static. He didn't really understand it, but he knew about it. And he tried to help her with it as best as he could.

"Anyway," Brian replied, changing the subject (one of his many talents was effectively changing the subject in a conversation), "How are you doing friend-wise?"

"You know how it goes. I can hold a conversation with anyone, anyone will let me sit with them at lunch, yet still even the weird people think I'm weird."

"Yeah, well, being weird is still better than being boring. I've got to go. Phone you tomorrow."

"Bye."

Sarah went to school in a daze the next day. She couldn't concentrate on a thing, not in class, not in the books she read during class or the doodles she created. Lunch was her only haven.

There wasn't much of a clique scene at her old school. People hung out with who they liked, and that was that. Her first day, Sarah had figured out public school was different.

If you wanted the best gossip, you didn't sit with 'the group', or the popular ones. You sat with the normal people. 'The group' only talked about the scandalous side of rumours, normal people tended to tell it how they heard it. Sarah sat with the normal people for lunch that day.

"Hi Sarah." A girl in her history class, Cerise or Elise something or other said. "Anyways, back to what I was saying. Yesterday, Archer Williams is rumoured to have had another vision during Arithmetic."

"Oh yeah!" another girl said. "I heard about that too!"

"He's totally weird. I'll bet he just faked it to get out of homework." Cerise/Elise replied.

"Who's Archer?" Sarah casually asked.

"Only the biggest freak show in the school." A girl to her left said. "He's supposed to be, like, psychic or something."

"Yeah. He sees ghosts and auras and reads tarot cards and stuff. He has like no friends and he's really tall and…."

Sarah blocked the girl out after hearing the words 'ghost' and 'aura'. The way gossip flies, this guy probably just read too many science fiction novels. But if he really was the real thing, maybe he could explain a few things to her. Like why the static at her aunt's house was grey and why it took strange forms in her room.

As soon as the 3 o clock bell rang at Hazelton high, over half the student body was no where to be seen. Sarah was lucky that Archer wasn't that particular half.

"Hi." She said as Archer slammed his locker door shut. "I'm Sarah."

Archer looked down at her. If he was feeling or thinking anything at the moment, he wasn't showing it. His shoulder length black hair fell over his emotionless looking eyes, which she realised were tow different colors. Green and Brown. He was tall, at least two inches taller than her.

"Look. I fainted, I cannot resurrect Elvis and I will not tell you if your life will be full of love and happiness." He said, before picking up his bag and making a move for the door at the end of the hallway, "Goodbye."

Sarah stepped in front of him. "I don't care that you fainted, I never really did like Elvis and I don't want to know about my future. I want to talk."

"Congratulations." Archer said, making another move for the door, "You just did."

"Why won't you talk to me?!" Sarah exclaimed. She wasn't used to being shunned, at any costs.

"I am." Archer said. He pushed her out of the way and walked out the door.

"Wait!" Sarah yelled. "You're static's mostly light blue."

Archer stopped and turned around. "Excuse me?"

"Light blue." Sarah continued. "Mostly around the head. The stuff around your hands is medium blue, probably because you have a talent for writing and just wrote a poem during English class."

Archer stared at her. Yet again, his face was void from any emotions.

"You mean my aura?"

"Yeah." Sarah said, happy he was finally paying attention to her.

He stared at her again, this time looking slightly interested. "What do you want?"

"To talk."

"Alright." Archer said, scribbling something onto a slip of paper. He handed to Sarah. "That's where I live. I'm free around five."

And he walked away.