• Please visit the prior chapter before reading this one:

    Chapter 1

    I think I started things a little abruptly. Let me rewind a bit, and then see if you guys understand a little bit more.

    I'm 15, adopted into a family at the age of 13, and if you hadn't guessed it before, I'm a track athlete. A pretty good one, at that.

    And that's not a boast. It's a fact. Running was just my thing, equivalent to how poetry was just William Shakespare's thing...ok, now I'm exaggerating. But, puns aside, it's hard to deny how great I am when you watch me run 200 meters in 27 seconds. Flat.

    Where'd we leave off before? I believe I had just been injured, and I was being rushed to the hospital. Nothing utterly out of the ordinary, but it was going to change. Pretty fast. If time were some how relative to speed, I'd say faster than I can run.

    ---------------------------------------

    Or could run, that is. I'm being rushed to the hospital, looking at my leg with bulging eyes. Pain. I feel it rush through my body. I shiver, and as I take one last glance at my leg, forcing myself not to cry, the bloody mess suddenly forwards a thought to my mind.

    Will I ever be able to run again? The thought immediately vanishes, as I can hardly think at all with all this pain. I grunt, closing my eyes the rest of the trip, leading to the inevitable falling asleep.

    ---------------------------------------

    Boop, boop.

    Noises resonate in my ears. At first, I think it's a dream. In fact, I think that everything that happened was a dream. Me? Falling in a race? What a joke.

    But as my eyes squint open, I find myself waking up into reality. I'm in a hospital. That's where all the noise is coming from. I'm laying on a bed, right smack dab in the middle of an empty room. I crane my head to look forward. A cast is tightly secured onto my right leg. I look at the cast, and ponder over it. I still don't know what happened. Did I trip?

    No, I didn't trip. Someone shoved me. I had felt my shoulder being rammed. But who? And why? Was it an accident? Or was someone intentionally trying to ram me away?

    I shake my head. Too many questions. I start to move off the bed, and am only reminded after a painful moan that my leg is broken. Or twisted. Or whatever.

    The moan I let out is like an alarm, and immediately, people start rushing inside the room. My parents, teammates, doctors, my coach. The room is crammed, and I'm feeling claustrophobic by the minute. People are shouting my name, asking if I'm all right, asking if they could sign my cast.

    "What's going on?" I let out, but no one hears me. I say it again, only this time, louder,

    "What going on?" The room starts to quiet down, and a doctor walks up to me, a grim look on his face. And the first thing he says is,

    "Son, I don't think you'll be able to race for awhile."

    --------------------------------------

    Huh? That's like telling Roald Dahl he couldn't write, or George Lucus to stop making movies.

    "What do you mean by that?" I say, looking at him dead eye, as if to say also that he is insane.

    "Well, I don't think you'll be going very fast with that cast on you." Oh. Right. I almost forgot about that.

    "You gonna tell me what happened?" I ask, glancing back and forth through the crowd I had attracted. Needless to say, people like me. I am pretty popular, and the fact people are gathering around me like I'm Martin Luther King or something is proof enough of that. My coach steps in, and says,

    "Timothy...When I told you I didn't know before, I was being honest. I don't know. You just started flying over to the right, almost as though someone had shoved you. But no one shoved you. If someone had, I would've seen it." Excuse me? People don't got flying across the track field for no reason. And I'm sure that I felt something hit me on the shoulder.

    "Maybe the runner to the left of me shoved me, and you just didn't see me..." I suggested, but am immediately cut off by the coach again.

    "Not a chance," he says confidently. "You were in lane one. There's no one to your left. Don't you remember?" That fact is, I don't. Everything feels so fogged up to me, I feel as though getting back my full, clear memory is going to take a couple minutes.

    "But that's--that's..." I search for words, and the only word I can find is, "impossible! I didn't fly across the track for no reason. I swear, I felt something pound against my shoulder. I--" I suddenly grunt in pain again, as I found myself moving my right leg a little bit again. It takes me a couple seconds to get over the pain, and the I ask,

    "What happened to my leg, anyway?" The grim face is still on the doctor as he replies,

    "It's broken. You hit ground really hard when you fell. I don't even know how you made such a strong impact against the ground." My mom and dad look terrified, glancing at eachother with frightened looks. I give them a smile to reassure them I'm ok. They nod back, but still with worried looks on their faces.

    "I'm--I feel tired." The doctor nods, and says,

    "I'll leave you by yourself. Get a good rest. It will help the recovery." The doctor motions everyone out of the room, and I'm left alone.

    But not for long.

    I close my eyes to go to sleep, when flashing lights saw right past my eye lids, and nearly blind me. I open my eyes, glad the light show has stopped.

    But I won't be glad for long, because what happens next changed my life. Forever.