• May sighed and expelled a frosty breath into the frigid air. So far in the day it was a horrendously boring Friday. Wake-up, go to school, walk home from school, do homework, sleep, rinse, and repeat. That was how it went, day after day.
    It had been made even more exceptionally boring by the fact that Dave, her friend-who’s-a-boy-but-not-a-boyfriend, hadn’t shown up to school today; continuing the fad of the week. For some reason unknown to her and everyone else in the school, Dave had failed to show up to school for the past week. There were rumors that he’d been suspended or expelled, but if that had happened his cell phone would still be functioning, wouldn’t it? And he’d still be frequenting the internet. Since he wasn’t doing either of those May had absolutely no idea what had happened to him.
    May was also slightly angry because Dave was really her only close friend, so for the last week she’d just been kind of coasting along with her other friends, talking about random things like peanut butter, zombies, and what happened if you mixed the two. Of course if Dave had been there she would have been talking about the same things, but with Dave it was different. A completely shallow conversation could be turned into something hilarious and thoughtful, and vice versa.
    As May rounded another corner and banged on the crosswalk button she idly considered the odds of her having an interesting Christmas break now. Very low, she decided, with Dave gone now the best I can hope for is Santa crash-landing on our roof or something, and honestly, what’re the odds of that?, she wondered.
    May was still trying to calculate the odds of Martians invading just in time for Christmas break when a black-clad man grabbed her mouth and pulled her around the corner. She didn’t even have time to scream.