Victims of the school’s scariest bully are invited to get revenge…
Blurb:
Jack Sullivan is Blackwell Middle
School’s scariest bully. When students and teachers see him coming down the
hallway, they run the other way. He has no friends; he doesn’t need them.
School is a waste of his time.
But after a car accident with his
father leaves him in need of surgery, Jack has to have a tissue donor.
Strangely, he then begins having memories from events that never actually
happened to him – memories of being bullied by bigger, meaner boys. Jack learns
he is experiencing cellular memory, which makes him receive the memories of his
tissue donor…who just so happened to be a weak, helpless victim of bullying.
Jack decides he has to make things
right. To do that, he offers each of his former victims an apology, along with
the chance to choose a way to get even with him. But Jack quickly learns that
earning their forgiveness won’t be easy...
Prologue
Jack
shoved the head of the writhing boy further into the toilet, feeling a small
glimmer of satisfaction as he listened to the muffled screams. He watched the
water bubbles come up from the nameless boy’s mouth as he tried to make noise
and fought a useless battle, trying to escape the grip of Jack’s large fingers
on his neck. Jack continued to hold the boy’s head under the water, waiting
patiently for the boy to stop moving. When he did, Jack quickly pulled his head
back out of the water, watching the helpless boy gasp for breath and slap the
water off his face while tears filled his eyes.
“If
you tell anyone what just happened, I’ll kill you,” Jack growled at the boy,
giving him his most convincing glare before he casually walked away, leaving
the boy crumpled on the floor, drowning in his own sobs.
Jack
walked out of the locker room and rejoined the rest of the members of his gym
class just as the dismissal bell rang, signaling the end of his school day. He
shoved past several students who were heading for the gym doors, ignoring their
grunts and protests as he bumped into them from behind. He knew that as soon as
the other students saw who was pushing past them they would quickly shut their
mouths in fear. No one wanted to make Jack Sullivan mad. No one even wanted to
be on his radar. He was crazy. Unpredictable. No one messed with him; no one
even looked at him. The scrawny new boy in gym class had just learned that the hard
way. A nice swirly would teach him to ask Jack to pass him the ball.
Jack
smiled to himself as he walked down the middle of the hallway, thinking about
his own reputation. Every boy and every girl that roamed the halls of Blackwell
Middle School was terrified of him. It was obvious at all times, even as he
made his way out of the building. The other kids intentionally averted their
gazes and deliberately moved to the other side of the hallway to avoid any
accidental contact. Even the teachers pretended to be engrossed in something
else whenever he came into view. He smirked slightly as Mr. Andrews stared at
the file in his hand while he passed, never smiling up at him or even glancing
in his direction with so much as a nod, though he’d greeted the group of
students a few feet in front of him only moments ago. There was no doubt that
he brought terror to the hearts of others, both kids and adults.
That
was just the way Jack preferred it. He didn’t need friends; he had no interest
in any of the idiots that surrounded him in his classes. He hated school, hated
the teachers, hated the classes, and hated the structure of it all. He hated
the clubs and the sports and even the stupid cardinal mascot that covered the
walls of the building. If everyone were scared of him, no one would try to talk
to him. He felt invincible as he pushed through the double doors of the front
of the building.
Trudging
down the sidewalk toward his home, he never looked back at the building he had
come to loathe so much. He couldn’t wait for the day when he’d never have to
step foot in that hole of a school again. As an eighth grader, he didn’t have
too much longer to wait.
He
often considered quitting. He would call it an early retirement, he decided.
But then he would remember the state’s dumb law that a person has to be sixteen
to quit and be left alone. If he stopped showing up now, the feds would get
involved and make his life complicated. Not that he was scared of a bunch of
low-life feds; he wasn’t. But he knew they wouldn’t be as easy to avoid as his
teachers and the students at school. If he could just hold out for a couple
more years, he could quit and no one would bother him about any laws. So for
now, he showed up most days, keeping the number of days he skipped strategically
low so that they would go unnoticed.
Author Bio:
From the time she was old enough to talk, Katy Newton Naas has
been creating characters and telling stories. As a child, they sometimes got
her into trouble. She knew she wanted to write books when she won a Young
Author's competition as a second-grader for her short story titled, “The Grape
Pie.” (Don't let its tasty title fool you - it was actually a sad little tale!)
Katy devoured books as a child and young adult, always doing
chores and odd jobs in order to make enough money to buy more of them. Though
she continues to age, her true literature love is and has always been
children's and young adult fiction.
Katy currently teaches middle school reading and high school
English in southern Illinois, as well as children's church. She graduated from
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale with a bachelor's degree in English
Education and a master's degree in Reading and Language Studies. She enjoys her
life out in the country with her husband, her two sweet and rowdy young sons,
and all her other “kids”: four dogs, three cats, and eight ducks.
Buy Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KatyNewtonNaas
Instagram: https://instagram.com/katynewtonnaas/
No comments:
Post a Comment