My Girlfriend Bites (Young Adult Paranormal Werewolf Romance)

Chapter 2

Aiden

So how did I screw that up? I remember the rope biting into my neck. I blacked out. Then I woke up in this stupid hospital. Alive. What the hell? The hospital staff filled in some of the missing pieces. Late that night, someone brought me to the ER when things were going crazy. A huge apartment fire swamped the place with twelve burn patients and their grieving families. The staff didn’t remember any details about the person who brought me in and disappeared. They never left a name. Whoever this good Samaritan is…I want to thank them for being an asshole.

“Ready to go?” A male nurse rolls a wheelchair into my tiny hospital room. He raises the shades, letting in all that bright sunshine I want kept out.

I peel myself off the sticky leather chair I’ve been waiting in, gather my stuff, and nod. The male nurse wheels the chair next to me.

“Do I have to use that?”

“Yes, sir. Hospital policy.”

Whatever. I drop myself into the chair, putting my backpack on my knees. The nurse slaps down the foot rests. I divert my eyes from him, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The wheelchair completes the I’m-a-total-loser look that is so me right now.

We take an elevator down to the first-floor lobby. The nurse rolls me past walls decorated with buffaloes, Indian art, and other Oklahoma-related crap. Through the front window, the morning sun paints the hospital lobby this weird shade of orange. It almost fools me into thinking this will be the happy day when I come back to my happy life that I failed to escape from.

Dad waits in the lobby, wearing his familiar Liberty Airways t-shirt that’s permanently stained with hydraulic fluid and wheel grease from a Boeing 737-800. He follows as the male nurse wheels me up to the old Dodge pickup. I get out of the stupid wheelchair and lift the door handle. Locked. Dad climbs in, reaches over, and unlocks it.

Johnny Cash sings from the old country radio station Dad likes to listen to as we drive home. He’s the only guy who listens to the radio anymore. I bought him a digital music player for Christmas, but it’s still in his bedroom. Unopened. Whatever.

“How about pizza for dinner?” Dad asks. “Want the usual?”

“Sounds fine,” I say, wondering when he’s going to say something about you know what again.

“Bought you an electric razor.”

“Okay.”

Dad nods. Hesitates. “Hid the scissors, too.”

I don’t answer.

“Catch you trying that again and I’ll ground you.”

Ground me? That’s funny. He’s acting like I broke a window or lied about my grades.

“I’m being serious, Aiden.”

I nod. “Okay.”

Dad guides the pickup into the driveway. I stare at our sad, one-story house that I hoped I would never see again. We step on the porch causing Fatso, the neighbor’s dog, to bark its head off. Stupid dog. All it does all day is bark. And it knows that we live here. If it can smell us, why does it keep barking like that?

I’m glad we never got a dog.

                                                                                  ***

The outside of Wiley Post High School reminds me of a slaughterhouse. The hooks ready to plunge into my skin and take me down the conveyor belt to the rotating knives disguised as classrooms. The inside has few windows. Only an endless criss-crossing of sanitized hallways with smooth white walls, red classroom doors, and shiny, white-tiled floors. The shine comes from the janitors mopping up all the blood the school takes out of the students.