chapter 1

                      Chapter 1- The beginning

 

       It was a dark and gloomy mid-December night.  Sterling                    

 stepped out of his small apartment building into the cold night.

Breathing in the freezing cold night air he began to think about

his little sister, Juliana. It had been a very long time since he

had heard anything from her, about seven years. About eight

years ago they were separated by their parents divorced

for reasons unknown to him and Juliana. For a whole year

after that they kept a constant stream of contact, talking

over e-mail and phone calls for hours at a time every day

and then, he never heard from her again. Right now he was

wondering what she doing. He began to think about what

she had looked like on the day of the divorce. Juliana (who

was six at the time)had long, jet-black hair that matched

perfectly with her piercing, sapphire blue eyes. She was

slightly shorter than the average nine year old girl in

Washington. The last time he saw her was in the court

house where their parents had divorced and she was crying

and flailing uncontrollably. She was crying because she knew

that she would never see her brother or her mother ever

again. Sterling sank onto his knees in the cold snow, pained from

reliving that painful memory, he felt like he was going to cry.

“I really miss her” he said sadly.

He was freezing cold right now, he felt like a popsicle.

‘I need to get back inside’, he thought. Before he back inside

though, he looked around at the apartment complex. It wasn’t

a large complex, only six apartment buildings lined up side by side

with the registering office right across from it. Each of the apartment

buildings had two floors with three apartments on every floor. His

apartment was on the bottom floor of the second building in. The

second he entered his small apartment his dog Jake came speeding

toward him from Sterling’s twin sized bed. For him it was hard to not

be knocked over by a bounding German Sheppard. When the dog had

succeeded in taking Sterling down,  he began to furiously lick him.

“Hey Jake” he said joyfully.

Sterling had taken Jake in about two years ago when he had found the dog

roaming around the area and he wasn’t surprised to find that the dog had

a collar, because people these days were always releasing their dogs

out into the wild. He had tried to find Jake’s original owner for weeks

and weeks but without success. So after weeks of failure to find the dog’s

owner, he decided to keep him. After the dog had stopped licking him

and he had gotten to his feet, Sterling gazed around the small room.

His bed was pushed against the back wall and a fifteen inch television

sitting on top of  a small dresser opposite it. A tall silver lamp was

standing in the corner by the front door was burning brightly. There is

also a window near the bed that overlooked the small, snow strewn

office building. ‘Its not a lot but its what I need and that’s all that

matters’ , he thought. Walking across the room to his bed, Sterling

bent down to pick up his alarm clock, it said 11:00 p.m.

“Time for bed” he told Jake and the dog instinctively ambled over

to a corner and laid down. Sterling walked over to the standing

lamp and turned it off. He sauntered over to his bed in the dark

and flopped down on the soft mattress.  He started to think about

 Juliana again, her hysterically crying face wove in and out

of his mind, making it hard for him to concentrate on sleep.

He was soon unable to resist the welcoming hands of sleep

and rest, he began to drift into unconsciousness.