13. Astrid's flu

PART 2

I’m floating.

I made myself promise so many times over to keep my memories safe, to commit everything to memory so I could one day give all my pain a purpose. Because what’s the point otherwise, right? Going through hell and coming out none the wiser? And yet here I am. Not only am I none the wiser, but I might have been all along. Nothing is real, nothing comes to me anymore. What does is questionable. Maybe I did deserve to die when I smashed my head on the floor. What’s a person with no memories? What’s worse than not getting to know your own self? Can you even consider yourself a person with no grasp on your person…hood?

Flashes of light.

There’s a distant sting. I can’t tell anymore if it’s physical or mental. Pain in your head this bad when your thoughts fail you is the ultimate irony. Where does the outside pain become the inside pain?

It burns.

Leila briefly came to. Disoriented as she was, she could only make out the fluctuating outlines of her parents standing over her. Someone was holding her hand. As she closed her eyes and went under again, she could swear there was a faint sob from someone in the room.

Don’t dream…

It was morning again. She was in her room, surrounded by all her familiar things, plus a couple of uninvited new trinkets. Most notable were the five or so new bottles of pills on her drawer, mingling quite successfully with the previous bunch and having themselves quite a get together. There was also a pileup of what she could only believe to be every single pillow in the house propping her up to a near straight sitting position.

Then there was the other thing… beyond her night table, on her dresser, there was a basket of white lilies and pink roses. The lilies were her favorite but she hated pink anything. She didn’t need to strain at all to notice Evelyn’s familiar, oversized handwriting on the card. It was easy to conclude the roses were her idea of a joke. Even if Leila had felt like getting a closer look or opening the tiny envelope to read the card, she was far too groggy and unstable to try. She was also sure the bad pun written on the card wouldn’t be worth the effort.

It had taken just a couple of seconds to absorb all of this, which is when she realized she was slack-jawed with a mouthful of spit. She swallowed and felt like the saliva was trying to navigate down a chute of half-set tacky glue. She exhaled through her mouth and as she did she imagined herself a toxic dragon. Her entire throat and sinuses were festering with what she imagined to be a violent cocktail of bacteria and viruses.

Great… I got Astrid’s flu, too.

She started at her own thoughts, at their certainty. Just like that, she had regained her memories of the days following the field trip.

The events of November 12

Leila sat on her desk at school the morning after the longest day in history, staring down at a piece of paper like she was waiting for it to speak. Evelyn was not in her seat. She’d have to ask Vin later if his sister had come down with something. Sleep the night before had been an ordeal, she had napped for so long that she spent hours staring at the ceiling and going over the events of the day, piecing them together with as much success as putting together a 5,000 piece monochromatic jigsaw puzzle.

She’d managed to doze off around 2am. No images came to her in her sleep, the rest of the night seemed to have been clipped from existence altogether.

She went down the items on the list inscribed onto the piece of paper before her.

There is no sandwich.

Evelyn had cleared up the fact right off the bat. The story of Evelyn’s sandwich, though detailed, was not based on anything her friend had told her, nor had she mentioned it on the morning of the field trip. It baffled Leila that it was able to possess such detail if it hadn’t been told to her by someone else. Even her conversations with Clay leaned on the side of basic chitchat, no real depth or complex rhetoric, at least not from his side of the exchange. She talked the most, and he gave very simple answers to everything she asked. It was a step away from her few previous experiences with awareness in dreams, and she didn’t know how to make sense of it. The thought that she was trying to make sense of absurdity was now foremost in her mind.

Soren?

There were no leads as to who the perplexing dark character in her latest dream could be. He struck her more as the type of person she could expect to find in her school; dark, insidious and unwelcome. The very thought was harrowing to no certain extent, that not one, but two people from her school could have gained access into her deepest subconscious activity.

Yesterday was a tough day; maybe that Soren guy was just a reflection of how I was feeling, no more real than the Moon falling out of the sky. He was able to do some stuff Clay has never done in my dreams, like that whole thing with becoming a dark, amorphous blob, shifting Clay out of my dream, inserting himself into his presence like he did…

Shivers prickled her skin when she admitted to herself that Clay had been amorphous and shape shifting the first time she met him too. Leila directed her attention to the next item on the list to divert from the noxious thought.

Evelyn’s not the one in trouble.

Her insides shifted, but just then her scrutinizing of the previous day’s events was halted by the teacher’s entrance. Miss Allen, Leila’s English teacher, was a sprightly lady with small blue eyes that danced and darted around like tiny hummingbirds, taking in the world in minute sips of nectar. Her smile was permanent, bemused and a little distant. Leila often wanted to get inside Miss Allen’s head because she seemed to be having a grand time in there.

The teacher’s thin form stepped in front of the class after depositing her belongings on the desk, and greeted the students with her usual crisp, perky inflection. She then scanned the group from right to left, and let her eyes linger on Leila before throwing her a little smile. It was her custom, and Leila secretly thanked her for it. She was the only teacher who seemed to regard her as an actual person; not just a number, a situation, a case file or a walking tuition check (or in her case, half a tuition check).

Leila usually returned the smile, or perked up on her desk and acknowledged her teacher’s kindness with her full attention. That day, though, Leila was lost in the innermost recesses of her thoughts, too swamped to even muster a glance.

Miss Allen continued with her lesson with no telling sign that she had noticed her pupil’s uncharacteristic aloofness. Leila did her work as well as usual, but so detached it seemed like she’d been a stand-in for the wordy nerd everyone knew her to be.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker as Miss Allen was writing the homework on the board. Student body elections were to be held in two weeks. There was an open call for students to assemble a committee that included representatives from all three middle school grades. Other requirements came over the speaker but Leila’s mind blanked them out. She had become uninterested in the announcement after the first line. There was no way she was submitting herself to that kind of exposure, especially in her current situation.

Leila’s characteristic detachment from the outside world started seeping into her innermost thoughts. She wanted to feel like nothing mattered. Not what was happening around her, with all the unpleasant faces, words and actions; nor what was happening inside, where sense and logic avoided every attempt to sort out the waking and non-waking events of the previous weeks.

She found herself sitting by herself on a table in the courtyard during recess, with no recollection on how she got there. Vin materialized before her breaking her out of her internalized spell.

“Hey, how are you?”

“Okay I guess. Where’s Evelyn?”

“She said wasn’t feeling well this morning. Mom says she might have gotten heat stroke, but I’m sure she was faking it. You know what she did? She flipped me off and laughed at me from the den when I was walking down the street.”

“Yeah, sounds like faking, alright.”

“Anyway, I wanted to ask you about something right now, maybe help you get your mind off things?”

“Yeah, that’s nice of you. Although I’m kinda surprised things have been chill so far, no one’s mentioned anything about yesterday.” Leila felt her insides shudder at the recollection, but was in all earnest wary and suspicious of her classmates. She had expected all sorts of kickback but nothing had come about yet. Be that as it may, she felt far from safe, just expectant.

“Well, a couple of people from second grade asked me to join their student body candidacy. At first I thought they just needed to fill the requirement for a first year student, but then I figured out what they really want from me.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Well… they told me.”

“Well aren’t you a regular genius.”

Leila chuckled and Vin followed suit. He seemed pleased at himself for making her laugh, and he continued talking more with a more animated inflection. “They want me to ask you to join them too.”

Leila instantly broke out in a cold sweat. Something as public as joining a student body election was the farthest thing from her current desire to be left alone. What is Vin even thinking, bringing this to me? I would have thought he knew me better. “What? What could they possibly want me for?”

“Well, they… here, lemme get them so they can tell you.”

“Vin, no…” It was too late; Vin was already running to get a couple of students from another table. Leila felt like she would fold into herself until implosion, the only thing harder for her than exposing herself was saying no, so nothing about this situation seemed agreeable in the least.

Vin came back with three people in tow, she recognized one of them as Paula, third year student and also the daughter of the school’s dean. She’d been one of the few people who greeted Leila during her first few weeks at MJC, and even had a couple of casual conversations with her. The other two, another girl and a boy, she identified as second year students, although she couldn’t place them beyond that.

Vin stood next to the younger girl, just a step behind her and bared her teeth at Leila in a caricature of a grin while he pointed at her with his eyes. That’s when Leila recognized the second year girl, she was Astrid, the girl Vin had a crush on.

It was at that moment when Leila felt like she couldn’t catch a break with a satellite dish.