[Note: Cautions apply to the entire story.]

CHAPTER 2 -- Recovery Room

When you've had a head injury, you don't just wake up. It's more like bits and pieces start to sort themselves out like a jigsaw puzzle, only over months. And the pieces sometimes unsort themselves for a while. At least, that was how it was for me. I have pieces of memory from early August, and longer ones from later in the month.

At some point I realized that I had been in a serious accident, with broken bones and a bad concussion. I hadn't worn a helmet (because I wasn't going to actually ride it, right?) and they said it was a miracle I was even alive. They told me I had spent a month and a half at the University medical center and had been in a medically-induced coma for a month while they pumped gene therapy drugs into me to encourage my brain to heal. I wasn't healing as fast as they hoped, which said something about how bad the concussion was.

But by September, most of the casts were off and my brain was working well enough that the doctors thought I could go back to school, although I should avoid anything that might bang my head. I hoped my brain injuries hadn't hurt my survival skills -- I needed to be in top form to survive at West High. They let me go back as a sophomore, even though I had missed freshman year finals. I don't know if I'd done well enough or if they just didn't want to have me around any longer than they had to.

I'd hoped that I'd get out of gym class, which I hated, but no such luck. The other classes were okay, although I got a lot of headaches, especially when the other guys harrassed me too much.

Now I should say that sports, and especially football, are a big deal at West High. West High is like a small town. The parents all know each other; most went to West High themselves. And in the fall, most of the conversation, in school or out, is about whether the team will win the next game. If the team wins, especially the big game with Hollingsworth, everybody screams and drives around honking and throwing stuff. And that's the grown-ups. So the guys on the football team are gods. They can do anything they want, and nobody will say anything. Even the freshman team is a big deal. The basketball team is a big deal, too, but those guys are just demigods.

For some reason, my gym class was always getting out when some of the football players were coming in. They liked to hang out and harrass anybody they thought was a wimp, which meant pretty much anyone who wasn't on the varsity or one of their buddies. I didn't do well in gym, anyway, so the class kept proving I was no good as a guy. And then I'd get to the showers, and they and the jocks in my class would make fun of people's private parts and pop them with towels. I always had a splitting headache after gym, what with the concussion and all.