"something I can't live without, at least you can be happy now."
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Charis Forrester is trying to hold on. Trying to hold on to anything she can, really. The poor thing hated change, and growing up was proving more complicated than it should. Everything in Charis' world was changing, from realizing she's not into the same bands any more to noticing that she spent a lot of her past doing things or making decisions she wouldn't have now and wishing she could have that time back. She's never felt accepted, realizing that she isn't anybody's 'favorite person'. Charis feels adrift in the ocean, waiting to be saved by a passing cruise ship. Her over-competitive, athletic family doesn't help her much either: an artist and an intellectual in a house full of athletic, sports loving baboons. Of course, she can't hold it against T.J, who has never been anything but nice to her. But her parents, who've played blissfully into believing that Charis is fine and normal, as well as inadvertently becoming the reason she became a lorazepam addict? Hell yeah, she's holding that against them.
Nate Macauley had to grow up too quickly. His mother needed psychiatric care, and he had to deal with his mother's mental health as well as his father's alcoholism at a very early age. Now, he's a playboy delinquent with nothing going for him except a job as a full - time drug dealer. If he can stay out of jail. Charis is one of his clients, reliant on a hefty dose of lorazepam to keep her emotions and her anxiety under control. Sure, he feels guilty about being the reason the bookworm-artist-archetype became an addict, but he's not about to let a payday slip out of his fingers, especially since Charis is friends with the one and only Simon Kelleher, who's been making Bayview's teenagers gossip-hungry mongrels with nothing better to do with their lives than judge other people and be assholes about it.
Fate is a funny thing. One could call it a coincidence that both teenagers found themselves in the same alleyway on a dark California night. Fate? Perhaps. Neither of them actually expected to witness an underworld gang murder behind a sketchy-ass tanning salon. I mean, why would they? But Charis and Nate were exactly where they needed to be at just the right time, even if they almost got each other killed in the process.
