The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Ryn’s Hell book. Enjoy!
Now What?
If you’re not sure how to start a story, I was told to start it with a dead body. In this case, the dead body just so happened to be mine.
I wasn’t physically dead, of course, or I wouldn’t be writing this. But I was pretty much dead on the inside – not to mention in a hell of a lot of pain.
My head was pounding. My throat was raw and burning. My mouth tasted like the inside of an old shoe. But the greatest pain was in my nose. Something was making it ache from the inside out, as if a Matchbox truck had been stuffed inside it.
Something was wrong. Very wrong. So wrong I was scared to open my eyes. If I just laid there a little longer, maybe it would all go away. Maybe I’d wake up again, this time without the pain in my nose, the pounding in my head, and the fear swirling in my gut like a tilt-a-whirl.
My nose was about to burst. I instinctively tried to reach for it, to pull out whatever was making it hurt, only to realize I couldn’t move my arm. Or my other arm.
What have I done now?
That’s when I opened my eyes. Both of my wrists were tethered to a hospital bed with leather buckle cuffs, the kind they use in old haunted asylums.
Great. Chained to the bed. A toy truck stuffed up my nose. I wondered if my head was turned around backwards, too.
I heard a murmuring voice: “She’s awake.”
Then another: “You’re one lucky girl. You should have been dead.”
Dead? Dead from what?
A very brief piece of the night before started filtering back to me. A group of about five of us teens, hanging out before the homecoming football game. Two brand new bottles of booze. One of them gin.
Them handing me the bottle of gin. Me wanting to show them how cool I was, slamming the whole thing in about 52 seconds.
Someone saying, “Holy shit.”
Then blackness. More blackness. Nothing.
Then this. Waking up tethered to a hospital bed, tubes shoved up my nose so they could pump my stomach.
Death from alcohol poisoning generally comes from a blood alcohol level of 0.5%. Mine had been .46%.
Ooops.
I was tethered to the bed because I had been brought in to the hospital totally out of control. Kicking and screaming and cussing and punching. I may have even tried to bite someone. It was never confirmed if my head spun all the way around, but I would not have been surprised if it had.
Everything hurt that much. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the fear and shame. Shame over doing something dumb, once again. Something I couldn’t even remember but had a bad, bad feeling about.
Fear someone may have seen some of what happened. Fear of what kind of punishment my parents would have in store.
And although the death wasn’t necessarily to my earthly being at that point, the situation had been a death for several things.
The death of pretending to fit in. The death of caring about much of anything. The death of hope.
I had crossed that line that had been beckoning me for years. Crossed the line into full-blown alcoholism.
I was a freshman in high school. I was 14 years old.
Find out what happens next. Get your copy of “How to Get Through Hell on Earth without Drinking a Keg or Kicking a Garden Gnome” now.
