Fractured (Unreel series Book 1) Read online

  Fractured

  Book 1 Unreel Series

  Sanna Wolf-Watz

  Copyright © 2019 by Sanna Wolf-Watz

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For my Family and Linnea who keep encouraging me to do this. Thank you.

  Contents

  1. First Impressions

  2. Pushover

  3. Vocal Points

  4. Friends

  5. House Call

  6. Absolutely Ridiculous

  7. Only in the Movies

  8. Armed and Dangerous

  9. Assigned

  10. Going Out

  11. Lucky Losers

  12. Passing the Time

  13. Tripping

  14. Building Up

  15. Chloroform and a Cup of Coffee

  16. Dislocated and Misplaced

  17. Asking Questions

  18. Bashing Heads

  19. What Hits the Fan

  20. Having a Blast

  21. Great Balls of Fire

  22. Under Ground

  23. Wakeup Call

  24. Shackled

  25. Falling Down

  About the Author

  Also by Sanna Wolf-Watz

  Fractured – Book 1 in the Unreel Series

  Sofia is not pleased with her parents decisions to move to a hole in the ground, Middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Still, she's stuck here until she can find a way to get out.

  She never thought her 'out' would come in the shape of a handkerchief drenched in chloroform and a prison style cell with the toilet way too close to the bunk. Yuck!

  Thomas is living the dream. Captain of the baseball team? Check. Gorgeous girlfriend? Check. Straight A's? Check. It’s all going great until he (literally) runs into the one person who seems determined to wreak havoc on his carefully constructed life.

  A case of mistaken identity, a few successful kidnappings and many explosions later they find themselves with an offer they can't refuse and no one to trust but their least favorite person in the world. It's enough to make anyone want to go back to Kansas.

  1

  First Impressions

  Thomas checked his sun bleached hair one last time in the rear view mirror before turning in to the parking lot in front of Little Sippleton High School.

  He stepped out from his new Jeep with well-practiced indifference and locked it with flick of his finger. A moment later his best friend Jock drove in to the parking lot, honked his horn good-naturedly and parked his truck from sometime in the last century next to Thomas’s Jeep.

  ”Hey! Wzup?”

  “That thing still running?” Thomas asked while Jock jumped out of the car and they went on with the obligatory back thumping.

  “Dude, don’t hate on the car, it’s doing fine,” Jock said and petted the car tenderly. “Hasn’t quit on me once for a whole week now,” he continued proudly as he manually locked the driver’s door.

  “Whatever you say,” Thomas grinned.

  Jock pointedly ignored him and started off towards the ugly school building in front of them. It was made from brown bricks and the tiny windows made it look like the prison it once was.

  ”Heard anything from Lewis?” Thomas asked when he caught up to Jock.

  Jock shrugged while searching the mass of students, who were all purposefully heading towards the brown monstrosity.

  “I don't think he's come back from Hawaii yet,” he mused distractedly. “That’s where he spent the summer, wasn’t it? He’s probably found some hot chic and decided to… Aww! All the new ones have already gone inside!”

  “All the new what?”

  “All the new what he asks me,” Jock muttered and gave Thomas the same look he always gave him when he thought Thomas was being extremely stupid. He shook his head. “All the new girls, what else?”

  This was, although upon reflection it shouldn’t have been, a surprise.

  ”Aren’t you dating Gemma,” Thomas said irritably.

  As late as last week Jock had talked about nothing but his latest sort-of-almost-girlfriend. It had slowly been driving him insane.

  Thomas had been dating Rachel for a whole year, yet he didn’t talk his best friend’s ear off by telling him everything about his girlfriend, from her favorite shows to the color of her nightie. Thomas paused. To be fair, he didn’t know the color of Rachel’s nightie. The few times he’d been in her bedroom they’d both been fully clothed and the door had been open.

  ”Who? Oh, look!” Jock said and whistled softly. “See that chic, the one in the jeans skirt? No, not her, the blonde one, by the entrance. Yeah, you’re looking at her. Mine,” Jock said and strode determinedly across the parking lot towards somebody Thomas hadn’t been able to make out from this distance.

  He shook his head while Jock made good use of his long legs to propel himself towards the school building and his quarry. Those legs were the reason their baseball team had managed so many points in the league last year. Well, Jock’s legs together with Thomas’s batting arm.

  Jock suddenly discovered he was on his own and turned around. “You coming or what?” he called impatiently to Thomas.

  Thomas walked up to him, keeping a slow and dignified pace while Jock, who was dancing on the spot, sighed loudly. Together they continued across the parking lot, the other guys catching up with them one by one as they made their way inside the school.

  The friends who had been out of town for the summer exchanged tales of their holiday adventures, those tales growing taller for every retelling until they reached the level where someone could have turned them into film scripts.

  “Seriously,” Jock cut in when Dave waxed poetic about a visit to the zoo. “You rode an elephant?”

  “Totally, man.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a pony?” Wayne asked.

  “Of course I’m sure! It had a trunk.”

  “I have a trunk,” Bob said with a snigger and a wink to a sophomore girl they were passing. “It’s just that mine is between my…”

  “Do you have any pictures of this elephant?” Jock wanted to know.

  He had been assigned to work for the school paper last semester when the teachers finally realized that detention wasn’t having any effect on him. That decision had blown up in their faces because now he wouldn't stop asking questions. It turned out you can't send a student to the principal's office for asking questions.

  Thomas guffawed along with the rest of them as Dave tried to explain why he didn’t have any pictures of himself on an elephant. He said nothing about his own summer. When they asked him about it he just smiled, knowing full well that the scenarios they would come up with in their heads about him would far outdo anything he could come up with himself.

  The truth was plain boring. Rachel had been staying with her aunt in Los Angeles and Jock had been at three consecutive summer camps so Thomas had mainly been helping out at the farm and taking care of his baby brother. Not exactly summer holiday bragging material.

  Still, as they made their way towards the auditorium and the annual speech from the principal he was feeling surprisingly good about being back in school. Here, things were the way they’d always been. Here, he moved with purpose. He was the star of the baseball team, the straight-A student.

  Walking along the corridors, while he listened to the guys talk about girls and cars and girls and movies and girls, he eased into the steady, comfortable routine that they had created and ma
intained for years. The stories and the jokes were the same as they'd always been and he could laugh along without having to pay attention.

  As they sat in the uncomfortable wooden seats of the auditorium to listen to this year’s traditional monologue, held by their principal, he was smiling.

  That smile had long faded thirty minutes later. The principal’s speech was duller than usual. Mr. Thisbe’s’ soft and monotonous voice always made him drowsy, but this time he'd been practically unconscious five minutes in.

  Thisbe was going on and on about what an important year they had ahead of them, as he did every year. He talked about the value of persevering in the face of hardships.

  “Life is,” he said with a meaningful glance to Thomas who immediately roused himself from his daze and tried to look attentive, “like a baseball game. Even when you manage a perfect strike, you still have to make a run for it.”

  Thomas glanced at his watch and groaned. The speech had been going on for thirty minutes and it was likely to continue for another thirty before the old man was done with it. This was torture.

  He looked at Jock who was sprawled over his seat, head tilted back as he snored lightly. Thomas would have done anything to be able to nod off like that, but since he was the captain of the baseball team Mr. Thisbe tended to expect more from him. This “more” included, but was not limited to, maintaining high grades and staying awake for endless monologues and nodding sagely whenever the principal made eye-contact.

  Since Thisbe was the one who handled recommendations for college applications and scholarships Thomas was careful about giving Thisbe what he expected.

  “…want to give our old as well as our new students a warm welcome to another year of learning and fun inside these glorious halls,” Thisbe said and beamed out at the comatose students. “I know I speak for the entire staff, when I tell you all how thrilled we are to be spending another year with all of you!”

  Thomas glanced at the supposedly thrilled teachers who sat up at the podium, scowling at Thisbe. Thomas stifled a yawn. The only interesting part of the introduction had been the presentation of two new teachers: one in math and one in history. Thomas hoped they would be at least half decent and, more importantly, generous when they graded.

  “…and with this I conclude my speech and leave the floor to Miss Cahill and the national anthem. All rise!”

  It took a while for those still semi-conscious to elbow and kick their friends into full alertness. Jock was jolted awake when Thomas shoved him with his elbow.

  “What? Is he done already?” Jock asked sleepily and checked his watch. “But it’s only been forty-five minutes,” he muttered as he struggled to his feet. “I was counting on an hour.”

  The tunes of the anthem soon filled the hall and Thomas sang along with gusto, grateful that the speech was over.

  As the song reached its crescendo he was smiling again. He thought about the home runs he would manage for the team, the A’s he’d take home to his father and the time he’d be able to spend with Rachel. This was going to be a great year.

  Sofia Hansson was looking around the room, trying hard not to freak out. She stared at her new principal who was standing at the center of the stage, singing loudly. She could see the veins on his thin, pale throat work as he belted out the lyrics with more enthusiasm than tonality.

  When she'd had to listen to him drone on and on during his speech she had been convinced that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. She had been wrong.

  Did they seriously intend for her to put her hand over her heart and sing? She looked around. It seemed like they would. Oh why, why couldn’t her parents have let her stay in Sweden?

  She put her hand over her heart and, having no idea of the actual lyrics, lip-synched her way through it. She hoped she came off as completely at home with the ‘rockets’ red glare’ as well as the ‘bombs bursting in air’ that were apparently part of the American national anthem.

  While she hummed along she tried to not be intimidated by the size of the crowd filling the room. She had thought that Little Sippleton, just outside Sippleton Major, in the middle of Kansas, would be nothing but a small hole between two rocks in the Midwest landscape. She had been wrong about that too.

  She frowned, but decided to see the positive in this. At least, among all these people she wouldn’t stand out. She’d spend the next two years flying under the radar and then she’d be out of here.

  The singing suddenly stopped and she was somewhat disturbed by the sight of her new principal wiping tears from his eyes while telling them all what amazing singers they were. Of course, it was great that he was comfortable displaying his emotions, but... She picked up her bag and headed towards the door while he smiled tearfully at them as he waved them out of the auditorium. Everyone filed out and headed off to wherever they were supposed to go.

  For Sofia, that meant the principal’s office. If she hurried she might only have to talk to the principal’s assistant instead of the man himself. She wasn’t sure she would be able to listen to that monotonous voice for another minute. It had been bad enough when she’d visited with her parents to have her signed in a week ago

  She sped up and managed to leave the throng of people behind her as she tried to remember the route she and her parents had taken last time. She finally cleared the corridors to the office after taking three wrong turns. Stopping outside the door, she picked up her transcripts and her study visa from her backpack before knocking and pushing the door open.

  Mrs Manning, an older lady Sofia had met a week earlier, was sitting in a chair behind a desk covered in stationary and pictures of children Sofia knew to be the woman’s grandchildren.

  “Oh, Ms. Hansson! Do come in and close the door behind you. How are you? How is your first day?”

  Sofia smiled at Mrs. Manning. The round woman with her kind face and grey hair looked like the archetypal grandmother who made you hot chocolate and gave you cookies.

  “So far, so good. I found my way here, at least.”

  “Yes, you did. And I have a map of the hallways printed out for you,” Mrs. Manning said, placing a paper in front of her. “Would you like to pick up your schedule now? We gave you the keys to your locker last week, didn’t we?”

  Sofia nodded. They had been very friendly to her when she came to sign in with her parents. They’d even showed where all the classrooms for the classes she would be taking were. Not that she remembered anything of that now.

  “Julie was supposed to show you around and take you to all your classes, but she’s caught one of those bugs going around so she’s not here. Do you want me to find another student for you or will the map be enough?”

  Sofia heaved a sigh of relief. She didn’t like forced social interaction and she couldn't think of a more extreme example than having a classmate follow her around, herding her like a sheep all day long. She preferred to prowl through the hallways like a lone wolf.

  “I’ll be okay, thank you.”

  “So polite,” Mrs. Manning muttered to herself. “We’re happy to have you here, Ms. Hansson. Do you want to wait for Principal Thisbe or would you…”

  “No, thank you,” Sofia said quickly. Too quickly, she realized when Mrs. Manning's eyes widened in question.. “I… er… I don’t want to be late for class.”

  “Right you are. Well, take this and allow me to officially welcome you to Little Sippleton High.”

  “Thank you,” Sofia said, grabbed the map and headed out into the hallway. She needed to find her locker to unload some of the books. She consulted the map. It shouldn’t be that hard.

  Fifteen minutes later Sofia had tried and failed to find her locker. She fiddled with a strand of her hair while she regarded the rows upon rows of the stupid things.

  She wished she had been able to have more than a piece of bread and some orange juice for breakfast. Or that she had managed to sleep the night before. She was too tired and too hungry to deal with this.

  She looked at the map
again. It showed a labyrinth of classrooms, bathrooms and staff rooms. The individual lockers were not marked on it and there were hundreds of them. She checked the time on her phone. Five minutes until her first class was supposed to start.

  Sofia’s heartbeat picked up, her skin clammy now, as she imagined being the last person getting to the classroom. She swallowed deeply and looked around at the people hurrying past her. Somebody had to know how to find he right locker.

  The hallway was crowded with potential somebodies, but who was she going to ask? What was she going to say? The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself. She frowned. Her English was good, sure, but it was far from perfect. What if they laughed at her?

  She straightened her spine. So what if they laughed? Who cared? This was silly. She was sixteen years old, practically an adult, and she would not be transformed into part of the decoration.

  She looked at the other students moving past her. They all appeared to know exactly where they were going. That was so unfair. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She would ask the first person she saw when she opened them. No matter who it was and no matter how silly she sounded.

  On the count of three, she thought. One, two…Sofia gave a yelp as someone bumped into her. She tried to keep her balance, but it was impossible and with a force that reverberated through her entire body she landed butt-first on the floor.

  2

  Pushover