High school sucked. High school in podunk, backwater, not important enough to even have a traffic light Gallatin, Montana sucked even more. High school two months into your Senior year, seven-hundred miles away from your friends sucked most of all.

No one could agree more with these statements than Grace Cho. In fact, Grace repeated the three sentences to herself every morning while getting ready to go to her daily hell-on-earth. It was her own personal mantra, which she used to remind herself the situation was only temporary.

In less than ten months, she'd be back home as a fresh-faced college student at the University of Washington. Well, once she finished her application, got accepted, and received enough financial aid to afford it.

But those were just technicalities.

"The bus is here," her mother yelled up the stairs, making Grace pause her complaining, slam down the hairbrush in her hand onto the counter, and bolt out of the bathroom. Stopping by her room long enough to grab her backpack, she nearly ran into her little brother as they both rushed downstairs.

"Don't forget, it's Boy Scouts tonight," her mother grabbed Tommy and adjusted his collar before he had a chance to step outside. The act allowed Grace to slip out the door behind them, thankful she didn't have mandated extracurriculars any more. "Have a great day!" The woman waved as her children ran across the residential street just as the school bus pulled up to the curb.

Grace tapped her foot on the pavement, her maroon Doc Marten boots stirring up a small cloud of dirt around them, as she waited for the doors to open. Slipping inside as soon as they did, she took her usual place in the front row and threw her bag on the seat next to her. After her brother joined his friends in the rear of the vehicle, the driver pulled forward.

All of this was fairly typical. Actually, it was like clockwork. That was one of the things Grace hated about having moved to this small town. Everything was so damned predictable.

She still didn't understand why her father – a prominent Seattle orthodontist – sold his successful practice and moved the family to Gallatin, seemingly overnight. No matter how many times she asked, they avoided giving her an answer.

That was another thing that had been standard lately: everyone ignored her, like she had some sort of awful, communicable disease or worse yet, publicly confessed she hated country music. Apparently, that was considered sacrilege in this part of the good ole' US of A. It wasn't her fault she was cooler than the whole student population of Mountain View High School put together.

Slipping her earbuds out of her pocket, she set her playlist on random and turned up the volume. Leaning against the window, Grace closed her eyes to enjoy the approximately five-and-a-half songs until they reached their destination.

Two songs in, the bus stopped, but there weren't any tell-tale sounds of feet, which signaled embarking passengers. Instead, the surrounding raucous of the kids already on the bus got louder.

Ignoring her instincts, Grace opened her eyes. Seeing the long row of cars on the rural two-lane highway in front of them was unusual enough, but the flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles made the girl bolt upright. Pulling her earbuds out, she heard the conversations around her as the scene slowly unfolded.

"Holy shit . . . look at that . . . isn't that Ed Fortney's truck . . . Oh, my God . . . it's just like with those three kids . . . are they dead . . . they must've been speedin' . . . were they drunk . . . I bet he was texting . . .." The commentary was mixed with speculation, as the two-dozen students craned their necks to see more of the car accident that had completely shut down the usually light, morning commute.

A white pickup was lying on its side in the grass beyond the road's shoulder. Only the bottom of the chassis was visible as a gray plume of smoke rose from the front. Nearby, a group of people surrounded the mangled wreck of a red sedan. Some of the onlookers were emergency personnel watching their fellow first-responders busying themselves around the vehicle, while others were townspeople who'd left their cars to ogle at the carnage.

"Disgusting," Grace mumbled, never having understood the appeal of others' misfortune to such rubberneckers. She was about to turn her head away from the scene out of pure principle when a pretty, blonde haired teen standing at the sedan's hood looked right at her.

Grace's eyes widened in surprise, and a chill ran through her as the girl even gave her a faint smile. "What the hell . . . ?" she shuddered.

Luckily, the police had begun letting the stalled traffic pass through. Using the restricted access on just one lane, the school bus inched forward until it cleared the accident scene. Before it accelerated to its normal speed, Grace looked back one more time.

It was just enough to get a glance of paramedics placing a body covered in a white sheet onto a gurney. She shuddered once again and was about to put her earbuds back in when the conversation in the row behind her piqued her interest.

"I wonder how they'll punish the rest of us after this," a girl Grace knew to be a Junior pouted.

"Right?" Beside her, another girl concurred. "Like there's anything left to take away. Year-round curfew, no driver's licenses until we're eighteen—"

"—no school dances, R-rated movies, or public celebrations." The first finished her thought.

"For real. I haven't been trick-or-treatin' since I was seven. How are we supposed to be real teenagers when we're not allowed to do anything normal?" The other huffed, popping bubble gum.

"Just because three kids managed to get themselves killed ten years ago," the Junior continued.

"I heard they didn't really die," a boy across the aisle joined the conversation.

"What?" The girls asked almost in unison.

The boy leaned over as others around them began to listen, too. "Yeah. Rumor has it, they faked their own deaths."

Some in the crowd laughed, while others were more dubious. "C'mon. Why would they do that?" Another young man asked with a grin.

"My daddy told me that they were involved with the mob." A girl from farther back in the bus interrupted. "Had some gambling debts they couldn't pay, so they set up the whole accident and disappeared. Probably ran off to Mexico or some other country where they don't ask too many questions about your past."

"That's bullshit!" The boy next to her exclaimed. "I mean, I agree those weren't their bodies that burned to a crisp, but I still think they were kidnapped and sold into that sex slave ring they're always investigatin' on CNN."

"Listen to yourselves," the girl behind Grace pleaded with her peers. "You all sound ridiculous. Just let them rest in peace."

"You really believe that it was just a simple car accident?" Her seatmate whispered, once the others tired of the topic.

"Why wouldn't I? Mamma said the police did their job and found nothing out of the ordinary except three kids on their way to the movies, a slippery road, and bad luck." To Grace, it somehow didn't sound like the girl quite believed her own explanation.

"If it's that simple, then why make the rest of us live like we're in a bubble. Shieldin' us from anything that could cause us any harm. Huh?" Her friend pressed on.

"Stop it, Becca. You're giving me a headache." The other huffed. "And since when did you become such a conspiracy theorist?"

The girl didn't answer, and finding the conversation over, Grace focused on her music again. At the next stop, instead of just the regular rider – a freshman boy who looked like he was ten – getting on, a brown-haired guy she'd never seen before also embarked.

Stopping next to her, he unfastened his letter jacket and nodded at the backpack taking up the seat. "Do you mind?"

As the relatively new kid, Grace was perplexed by anyone speaking to her, much less someone who looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch model. Momentarily forgetting her voice, she grabbed her bag and turned her attention out the window. Luckily this was the last pick-up before reaching the school, and as soon as the bus stopped, she squeezed out of the seat and bolted out the door.

Sneaking a peek behind her, it was just in time to see Mr. Handsome step off the bus, right into the arms of a pretty blonde girl. The same girl who'd smiled at Grace at the scene of the car accident not ten minutes earlier.

"How the hell did she get here so fast?" Grace wondered as she walked through the doorway of the home of the fighting Lynx, rolling her eyes at the image of the grimacing feline above the entrance.