Heartache High: The Wakening

By Jon Jacks

You can never leave

If you’ve ever been broken hearted by a hopeless love – then count yourself lucky you didn’t find yourself enrolled at Heartache High.
Even the beautiful Gillian Hazlehurst finds herself there.
Finds, too, that she can never return to the real world she’s left behind.
Only her friend Stephanie Johnson, another Heartache High Permanent Student, has a chance of helping Gillian work out how she ended up trapped in a school you can never leave.
But once Steph becomes involved, the mystery only deepens – because in the real world, Gillian doesn’t even have any friends.

Heartache High (Vol I)
Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Jacks
• Release date: May 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301378845

Jon Jacks

While working in London as, first, an advertising Creative Director (the title in the U.S. is wildly different; the role involves both creating and overseeing all the creative work in an agency, meaning you’re second only to the Chairman/President) and then a screenwriter for Hollywood and TV, I moved out to an incredibly ancient house in the countryside.On the day we moved out, my then three-year-old daughter (my son was yet to be born) was entranced by the new house, but also upset that we had left behind all that was familiar to her.So, very quickly, my wife Julie and I laid out rugs and comfortable chairs around the huge fireplace so that it looked and felt more like our London home. We then left my daughter quietly reading a book while we went to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.Around fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, saying that she felt much better now ‘after talking to the boy’.‘Boy?’ we asked. ‘What boy?’‘The little boy; he’s been talking to me on the sofa while you were in here.’We rushed into the room, looking around.There wasn’t any boy there of course.‘There isn’t any little boy here,’ we said.‘Of course,’ my daughter replied. ‘He told me he wasn’t alive anymore. He lived here a long time ago.’A child’s wild imagination?Well, that’s what we thought at the time; but there were other strange things, other strange presences (but not really frightening ones) that happened over the years that made me think otherwise.And so I began to write the kind of stories that, well, are just a little unbelievable.

Book preview

Heartache High: The Wakening

Heartache High Series Vol III

Jon Jacks

Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

Heartache High (Vol I)

Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II)

The Caught

The Rules

Chapter One

The Changes

Sleeping Ugly

The Barking Detective Agency

The Healing

The Lost Fairy Tale

A Horse for a Kingdom

Charity

The Most Beautiful Things

The Last Train

The Dream Swallowers

Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night

Jonah and the Alligator

Glastonbury Sirens

Dr Jekyll’s Maid

The 500-Year Circus

P

The Endless Game

DoriaN A

Wyrd Girl

Coming Soon

Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg

The Wicker Slippers

Text copyright© 2013 Jon Jacks

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Chapter 1

I wake up, still drowsy, still half-asleep.

I can’t open my eyes for some odd reason.

I’m ridiculously weak too.

I can hardly move my arms

Hardly move in fact.

Like I’m heavily drugged.

I feel around with my hands.

I’m in a bed.

Reasonably soft, if over-tightly tucked in sheets.

Reasonably hard mattress.

It’s a narrow bed.

Like a hospital bed.

Again.

Perhaps it hasn’t worked.

Perhaps I’m still in Heartache High.

*

I’d been doubtful from the start that it would work.

But Gillian had insisted that I at least give it a try.

She’d come to me for help, having heard that I’d briefly managed to break free of Heartache High. If only for nothing more than a few minutes.

No one had ever achieved even that before.

In those brief few minutes, I’d managed to retake control of my own body and re-enter the real world.

I’d thought, in those few, exciting moments, that I might have managed to leave Heartache High for ever.

Gillian, of course, wanted me to try something harder.

Something even more impossible.

She wanted me to try and take over her body for a while.

*

It turns out that, just because I thought it was impossible, it didn’t mean it was impossible for me to move into Gillian’s body.

Because here I am.

In Gillian’s body.

Yet, strangely, weirdly – and it has to be really weird for any student of Heartache High to be surprised – I still seem to have woken up in the narrow, hospital-like beds our school dormitories are infamous for.

‘Gillian!’

It’s a girl’s cry.

Incredibly loud, incredibly excited. Even though it sounds like she’s only a couple of feet away.

Suddenly, someone’s by my side, leaning over me, breathing heavily, excitedly.

An eye mask is ripped away from my face.

I can see at last.

It’s a young girl. A younger version of Gillian.

Heddy.

This has got to be Heddy, Gillian’s younger sister.

She’s crying, but wildly, elatedly. She’s smiling too.

She’s crying from happiness.

‘Gillian! Gillian! You’re back, you’re back!’

She’s kissing me, hugging me.

I’m too weak to respond. Too weak to even speak.

Heddy briefly turns her head aside.

‘Nurse! Nurse!’ she yells urgently.

Nurse?

I am in a hospital bed?

‘Gillian’s come round!’ Heddy screams out elatedly.

‘Come round?’ I manage to croak.

There’s some form of thin, flexible tubing inserted into my mouth.

I can also feel other pieces of plastic tubing snaking over my body. Sense pin pricks too, where something like cold, thin bits of metal have been inserted.

The room around me has that spare bareness of a hospital room. I can hear the beeping of monitoring machines, catch glimpses of small, brightly flashing lights out of the corners of my eyes.

‘Gillian? Can’t you remember?’

Weeping yet also chuckling. Heddy gives me another loving hug.

‘Remember?’ I say confusedly.

Heddy is heading for the door.

‘You were in a coma Gillian! But I’ve got to tell everyone! You’re back now!’

*

Chapter 2

It wasn’t until Gillian had first smiled that I’d realised just how amazingly beautiful she was.

She’d found herself waking up at Heartache High little more than a day after me.

She had wandered around in an unbelieving daze even longer than I had.

She’d been miserable.

She’d refused to talk to anyone.

She’d moped around like it was the end of the world.

Which, of course, in many ways it was.

The end of the world she’d known, at least.

So, when she’d approached me, smiling, looking like she had hope again, I’d been more than a little surprised.

‘I need your help,’ she’d explained. ‘I just know my boyfriend’s in big trouble, back in the real world.’

Course, when she says ‘boyfriend’, she means the guy she spent all her waking hours, and most of her sleeping hours, dreaming about.

The guy she wished would be her boyfriend.

The guy who, in reality, ignored her.

Didn’t even know she existed.

That’s why we all end up here, at Heartache High; because we’ve all retreated into a little compartment of our mind where we can imagine our love has at last been recognised by the boy (or girl) of our dreams.

Though how any boy could be unaware that Gillian didn’t exist, I just