This whole thing happened because I sat next to a girl in English class.

I didn't want to draw attention to myself, so I sat in the back left corner next to a window. Maybe I could escape notice from back here.

I sunk down in my chair and pretended extreme interest in the flagpole, from which the flag hung at half-mast. It was hot as hell, even though it was September, and as soon as I got out of school I was going to take my shirt off and go sulk in the open space out behind my house.

The teacher hurried in, blonde hair captured in a neat bun at the nape of her neck. She was fairly young, and spared a smile for us as she dropped her purse and several binders on the desk up front.

She flipped through the binder on top of the stack, then let it lay open on the desk and turned to the whiteboard. She was left-handed, and her handwriting was very neat.

She turned back to face us and capped the marker. "Hello, class. I'm Miss Walker and I'll be your English teacher this year. I hope you're all in the right room."

I'd showed up early specifically to be sure I could find all my classes, like the dork I was.

"Let me just call roll and I'll pass out your syllabus for the year." She smiled and picked up her binder.

"Nicola? Nicola Aloisi?"

I stuck my hand up in the air. She'd mispronounced my last name, but pretty much everyone did. "Here. Call me Nick."

"Nick? Okay."

To be honest, nobody was staring at me, but it felt like the whole class was, and I looked out the window, trying to seem all James Dean-like and mysterious rather than embarrassed. Every year. Every year I had to correct people about my name.

Why couldn't my dad just have named me Leonard or something? I didn't care if it was a family name. After a hundred years settled in the Great Plains, we were about as Italian as pizza pie.

I wasn't really paying attention for the rest of roll, until (of course) the girl next to me answered. She was good-looking, in that particular way you see in small towns in the West - strong bones, kind eyes, her hair pulled back tight. And, of course, she wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans.

I missed most of her answer being an awkward nerd creeping on the girl next to me, but I heard her first name loud and clear when she corrected Miss Walker.

"Max," she said her name was. I could like that. We could start a "cursed with strange names" club. God, I was so lonely back then.

And for whatever reason, I didn't just forget about her when the bell rang. She interested me. What was with the name? Why was she so attached to the corner seat? And why did her fashion sense match mine?

I had a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers - but then again, such is life.

So I was curious about this new girl. And I had time on my hands, more than enough to get to know her.

What I didn't know at this point was that there was, indeed, much more than met the eye to Max, and that while we both liked hiking (as I was soon to find out) most of my afternoons were going to be spent chasing leads in dusty libraries or learning to use microfiche.

But that was all in the future at this point. I didn't know her reputation. I hadn't met the people she'd been friends with. I hadn't tracked her family's history.

I hadn't met her father yet.

Even then, though - I had a hunch. Just a vague idea. Maybe it was intuition.

Something was not only different about Max, but wrong.

I'd like to stop for just a minute and tell you something before I get any further: I can't tell you everything that happened, as much as I'd like to.

See, once the ball got rolling, this whole ball of weirdness and tragedy snowballed larger and larger, until people who had never been involved, people like Max's mom and little brother, got drawn into the storm of strangeness and government attention. It was a bad time, and I waited until now to spill my story because I didn't want to stir the whole feeding frenzy back to life.

If you really want to know everything, it's not as if Itexicon ever cared enough to completely bury what happened - and if you look in the right places, the whole story is, as far as I know, still just floating around.

That said:

This all happened when I was a junior in high school, in a little town in the West that I'm going to call Undisclosed...