Paranormals

Chapter 4: Soccer and Werewolves

Casey's POV

As the final bell of the day rang, all I wanted to do was go home and sleep until my alarm went off at six tomorrow. I was completely exhausted. I had found out that I couldn't skip school when my mom came into my room to wake me up, citing a soccer game. Therefore, instead of running to my sweet bed, I had to board a large yellow school bus and ride with my teammates to Frederick Douglas High School, in hopes of kicking the Buffalo's butts back to next week.

My first issue with this arrangement was, obviously, the lack of rest that I was going to have to suffer, but the second source of my irritation came from the fact that my mother didn't believe that my team could beat the Buffalo's without me. One, this was wishful thinking, I contributed nothing to the team, and participated mainly because I had hopes of a secondary education. Secondly, it's the Buffalos. Who the heck thought up that mascot? We were the Tigers. Last time I checked, tigers, in their natural habitats, were predators, and buffalos were larger, furrier versions of cows. Therefore, I wholeheartedly believed that I had no business being on this bus, especially in light of the sleep I could be catching up on. Despite this, I was still seated on cracked leather older than me as the bus lumbered down the interstate at exactly 55 mph, and not an iota faster.

Staring out the window as all of the other vehicles on the highway passed us, my thoughts turned again to Lombardi's words. They had haunted me all day, popping up in my mind at the moments I least expected them to. The rational side of my mind told me to forget them, but it was impossible. Even though I was still tired, I knew that I probably wouldn't be getting much sleep with his voice in my head.

Yawning, I reached for my bag and selected my math homework from the clutter of papers inside. Then I started the epic search for a pencil, opening all the pockets of my backpack and sliding my hand into the nooks and crannies of the larger pockets. It took me while, but I finally found a blue papermate pen. Although my toothmarks were evident on the end, it was usable and much better than the alternative, a fluorescent yellow highlighter I had located under my chemistry binder.

I remained in the consuming, if boring world of quadratics until the bus finally reached it's destination. Tossing the pen and paper into my backpack, I grabbed my gym bag and phone and filed off the bus with the rest of my teammates.

Fredrick Douglas High School was a private school, so it was no surprise that they had nice facilities. But these weren't just nice, they were pristine, state-of-the-art. Walking through the large school to the locker rooms, I tried not to gape, but it was hard. The blue lockers were much cleaner than ours, and the hallways were larger, with higher ceilings. Nice little blue signs told visitors where everything was, and the gym was at least twice the size of ours. But it was the bathrooms that most impressed me. They were relatively new, and they were absolutely free of graffiti. Absolutely. Free. I had always been a hardcore believer that one could always recognize a high school bathroom by the state of its walls and toilet paper dispensers, private school with new bathrooms or not. This contradiction to my lifelong faith left me dumbstruck and a little scared. I mean, what was the world coming to if the girls bathroom, the heart of the rumor mill, was completely blank? Then again, I figured Catholic girls weren't supposed to spread rumors, and since this was a Catholic high school,  that might explain the blankness of the blue stalls. Either that, or they had enough money to change their bathroom stalls and fixtures fairly often.

I stepped out of the bathrooms and started my warm up stretches. Across the field from me, the opposing team was beginning to do the same. But out of the team, only two girls stood out to me. They seemed to move more fluidly than the rest of the team, and I could make out a golden halo surrounding them. They were definitely supernatural, the question was, what were they. Obviously they weren't ghosts, but they could be almost anything else. I wasn't close enough to tell, although I highly doubted they were vampires. They clearly went to school, and most vampires weren't capable of being around humans for more than a few hours, much less for an entire day.