Captivated

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

 

I woke up that morning with a pounding headache. As I rolled over to look at the clock on my bedside table I pressed a hand to my face, hoping to ease the pain. It didn’t help, and as I slowly regained consciousness I remembered that today was my first day at Hush High. I couldn’t figure out why the school was named after a quiet stillness, high school was anything but quiet or still. I also had no clue why this town was called Whisper Falls, aside from the small trickle of water somewhere in the back woods they called a waterfall, but on that clear sunny morning I had no idea how well the name suit my new home.

I realized that my alarm was going to go off within the next minute and I quickly fumbled with the buttons on the clock to prevent the loud beeping from causing my aching head more pain than was necessary. I stared at the ceiling while I summoned the will to get ready for school.

A light knock came from my door. “Ash, honey, are you awake yet? You don’t want to be late on your first day of school!” She sounded a lot friendlier than she had last night. I groaned and sat up. “Yes Mom, I’m awake.” I stood and shuffled from my room to the bathroom across the hall. Mom laughed at my squinting, hunched over appearance. “Good morning beautiful! Aren’t you excited for school on your first day?” I moaned and my head continued pounding as I searched for some Advil. We hadn’t finished unpacking in the week we’d been here, so I wasn’t sure that I’d even be able to find what I was looking for. “Mom,” I called, hoping she hadn’t left the hall already. “Where’s the Advil?” She answered from down the hall. “I think there’s some downstairs in the kitchen.”

I trudged down the hallway for what seemed like hours behind my mother and waited while she rummaged around in the drawers looking for Advil. She found the plastic bottle and shook it triumphantly. “Here you go sweetie.” I left the kitchen with a glass of water and two little pills. My mother called to me as I was making my way back to my room. “Ash, you should get ready quickly, I’m going to drop you of at school on my way to work.” My mom was a lawyer, and that was one of the reasons we’d had moved to this town. Mom had been promoted, and while she wanted to be fairly close to the new office she was working at, she didn’t want to live in the city. She said it ruined her health and the air there gave here wrinkles. And so now we lived in the middle of nowhere and her commute to work was nearly an hour long. But she didn’t mind, because she was already an early bird. Many times she was already gone before I even woke up.

 Dad didn’t really care where we lived, as long as he had an office that he could hide in and write his novels. My father was apparently some kind of book writing god. He wrote murder mysteries and the shelves in the living room of our old house had been filled with his books. People always told me that my dad was a genius, but I still think that he’s crossed the line from genius into the land of mad scientist writer. Sometimes he comes out of his office with his hair sticking up in all directions like he stuck his finger in the lamp socket.

Dad’s brain is kind of twisted, one day we were eating dinner and I heard him muttering to himself about how “Georgia committed the murder of her father with a fork.” I could never look at forks the same way after that. Thankfully I didn’t inherit my dad’s strange mind. Instead, I had received the part of him that actually was a brilliant writer and I excelled in all of my English classes. As I continued to get ready for the day I thought about how I felt about the move. I was going to miss my best friend Lynn. We’d been friends since eighth grade when she flipped me the bird. She was new to the school and had been going through a Goth phase, and I had been staring at her lip piercing. Lynn caught me gawking at her and immediately made a face at me, gave me the finger and continued down the hallway.

The next day at lunch she slammed her tray next to me on the table I was sitting at and told me that I shouldn’t stare, it was rude. I had rolled my eyes at her as I replied, “Yeah because giving people the universal sign for ‘friendship’ when the look at you, isn’t rude at all.” Lynn smiled and sat down next to me. She studied me and spoke slowly. “Yeah, we can be friends.” And with that, a friendship was born. Thankfully she’d grown out of the Goth phase, although she kept the lip piercing because it suited her perfectly. I missed her already.