Rougarou

Chapter One: July Night

AN
Yes, I am unashamed of using Dylan O'Brian as my main protagonist and other various TW cast as the image I've created. No regrets. I blame this story on the beautiful face of Dylan O'Brian, because he made me want to write a book about a pretty boy and back roads and small towns and suspense.
ALSO, book has undertones of BxB
ALSO, this chapter is long and very boring. I'm sorry.
ALSO, pay attention guys. I ain't spelling it out for you, use your mind. Please.

Skinny, lithe arms reach out from where they sat folded in the old shit-car; one hand reached for the bitter gas-station coffee bought for eighty-seven cents, and the other smacked at the offending, big hands of the skinny boy's best friend since seventh grade.

"Don't touch my caffeine, this is the only thing that keeps me from killing you," Asher Bravermen snaps at the driver from his passenger seat. The chair he sits in is nothing but cracking old leather. He can literally see the road the old Chevy is racing over between asunder floor-boards, the air-condition doesn't work, either; instead, it just rattles for a few seconds before coughing dead bugs into Asher's face.

Meaning, there isn't any heat in the truck, and he's forced to huddle over his coffee like a furnace in the cold weather of Louisiana- which feels almost alien. It hardly drops past forty in December, but now Asher's teeth are chattering because the weather forecast called for Friday's highest temperature 2 degrees below freezing.

It's going to suck ass when he's stuck in the stadiums watching and flashing 'Go Gladiators!' signs at Tyler and Tommy, the stars of Hollow Grove's only noteworthy event to most: Friday night football. The only social experience all generations of Hollow's High produced for themselves, keeping a good-enough team almost every year to be in the semi-finals until December.

Because it was game day, Tyler wasn't allowed to drink the 16 ounces of coffee Asher was chugging, and instead stuffed a protein bar down his throat as a substitute- it didn't actually look appetizing, according to his scrunched up nose and gagging noises that choked out of his throat.

Asher would've felt bad- but he isn't an athlete, and he chooses to be bone-skinny and look every inch of the teenage garbage he is instead of following Tyler to the gym after seventh hour. And it's every single day, with Tyler chugging oreo-and-vanilla flavored protein shakes each morning- which didn't really taste like oreo and vanilla, it was more like chalky icing and mushy hour-old cereal, at least when Asher had tried it. He talks about lifting weights and benching and other sins like sports and exercise, at least until he turns his head to see a horrified Asher staring at him.

Tyler usually shuts up then, laughing as he tells Asher that metabolisms won't work forever, and it won't be cute when he's forty and still scrawny with a beer-belly.

It's the honest truth, though. But Asher plans that one day very soon, science is going to make a discovery- for scrawny kids like him, who can eat three plates of dinner a night and still look below one-fifty. Some kind of muscle enhancers or robotic arms will be willed into existence to make him look less like a boy and more like a man.

Tyler, on the other hand, looks like a twenty year-old who was held back three years. But, Asher knows this isn't the case- before either of them hit puberty, they were both scrawny and short. Apparently Tyler stole all of Asher's thunder and left him to only gain twelve pounds and three inches.

"Only a semester and a month, Tyler," Asher hummed around his coffee as he stared past the top of the plastic lid to Hollow's High crumbling parking lot.

Hollow Grove was ancient, one of the first towns settled in Louisiana. Some of the inhabitants' families had been here for generations- Asher's mother and father were direct descendants to the first settlers in the town. Something that his grandmothers on either side never ceased to bring up every single Founder's day.