Chapter 1

A Chapter by Damon Favreau

Here you get to see a glimpse of a typical day for Draven on his last day of school. Abuse haunts his dreams, but is there something more to that haunting his nights?

My father gripped my mothers arm tightly, pulling her to the car, and then he tossed her into the backseat and slammed the door. "Stop doing this you b*****d!" I screamed in protest. I even started flailing my arms at him, but my eight year old arms did nothing to this three-hundred pound man. The knuckly back of his hand cracked across my face, making my nose bleed. "Get in the damn house and lock the door before I really hit you!"

I woke up with my black sheets twisted around my leg and arm like a boa constrictor strangling its prey, and with beads of cold sweat dripping down my forehead and into my near-to-tears eyes. Ever since two years ago, I've aways had memories like that dripping into my sleep like chocolate into a glass of milk, staining its color and flavor.

Rolling out of bed, I glanced at my watch on the night-stand next to my bed. 3:45am. It must be a new record...and just in time for the last day of hell that I call high school; daily pain of being ridiculed by damn near everyone. I quickly took a shower and got dressed in my normal attire: a plain black t-shirt, black skinny-jeans, gloves, and my watch.

Practically drooling from boredom, I stared at the clock. With its dusty hands, it read 3:00. Great, another fifteen minutes of school. "Hey emo kid! Catch!" Some jock wispered as he lobbed a piece of paper at my head. I slumped in my chair, with my black converse shoes worn in from the long school year pushed as far away from my desk as possible. At least my long black hair hid most of my face from these jerks. The last thing I want is to be trapped at school on its last day. This desk is very uncomfortable; funny that I haven't really noticed these four years of high school hell until now.

3:05. Sheesh, could time go a little faster? It's always a bad sign when you can hear the clock ticking, urching you on to just scream as time passes. CLICK. 3:06. Ugh. I looked away from the clock before it would drive me to insanity.

"Pssst!" whispered my friend, Archy. He sat normal...with his bottom half; perfectly straight legs with his feet together. The rest of his body was thrown across his desk with his arms folded, like a drug dealer that you could find just about anywhere outside of school. He wore a black t-shirt that said "Duct tape fixes all" with a stickfigure with duct tape over his mouth, and he had worn out jeans made into cut-offs for the new weather as apposed to my black skinny jeans.

"Martha wanted me to give you this." Archy said, flicking a piece of paper at me like a paper football. The college-ruled paper looked like it had been crumpled, uncrumpled, then folded a bajillion times. I opened it slowly to find words with hearts over i's and little smilie faces all over it. Crap. I already knew what it said, because I've recieved maybe twenty others identicle to this one over the past two weeks. It must've been something like "Dear D, blah blah blah, I'm really sorry, blah blah blah, get back together?" Ugh. We'd been apart for a month now, and now she wants back together just because she's sorry for cheating on me? Especially with that same a*****e jock that's called my "emo kid" all year long and just hit me with a piece of paper. No way! I promised myself that I was done dating for now. Especially Preppy b*****s like Martha.

I tore the paper to pieces. "You'd better pick that up when you're done with it, Draven!" Yelled Mr. Sparky, my English teacher. Everyone laughs at his name because everyone in our class other than me ends up Spark-noting the books he assigns. I picked up a handful of the paper shreds with my fingerless-gloved hands and blew it like pixie dust towards the teacher just as the bell rang. Before Mr. Sparky could yell at me any further this year, I took my bag in one hand and bolted out the door.

School was out.

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