She was a good girl. A girl with close friends, dreams, goals and a deep love for her small, quite home town. She was like most of her friends, growing up, living, laughing and enjoying their days. Now, the final year of high school was on them and the future was stunningly bright, perfect. They all knew it and they all slipped into the final days of summer not worrying about a thing. Just as small town girls should.

Connie, however, was different. Her desire, her gut need to get out of that town, to leave it behind, to start living a real life, was all she ever thought about, all she ever wanted. Her friends saw it in her and, of all her friends, Annie saw it the most clearly. Annie saw what Connie wanted and she knew exactly what Connie would do to get what she wanted. Annie worried and hoped that her friend, her best friend, wouldn’t do anything rash, stupid, thoughtless. Annie held that wish for as long as she could.

But with school starting and the sudden attachment between Connie and the handsome, driven Parker Levitt, things began to change with Annie and her close friends. Connie, somehow more secure in her future, believing Parker, with his offer of a full scholarship to Columbia in New York City, was her ticket away, her pass to freedom. But, Parker, was in the midst of change as well. The pressure to be the golden boy, the star student, the one who would make his family’s dreams come true, was getting to be too much for him. Combined with his realization that Connie was seeing him, not so much as a boyfriend but, as a way to freedom, Parker took a strange and dangerous turn, one that he involved Annie in far too much, far too deeply.

A small quiet town had rivers of silence and mystery running deeply beneath its surface. The innocence of the days, if you look closely, is tinged with glimpses of desperation, horror and fear. When the under currents begin to run faster, wilder, when they start to break their banks and bubble to the surface, the results are often devastating and life changing for all involved. This was the truth. This was the reality of that small town, in that year, when Annie Stewart suddenly saw the world as it really was.