It was Wednesday and I was sitting in the cafeteria eying my tuna salad as Alyssa waited in the lunch line. She was wearing plain blue jeans with a simple red sweater today and her beach blond hair was bouncing around her shoulders in its natural curls.

I thought back to what had been my first impression of Alyssa Tremors. I had known her since the first grade but High School had actually been the first time we had grown close. I remembered thinking of her as the smart girl with the cute blonde pigtails, who always managed to get in trouble during recess and yet managed to be all the teachers' favourite. She always shared her toys on Bring Your Toy to school day, except when she brought a certain Barbie doll to school. In middle school, she had been the best gymnast in the school and could do cartwheels from one end of the gym to the other. Back then, I had used to hang out with Alice Bracer and Emily Rene.

Emily had now moved to Canada with her parents and Alice and I had just sort of drifted apart. I remembered one day in seventh grade, everyone had teased Alice because of her last name and her braces and she had cried her heart out, and Emily and I had been there to help her and soothe her. Her braces had come off now and she was actually one of the more prettier girls in school. I missed talking to her and Emily, and although Emily and I would often talk over the phone and Skype, and Alice would stop to chat in the hallway, it wasn't the same. Alice would say "Hi, how are you?" and then she'd start looking around to see if her new"friends" were nearby. If they were, she'd walk away immediately and they almost always seemed to be near her. I missed the pointless, random things we would talk about in seventh grade. Our sleepovers had used to be so much fun.

Alice now hung out with Lisa, Ashley and the other cheerleaders. She had changed so much and when Alyssa told me about stuff that happened at the cheerleader tryouts, I found it hard to believe that Alice was actually one of them now.

Not that I didn't like Alyssa as my best friend, I just wished that Alice was still the Alice who used to be my best friend: that way, Alice, Alyssa and I would have been three best friends instead of two. My other friends Cassie, Gwen and Tiffany were on the school dance team just like me but their schedule was very different compared to mine so we hardly ever go to hang out in school. But despite the fact that I had made new friends, I still missed Alice.

A horrible thought had struck me the previous night: what if Alice was a werewolf? Dylan had said that the whole cheerleading squad was involved. Alice was a cheerleader and she also hung out with the other girls on the squad so there was a high possibility of her being a wolf. After knowing her for so long, I was sure of the fact that Alice could be very easily convinced to make decisions she wouldn't normally make. She almost never thought about the result of any choice. She was too innocent for her own good. That was probably why the whole school liked her now. After her braces had come off and she had gone through some sort of transformation, she had still remained the gullible, self-conscious girl she was before, but had changed from the outside. She had gotten rid of those pigtails she always wore her hair in. Now her hair was always hanging lose over her shoulders and it had grown into beautiful, long, strawberry-blonde curls. She wore lots of makeup now and nearly always had heals on. I was ready to bet that Lisa Thompson had everything to do with that. Lisa was most certainly a werewolf and this thought caused me to think about me being a Silverlight, again.

I had been practicing my powers since Sunday and had improved considerably in my ability to teleport. I had thought that I would never be able to vanish from one spot and then just appear in another in a matter of seconds. Yet I had tried it, with grandma muttering instructions over the phone. I had first stood in my bedroom outside my bathroom door, closed my eyes and had imagined the bath tub: a shallow rectangular bath near the far wall. I had then proceeded to leap lightly off the ground, kind of like when you do when you're playing jump rope, with the image of the bath tub in my mind. At first, I had felt like I had just hit my head on something hard, but then it felt like my head was breaking the surface of the water in an ocean, warm water wrapped around me in my mind, protecting me and then BAM! I had landed in the bathtub in my bathroom. I had been overjoyed, but my joy was to be short-lived, as my knees had buckled under me and I realised that I had somehow twisted my ankle and before I knew it, I was throwing up.

After that, I had practiced a lot: from the top of the stairs to the bottom, from my bedroom into the hallway outside , from my front door into our garden and then from my bedroom to the edge of the pool. Once I had even managed teleporting from the gate of the house to the corner of the street. I had been sure no one saw me though. But still, I had yet to master long distance teleportation..

Elizabeth had wanted to play a game of cards with me since Sunday but I had not played, until I came to realise that I could use that game to practice my mind-reading skills. It was working out great so far. But I still had a long way to go and we had still done nothing about making a plan to stop the werwolves.

Alyssa and I had decided that mastering my powers just wasn't going to help us if we didn't do anything physically to fight the wolves. We needed to find out who they were working under, what made them so strong and what they were looking for that would allow them to drain all humanity and most importantly: how we could stop them.

Alyssa came and sat down, wearing a sour expression, with her lunch tray in front of her. The tray held some frozen yogurt, cold chilli fries and a half-filled glass of milk. This was exactly why I preferred bringing my own lunch on Wednesdays and Thursday. No one had discovered the reason yet but Madeline, the lunch lady always seemed to be in a bad mood on these two days which led to us getting low quality food. She would always make something like fries or egg rolls in the morning and that was it. They'd get cold by the time lunchtime came and that caused people like Alyssa and I to want to strangle someone. They always ran out of sodas too. This caused people to settle for milk instead.

"So," she began."How are your powers coming along?"

"Good, I guess." I replied. "But I think we should be concentrating on other stuff too. Like how we can stop the werewolves."

"You know? I was thinking the same thing. We need to figure out the source of their power."

"That would be easy if we knew who was involved with them. We could just find out if they have a common possession that could give them their powers...." Alyssa cut me off by putting a finger to her lips. At that very moment, the guys from the school football team had walked into the cafeteria. They walked right by us to get to the lunch line. By now, the line had gotten so long that people were actually standing right next to our table, waiting for their turn to come. The players were talking very loudly and were arguing about some game that been planned for the next day. It was not likely they could hear us, but we decided to play it safe until the line had shortened. So we started talking about other things. When the football guys had gotten their lunch, they made their way back to a table where a few other guys and cheerleaders were sitting. I knew some of those guys but not all of them. We would sometimes eat with them too but since today, Alyssa and I were talking about something serious, we had decided to stay at a table that was a little way off the. Michael, a guy with blonde hair and emerald green eyes waved and smiled at me and I waved back, mouthing the words: "important English assignment," while nodding at Alyssa. He got the hint and started talking to Nick, another guy on the team.

Alyssa was quite for a minute and then said, "Lisa Thompson's sweet sixteen slumber party is this Saturday and I'm pretty sure all the cheerleaders are going to be there too. What if we go too since we were invited and we can trick them into telling us about the source?"

"But won't they be expecting that?" I asked. "I mean, we decided that they only wanted me to come because I'm a Silverlight and it could be a trap. They could capture me and force me to help them." It was true. Last night, over the phone, we had both come to the conclusion that Ashley and Lisa would do anything in their power to get me, and that it was best if I avoided them as much as possible, until I had mastered my powers at least.

"True. I could go alone though! When they see I'm alone, they might try to win me over like they are doing to every other vampire, and then I might be able to trick them into thinking I actually do want to join them, and I might find out more stuff about them," she said in one breath.

That plan sounded brilliant at the moment and it wasn't like there was anything else we could so we agreed upon it. After that party, Alyssa and I would only be able to communicate over the phone. That was if the plan actually worked.

I took out my History textbook and started going through the chapter we
had just done. I had a test in the next period and I hadn't studied at home. The past few days, I had just been too busy practicing my powers to concentrate on schoolwork. This led to me being seriously behind in schoolwork and I knew that it was only a matter of time before one of my teachers called my mom and told her about my academic performance deteriorating.

In History, I was bent over my paper and scribbling away my answers when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I nearly jumped when I saw that it was Taylor Lysander. He smirked and muttered,

"What question are you on?" He no longer seemed like the shy, quiet boy that I had grown to know him as. He seemed...confident and strong. So that whole shyness and weakness had been an act then.

I gulped. "Thirty." That was the last question and I would be free to go once I handed the paper in.

"Can you meet me outside the class then?" he raised his eyebrow. "I want to talk to you."

"Uhh," I started, desperately trying to think of an excuse, but I couldn't. "I've got another class."

"It won't take long," he smirked getting up and walking up to the front desk, and handing his paper over to the teacher.

I remembered Alyssa telling me not to talk to anyone in a deserted place and I knew that Taylor was a werewolf. But I didn't see how I could avoid this meeting. He would be standing right outside the door, waiting for me and I couldn't teleport inside school.

So I handed my test in, took a deep breath and turned the doorknob. Sure enough, Taylor was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. He looked up when I came and smiled.

"Hey,"

"Hi," I replied, nervously.

"Listen, I heard some pretty great things about Dylan Grace from the football players. He was your best friend wasn't he?"

This caught me off guard. I had thought he would transform and hurt me but I hadn't expected him to be considerate.

"Yeah, you were right when you said he died." I said, sadly, stating the obvious.

"I'm really sorry," he murmured, reaching out with his hand and I hesitantly shook it. "How did he die?"

Oh, so I was wrong. He could never be considerate. He was just trying to get the truth about Dylan's death out of me. He just wanted to know if I had figured it out.

"Car crash," I said stiffly, turning in the opposite direction.

The rest of the day went by quickly. Math was the usual boring drag along with Biology. In fact, the only only class I actually enjoyed that day was English because all we had to do was read silently.

After school, I made the usual drive back to my house, but somehow, I could feel that the next few days would be very eventful.

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I still hadn't told my father about me being a Silverlight and had had some pretty close calls with my mom. Twice, she had caught me in midair, practicing teleportation. Luckily, after much persuasion, she had assumed that I had been having a weird teenage mood swing and had been stretching and then had started jumping up and down because I felt like it, but I doubted whether I could keep this act up for long. After all, I couldn't exactly think of an excuse when she caught me practicing disguising myself as someone else. She would surely call the police, thinking I was some stranger who had just managed to slip into the house, or when I started my persuasive speech practice..

That night, I sat up in my bed for a really long time. The curtains had been pulled apart and silvery moonlight was filtering into my room, casting a soft silver glow. The moon was almost full and the clear black night sky was adorned with countless stars that twinkled and shone. I was trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Dylan had actually passed away. It was still hard to believe that he was gone and would never come back. I fiddled with the bracelet I was wearing. It was nothing special: just an ordinary teal bracelet with tiny flowers and hearts carved into it. But what made it special was the fact that Dylan had gotten this for me on my fifteenth birthday. That day seemed so ling ago now. I wondered who had actually killed him in the end. Had it been Taylor? Ashley? Lisa? Or was it some other werewolf?

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The next day, Lisa Thompson approached me in the hallway. She was wearing heavy make up and her shining black hair had been freshly curled. My next class was science and I had stopped by my locker to grab some books and was eager to get rid of my rather thick math one. I realised that ny locker needed cleaning. It was filled with chewing gum wrappers, pencil shavings and crumpled up pieces of paper. Oh well, it would have to wait.

"So, are you coming to my slumber party this Saturday?" She had cut to the main topic without so much as a How are you? How rude. But then again, she would never be polite with me and she was only acting this way so she could capture and possibly trick me, I silently told myself.

"Umm no," I said to her, uncomfortably, fumbling in my locker, looking for my science notebook.

"What?" she knitted her eyebrows. "But you have to, Ellie!" Since when had she started calling me by my nickname? "It'll be fun!"

"I'll try to come," I said, just wanting to get this conversation over with.

"Yeah, try your very best! I really am looking forward to having you!" and just like that she flounced off. She was really laying the flattery on too thick. Too bad it wouldn't work! I had found out that she was not going to Hawaii after all. She would have her party and then that would be it, because surprisingly, she did not want to go anymore.

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That night, it rained. Hard. The raindrops sounded like millions of coins as they landed on the roof of my house and I slept with difficulty because of all the noise. Wind howled through the night and every now and then, the sky would light up as lightning struck, throwing a purplish light over everything. I got the feeling that the first snowfall of the winter wasn't fat off. Soon, we would all be wearing snow boots and furry coats. We'd be drinking hot chocolate at night and go winter clothes shopping. Warm baths would become a permanent sanctuary and getting up in the middle of the night would be annoying because no one would want to leave the warm comfort of the bed and the warm blankets. The sidewalks would be covered in snow and walking on them would become a nuisance.

The rest of the weak went by in a flash. I hardly noticed the time go by. Maybe it was because I spent all my time practicing my powers and didn't really pay much attention to anything else.

On Saturday night, Alyssa went to Lisa's house for the sleepover and I sat hunched over on my desk, pouring over some math homework. She would send me a text as soon as something happened. I had also finished painting some posters for my election campaign. Now that I knew I was going to be running against Ashley, I was putting extra work into my campaign because I knew that she would be tough to best. Although, I had figured that after I was a fully trained Silverlight, I wouldn't really have much time to spare for Student Government duties, I still wanted to get the post of Student President. I would just have to balance my life somehow.

It was nine thirty and Alyssa still hadn't called or texted. I imagined her sitting next to Lisa, watching a horror movie surrounded by all the snobbish cheerleaders as they chatted about everything but the movie they were watching. That, or she was playing truth or dare with them and just listening to them gossip. I felt bad for her at that moment. I knew how much she hated Lisa and Ashley, and listening to them talk and pretending to be interested in what they were saying was going to be difficult for her.

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A/N
There you go guys. I hope you like this. Please Vote and comment and thanks for reading. What do you think of the story so far? Or this chapter? First one to answer gets the next chapter dedicated to them :-)