Bloodlines

Chapter 1

"What's the matter Aria? Did you hurt yourself?" said Alice Stripe with a sly grin

I was barley containing my anger. All I wanted to do was put my hands around her throat and squeeze until she couldn't muster another word, but I knew I had to keep myself contained. So instead I took a deep breath and ignored the hurt in my stomach, turned around and started walking away.

"Not so fast you little bastard." she said just seconds before I saw another fist closing in on my face.

I didn't feel it until I hit the ground though, and when I did, I knew my nose had been broken. It was such a terrible pain at first that I didn't even perceive that it was someone else that had hit me and that Alice wasn't the only one there.

Jerk.

Screw containing my anger, screw keeping calm. They could get away with a lot of things, but not this time. This time I wasn't going to walk away pretending that nothing happened. Not with my nose broken. So instead of staying still on the ground like I probably should have, I pushed myself off the it and turned toward my attackers. Alice was looking down at me with that hideous smile of hers, and to her sides stood two other girls from my class whose names I had a hard time remembering at the moment. But that didn't matter, so I closed my fist and threw it across Alice's face, hard enough for her to take a step back, but that was all.

She put a hand against her cheek and laughed.

"That's all you got? Really?" she shook her head in a humiliating kind of pity. "Even from someone as pathetic as you, I expected it to at least sting a little."

So weak. I was so weak that I could practically feel the energy draining from that one punch. I looked at the heart rate monitor around my wrist and took a sharp breath. It had gone way past 120, which I knew was my limit, a limit I hated. I could already feel the effects starting to take place in my head, in my whole body. It was such an uncomfortable feeling. So I just let myself fall to the ground, let myself calm down until the ach passed and the others left me lying in the mud.

It was better this way, I reminded myself, to at least get to roam around freely and take a few punches here and there, than having to stay in a hospital all day. My heart problem had always been something of a mystery to the doctors. They had no idea where this sudden pain came from when my heart rate went up to a certain level. It wasn't going to kill me, they said, as long as I wasn't running around purposefully trying to raise my heart rate. So that basically meant no sports, no adrenalin, no stress and nothing that made my heart beat too fast. I was a walking piece of jelly, with barely any muscles whatsoever. One of the things that always made my heart go over the limits was my anger. Anger always made me do stupid things that aren't thought through properly and put me in unnecessarily dumb situations. Like this one for instance.

Anger was trouble, and trouble was unavoidable. I just happened to have a lot of anger. Which is exactly why Alice and her minions always had so much fun beating me up. I knew it was exactly the kind of things I shouldn't be accepting, but it was also good practice. Good practice for containing my anger, something I was so incredibly terrible at. I wouldn't say I was letting them beat me purposefully. I just didn't do anything against it. My practice had been going well, until today I just snapped. Now I had to go home and explain to my mom why I had a broken nose without making her panic.

I took a peek at my heart rate monitor and saw that it had gone down to 87 again, which meant I was good to go. So I got to my feet and started walking home through the night.

----

My dad was awake when I came home and not too happy about the time.

"Why haven't you been answering your phone..." he started, but quickly cut himself off when seeing my bloody face. "Bathroom. Now."