I woke with a start, my heart pounding in my chest. I took a deep breath. I needed to calm myself; there was absolutely no reason to panic. It was only a dream. I slowly got up and shivered at the contact with the cool floor. With my eyes half closed, I headed for the bathroom, grabbing my towel on my way.
Jumping in the shower, with the steaming water, I started waking up. A multitude of images were flipping in my head: the entire school united in the cafeteria, the gun, the bullet…coming directly at me, and the shear pleasure when it finally pierced my skin, when it ran through my flesh and tearing it to reveal the gaping hole that was there all along. The face behind the pistol was blurred but I knew it by heart. Every night, when I saw it in my dreams, I’d kick and scream with anger. Why couldn’t he have plunged the knife already?
The tears gushed out of the corners of my eyes but I shrugged them off; I didn’t want to think of that dream anymore. It was already a nightmare at school, since Jake.
Everybody just seemed so eager to make me suffer. I had had enough of being the freak. The worst thing was that they didn’t even know what really happened, what he really did to me. I just wanted to scream it in their faces, see if they come to my side instead of his. But that would never happen because even if I did tell them, they would never listen to me and he would only want his revenge. Or maybe, they already knew. Maybe some of them were part of it… But would never admit it either. They would just lie, and everybody would believe them. A weird sensation appeared in the pit of my stomach and I blinked back tears.
Almost in a trance, I didn’t even realize the water was now ice cold. Jumping out, I rubbed myself vigorously with my towel. Coming out of the bathroom, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and looked away quickly. I stalked out of the bathroom, slamming the door and re-entered my bedroom to prepare for school. I slipped my over-sized sweatshirt on top of my clothes, my everyday routine, and glanced at my alarm clock. I had to hurry, there were only fifteen minutes left before the start of classes. I ran down the stairs, grabbed an apple and my lunch and got out in the crisp morning air.
The street was full of students, walking to either the high school, on the corner of the street, or the private school, a little further down the same street. There was much trouble between them. Since they built the new high school, Ashbury, so close to our school, it did nothing but cause problems. The rich kids went to the private school, with their uniforms and their perfect programs while the rest, like me, were stuck in the ghetto school, with the druggies and the bullies. Such differences would never get along.
I stopped in front of Tara’s house. She was one of my best friends, one of the only ones that stayed with me when my whole existence made no sense at all, but. The little path that lead to the white house was strewed with fallen leaves. I rang the doorbell and the door opened almost instantly. Tara was putting on her coat in the hall.
“Hey,” I said, when she saw me.
“Hi,” she said, “I’ll be just a minute; I have to grab my stuff.”
I nodded and went to sit on the porch stairs to wait. It was getting colder everyday now, the winter creeping slowly into the lingering warm fall air. No doubt it would be snowing in less than two weeks. But it didn’t matter to me; my heart was already as cold as snow, white and motionless in my chest.
The door opened, and Tara stepped out, bag in hand, “Okay, let’s go,” she said.
We walked down the sidewalk; there weren't many students now, most were already at school. The sound of footfalls made me look back.
“Hey girls!” Ian called, jogging behind to catch up. He slowed his pace to match ours, “It’s cold today,” he commented, rubbing his hands together. His cheeks were tainted, red by the slap of the chilly wind.
“Yeah”, Tara agreed, “It feels like it was still summer just yesterday. If it keeps going, there will be snow tomorrow morning.”
I nodded; it did feel like summer hadn’t finished so long ago, like The Night had been just yesterday.
Ian sighed, burying his hands in his coat pockets, “Yeah... I can’t wait for it again. Sucks we just have two months of it.”
Again, I nodded. I wished it would be summer again so I wouldn’t have to go to school. Even with Ian and Tara with me, it was still hard to get through a simple day at school. We didn’t utter another word after that, trudging along the now vacant street.
End of chapter
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140,367 Literary Works • 673,125 Reviews
I love this story. I love the suspense of what happened. I like how you don't tell everything that happened. I can't wait to read your next chapter. You really know how to make a reader want to read more. Keep up the good work and you better keep writing this story, it is one of the best that I've read.
Hey Truth! Happy Review Day! I'm here to wreak havoc on your novel, starting with chapter one.
I must say that after trawling through piles of cliche's this is quite a refreshing piece. Waking up from a nightmare and an ice cold shower makes a good start to the novel in a strange way that I can't really work out. It caught my attention enough to make me keep reading, but didn't give away huge clumps of the plot. I would say it's a great introduction.
I have to point out the sentence beginnings though. Try not to start so many clauses and sentences with the word 'I,' it gets very tiring after the first two or three times, and you have done it excessively. Try re-arranging or combining sentences to shuffle them round. 'I' is a word that blends into the background quite easily, unless you put it in the spotlight that is the beginning of the sentence. If you simply shuffle it into the middle then it's less noticable.
Right, on to chapter two.
Overall? Good. Just as good as the other chapters.
Hun, you need to continue this story....and soon! I love it! I really can't wait to read more...I'm dieing actually
keep up the awesome work! I have so many unanswered questioned that need to be fulfilled! 
Rent
Whoa!!!! slow down there
This novel has a lot of potential and i love the plot, but too much happened at once! Before you get into what shes dealing with at school, you should have an interesting beginning without giving too much information at once. That sure is a lot of things to think of while in the shower!
should be worded a little differently. Maybe try "The entire school united in the cafeteria."The "finishing" is unnecessary and puts two "ing" words together.
Why would the water be cold if she wasn't in the shower that long?
This doesn't really make sense. Rephrase it and maybe add some more detail!
Your first chapter just needs a little more detail and to be less rushed which will also make it longer! I'm looking forward to the next chapter! Happy writing
Hey Truth! This has some major potential, and you have me hooked, so I'm going to offer my two cents and see if I can't help polish this raw rock into a diamond.
Paragraphing
First, on YWS, it's really, really daunting to see/read through a huuuuuuuuge block of text. I know you have paragraphs in there, but it makes it harder to read on a forum if they're not spaced out a bit. Luckily for you, YWS has a posting feature that allows you to automatically double space paragraphs! (Like I've done in this post.) When you go to post a work, simply scroll below the text box and find the options marked "Formatting". Choose story format, and it'll double space your work for you.
Grammar
I'm going to help you out a bit here. Simply brushing it off as "everyone makes grammatical mistakes" doesn't help you correct it; Word spellcheck (or whatever spellcheck you have installed on your computer) can only do so much. It'll definitely clear out a lot of the mistakes you have right now, but you still should be conscious of fixing them in the future.
Tense
Past tense, past tense, PRESENT TENSE!!, past tense, past tense... See how intrusive that is? You should try to write the story entirely in one tense, or you might confuse your reader. It's okay to use present or other tenses in dialogue, but in the narration, not so much. You've already set this up as the MC (whose name we don't know?) recounting something that happened to her a while ago, hence past tense, and then you throw in present tense. You could tell this in present tense if you wanted, but not both past and present. There were a few other instances where this happened, too, but now that you know about the issue, I'm going to leave it up to you to go back and change them.
Subject/Verb Agreement
There are other instances, but these were the two biggest I noticed. "Fifteen minutes" is plural; say, "were only fifteen minutes", not "was". Students are also plural, so use "weren't"; also, students are a quantifiable object, so use "many". Go back through and carefully read the rest of the story, asking who your subject or the subject you're describing is and what number said subject is. If it's more than one, you're going to be using "were" and other plural forms of verbs; if it's only one, use "was" or a singular form of other verbs.
Nitpicks
Use a period where you have a semi-colon (;), and you can use the semi where your comma is: I took a deep breath. I needed to calm myself; there was no reason to panic.
This is a GINORMOUS paragraph. I've marked places where you can break it up with P. Comments/suggested edits are in green. Some of these are stylistic suggestions, though, so you don't have to take all of them. Where I do mark these kinds of suggestions, though, it'd be a good idea to reread that section and ask if it can't be written more clearly in a different way.
This would be the perfect place to give the MC a name: "Hi, ___" she said. "I'll be just a minute; I have to grab my stuff." (Bolded: Unless you're continuing a broken sentence, always use a period after your dialogue tag and/or before the next line of dialogue. Also, "I'll" makes more sense than "It'll", here.)
I'd rewrite this as: It was getting colder everyday now, the winter slowly creeping into the fall air. Or something like that; go ahead and have fun playing with that dependent clause (the bolded section).
I love the description here, but your period should probably be a comma. Otherwise you get a fragment: But it didn't matter to me; my heart was already as cold as snow, white and motionless in my chest.
I'd recommend rewriting the bold section to something more like: One of those students soon joined us as we walked.
Remember, make each new line of dialogue (from a different person than the last) it's own paragraph.
"Ian sighed, burying his hands in his coat pockets" is not a dialogue tag. It's a descriptive sentence. Use a period at the end of it and capitalize the first word of your dialogue.
I think the ending of this chapter would be much more effective if you chopped the last line; saying that they didn't talk the rest of the way kind of already says that they aren't very talkative. The last sentence simply smacks a fact in the reader's face that they already kind of know and can figure out through continual interaction between this trio in later chapters.
Other Remarks
You really have a very interesting plot moving forward here. You don't quite explain what happened to the MC, only giving vague hints that are enough to hook readers into continuing, waiting for a full explanation. The nightmare at the beginning is also intriguing, as we don't know if that's echoing a fear for the future or of something that has already happened. Throwing an ex into the mix pretty much immediately gives you your antagonist, plus the mental conflict going on the MC's head.
I think my one complaint at the moment is that we don't know the MC's name. That can really help the reader identify with the narrator, though it's not always necessary. Another less critical issue I have is that we don't really have any clue of the MC's family life yet and how that might be effecting her in addition to school stress. Do her parents know what she goes through? Do they care? Do they make any effort to help, or do they simply brush her off or are too busy to pay attention? I'm hoping that'll be addressed later, possibly when she gets back from school. But if not, it might be a good idea to throw something of that into her morning routine.
This is looking very good so far! I can't wait to see how the plot unfolds. Just keep what I've mentioned in mind, and this'll get even better.
~Glad
Hi,
I agree with Jessica, it's not long enough for us to know your characters and the story line. I know it, since I've already read your story, but other people don't... You might want to put up just a little bit more, maybe past your introduction, so we have a little more information about the plot and we can jump right into it. If you don't want to do that just now, you can always put up a paragraph at the beginning, before the story begins to inform your readers about your main characters, the main problem and so on... Grammar... well let's face it everyone does those, so I won't bash at you for that. Just try to review it before posting it, even though, I know it's hard to have absolutely everything right, am I right?
Continue to write, you are good
-Caroline
Hi! This is Jessica!
Try and always write out your numbers.The comma should be before the quotation marks, I think : D
Okay, is this the first chapter? State that in the title like Golden Wings Chapter One or Golden Wings ( 1 )
Anyway, this is like a dead end street. It stops before you tell us where it might go and who all these people are, character details, etc.
Keep writing this, it has potential. Any questions just PM me!
-Jessica