Spencer Carlin lay on her new bed staring up at the ceiling. It was all different, the white of the ceiling, the feel of the bed beneath her, the sound of the few cars driving slowly by in the little suburban neighborhood that they had come too. Even her parents were different. They fought less but they also hardly talked. Dad was at work from nine until seven while Mom left at six-thirty and worked straight through until five in the morning. Then she came home and they slept in the same bed and had breakfast with their kids and each other until Dad left.

They were starting at a new school, and Spencer wasn’t to upset about that. Sure she had left her friends and her boyfriend at home but she didn’t mind. She had been immensely popular at her old school and it had been too much. Now with a new school and a new start she hoped that she could be someone else entirely. She had always had the dream of saving someone’s life. Her dad told her she had a kind of hero complex but she still wanted to do it.

Her alarm went off at six and she got up from her non-sleep and began to prepare for school. She picked out a cute outfit that was as new as almost everything else in the house. She then went downstairs to have breakfast with the stone people as she thought of them as they never spoke and barely looked at each other during the meal. Afterwards she and her two brothers got into the beater that they had brought with them from Ohio.

Glen, her older brother, drove as usual and Clay rode shotgun. The car made normal pains of starting and moving as they pulled out. Her dad in his own Camry followed them as far as the main road then turned the other way to go to work. Her mom was probably asleep by now as L.A. had a far busier ER than their hometown.

They pulled into the parking lot of the school half an hour early and got a spot close to the entrance. The two closest spots we taken up by a sleek black car parked diagonally across the two spaces. Glen would usually bitch about the driver of the car but he was too busy staring at the car in question.