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a hurricane and a missing man.
STORMS.
Hurricanes, to be exact. The name itself comes from the Taino Native American word, hurucane, which means evil spirit of the wind. A tropical storm is considered a hurricane once wind speed increases to 74 miles per hour or higher. It's dangerous. It's chaotic. It symbolises all things bad – destruction ; chaos ; crisis.
Most people despise such weather conditions. Why would anyone enjoy being trapped in their house with the fear of getting blown away or hit with flying debris coursing through their veins? Simple, they didn't.
Hurricanes only demolish. It was a simple fact. They caused ruin wherever they went. They cost people thousands of dollars to repair the damage and you can only imagine how detrimental the loss of those thousands of dollars could be to the poorer families of the world.
To the richer folk however, hurricanes were more of just an inconvenience. Sure, they ruined their gardens and screwed up their pool by polluting it with leaves and branches, but all of it would be taken care of within a day or two. All they had to do was snap their fingers and their workers would be right on it, tossing trash from the grass into black garbage bags, cleaning the front yard, trimming the bushes.
That brings us to the status division of the Outer Banks. We have the richer folk – who handle everything by the exchange of a couple hundred bucks – , the Kooks. And the not-so-richer folk – who get handed those couple hundred bucks in exchange for bussing tables and cleaning yards – , the Pogues.
In other words, the Kooks were no-good, spoilt brats while the Pogues were no-good, troublemakers.
Some of the kooks, however, were more grounded. These people had their share of both worlds and would never trade either life for the other. They were on the finer end of the stick in terms of riches but were on the other end in terms of the group they hung around.
There was no official name for these kids. Maybe because there were only two of them.
Kiara Carrera and Willow Brown.
Well, there used to be two of them.
The repetitive sound of knocking was the first thing that met Willow's ears as her eyelids fluttered open. It was soon overlapping with an extremely tumultuous drilling that seemed to be coming from outside her window. Her gaze flew to the left. Her eyes widened in concerned at the sight of her father – definitely on a ladder – knocking a nail into her white wooden windowsill from the outside, only his waist and above visible through the slightly grimy glass.
