Entangled

chapter 1

Donovan was in his room, listening to music while studying for his upcoming math exam. He was on his first year of college, eighteen, and he had always been an honor-roll student. He was one of few to graduate high school with a 4.0 final average. Now his first year of college was almost over, thus he graduated at seventeen. He wasn't a genius or anything of that sort. He just studied really hard, but he was strange in a way compared to other students because rather than distracting him, music would help him study better. It would transmit him to a zone unknown and set him apart from everything else, where he could only think about what he was studying because it was classical music with no lyrics, and he would play it on a low volume. Unbeknown to him, he had studied for three hours now, and he was really tired. Therefore, he closed his textbook and his three-ring binder with his notes, went out of his room and into the bathroom, took a quick shower, and changed into his pajamas. Minutes later, he went to sleep in his bed, but he forgot to turn the music off. The radio was battery powered now and when the battery would die, it would go off by itself, no problem. Most of his devices were battery-powered for him to save a little energy. He lived in a two-room apartment that, had it been a hotel, it would've been considered four-star. His rent was really expensive. He worked as a secretary for a powerful attorney since age sixteen because he'd always been more than a computer freak, and there was nothing about computers he didn't know. He even knew how to remove malware without the help of any computer programs, take computers apart, repair them, replace parts—everything. He'd been kind of forced to become a computer technician without a license because every time his father would buy a computer, he would destroy it in a matter of months, and tired of watching his father waste his money on computers every six to eight months, when his father was on his third computer in less than a year and a half, Donovan spent his allowance on all sorts of computer manuals to do everything under the sun and he started repairing his father's computer for him at age ten, and because of that, it had been almost eight years and that damned computer, although old, was still up and running. It was a desktop and Donovan would help his father Daniel upgrade all of his computer's hardware and software every time that Daniel felt it needed an upgrade, about every two years or so. Donovan didn't mind spending his money on hardware all in one blow. It was preferable than buying computer after computer every time Father, as he would call Daniel, needed an upgrade. After all, computers weren't made to last forever, but they sure were meant to last more than two years. Daniel's computer was old on the outside but new on the inside, and Daniel was thrilled. He had the latest of everything. Every time he told someone how old his computer really was, no one would believe him, unless they saw that same model of computer on eBay. Daniel would keep his computer crisp clean and there were no scratch marks or dents on any of the parts, at all. Even the keyboard was clean as fresh linen.

The phone rang that night. Although Donovan was dead tired, he picked it up. He wasn't the kind to cut a call or reject it because he was sleeping, and he would always pick up and talk as long as necessary even if it were his dorky best friend, Scott, drunken as a cat, talking utter nonsense. After all, Donovan was always the only one that would listen. But it wasn't Scott. It was his older sister, twenty-three-year-old Diana. Her husband of three years had just beaten her to a pulp for the zillionth time because she was talking to her cousin, Tony, and stupidly, Langston thought that even though this was her first cousin, with whom she'd grown up and spent most of her days, she was cheating on him with Tony. Diana would never cheat with anyone, much less with kin. That was flat out disgusting, but Langston was so whacked out he just couldn't see things the way they really were most of the time and there was a good reason for this—Langston was a heavy meth user for many years. Diana thought that by being by his side she could help him rehabilitate. After all, she had helped many people, even total strangers, pull through from the worst life-situations. She just learned the hard way that her husband was literally a lost case. He couldn't be rehabilitated because he didn't want to be, and if his parents couldn't help him get better, what in the world made her think that she could?