Chapter 1
If there’s one thing that’s certain about life, it is this: there’s no such thing as time.
My leg began to bounce as I watched the minute hand crawl its way around the clock while Hamlet continued to whine. And whine. And whine. Oh, and then whine some more. Did he know how to do anything else? No wonder Mommy Dearest ignored him. I knew I was supposed to be basking in the Bard’s use of language and metaphor, but I seemed to recall a pretty girl throwing herself at him only scenes before. Maybe if Hamlet got himself some on a regular basis, he wouldn’t be so damn depressed.
How long would I have to wait for his to-be-or-not-to-be introspective walkabout to end?
That’s the funny thing about time. It always seems endless when you want something to happen. But that’s an illusion. Time was forever segmented and marked by obtaining the things I desired. Glory. Recognition. Freedom. Sex. I didn’t see time as a marker of things I had to do; I saw time as the space between getting the things I wanted.
How long 'till the next time I would throw the winning pass at the football game?
How long 'till my uncle introduced me as Shepherd High’s star athlete?
How long 'till I got to touch Jenna again?
As I sat counting down the meaningless minutes until I was released from Hamlet’s soliloquizing, my right eye began to itch—like pink eye itch. I rubbed the back of my hand against it, hoping to dislodge whatever was causing the irritation. I brushed away, in the manliest way I could, a half fist-half grunt technique, the tears that began to stream down the right side of my face. I hunched over in my desk, keeping my head down, hoping the rest of my classmates were digging the emo-est piece of literature I had ever read. As I closed and opened my eye repeatedly, I silently began to cuss out every unclean hooligan on the football team. That locker room was a hot house of germs waiting to infect me.
Then I felt something else.
Slowly, it felt as if every hair on my right arm was being pulled upward away from my skin. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it felt uncomfortable. My mind flashed through the countless episodes of Grey’s Anatomy that Jenna made me watch. Was I having a heart attack? Wasn’t one of the signs your body going all funky but only on one side?
A sharp pain in my stomach interrupted my desire to pull out my phone and search Web MD, a frequent search of mine since my uncle didn’t believe in doctors. The odd sensation spread from my right side to my left. It felt as if someone, or something, had punctured my skin with claws, dragging me into its cave. Like I’d stepped inside some damn video game. Dungeons and Dragons to the extreme. I tried not to scream out, but a muffled cry of agony escaped my lips.
Even Hamlet stopped whining at that point. My teacher looked back at me with concern. I could see her mouth open, beginning to ask me what was wrong.
But then everything stopped.
Everything.
My teacher froze mid-sentence. The clock stopped working. Chelsea Harper quit secretly texting under her desk. Sleeping Mark Franklin’s drool was held frozen in the air, trapped before it could fall from his mouth and hit the desk.
Only me, a buzzing fly desperately trying to perform a Houdini act and get past a closed window, and a sharp, piercing noise remained. I didn’t really have time to freak out because the pain had become too intense. It hadn’t even hurt this bad after last year’s championship game, and I’m pretty sure I broke some ribs in that death struggle.
I moved my shaking hands to cover my ears, falling out of my chair. With every shriek of the mystery noise, a shudder ran through my body. I curled myself in the damn fetal position. It just seemed like the only thing to do.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. Closed them. Opened them. Each time cursing that I wasn’t waking up in my own bed at home. This couldn’t be happening. Not to me.
But then closing and opening my eyes made no difference.
Suddenly, I couldn’t see at all.
Had I gone blind?
And just as soon as this weird sickness grabbed onto me, it let go. I felt perfectly normal. No pain. No noise. Nothing.
I slowly sat up, waiting for some explanation for what just happened. Waiting to be rushed to the nurse’s office or the nearest psycho ward.
But everyone was gone.
Alone.
It had to be a prank—albeit an effing elaborate one. What other explanation was there ? It was almost homecoming. Pranking was in full-swing. A rite of passage for seniors.
The smell hit me first. The first wave of their attack. Last year, the seniors thought it would be funny to wait on the bus ramp for the freshman on the first day of school, a sort of welcoming committee. Instead of gracing them with smiles and cheerleaders holding handmade banners welcoming the “freshmeat” to the hellhole where they’d spend the next four years of their lives either trying to stand out or disappear completely, the seniors doused them with spoiled milk. The chunky sort. The smell was damn awful, and it lingered around for weeks. No matter how hard the janitors scrubbed. That’s how bad this smell was. Week old spoiled milk. It wasn’t strong enough to make me want to vomit, but still strong enough to tickle my nose and cause my throat to tighten.