He started up the stairs—there was nothing for it; he wanted to lie down, and he had to go up to the third floor to do it—and as he did he heard Mr. LeRouve’s door open and Mr. LeRouve himself step out into the hall.
“Mark? Is that you?”
“That’s me.”
“Did you sign in?”
Mark had not signed in. He had signed in every other night of his life in this place, but tonight he had not signed in. He had no idea why.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot.”
Mr. LeRouve made a noise—Mark wondered why he always thought of him as Mr. LeRouve, instead of Sheldon; he was supposed to call him Sheldon, but he couldn’t ever quite believe that was the case with any of his teachers, and he didn’t really like it—and Mark turned away from the stairs to go on to the back and fill in the sign-in sheet. It seemed to be about ten o’clock, but that didn’t make much sense. He couldn’t remember what he had been doing for the past hour. He couldn’t remember where he had been. He tried to fix himself in time, but all he could remember clearly was being in the library with the family medical book reading up on Huntington’s chorea. He had come to the conclusion that it was just another excuse. He wanted an explanation for why he was the way he was, but there was no explanation. Maybe he had always been like this; maybe he hadn’t. But this was the way he was now, and there was nothing he could do about it. He wondered, sometimes, if his mother would like this person he had become.
Mr. LeRouve was standing next to the sign-in sheet. Mark had to brush against him to get at the pen tied to the wall with a piece of fraying string.
“You don’t smell like liquor,” Mr. LeRouve said. “There’s that.”
“I don’t drink liquor,” Mark said. He picked up the pen and tried to sign his name in cursive. He couldn’t make it happen. His hands didn’t work right. His hands hadn’t worked right for months. He went to printing, which wasn’t much better—I print like I’ve had a stroke, he thought—and when he was done it occurred to him that Mr. LeRouve thought he was lying.
He let the pen drop and stepped back. “Sorry,” he said. He thought he’d said it before, but he wasn’t really sure.
Mr. LeRouve shrugged. Mark turned away and went back into the hall, to the stairs. When this had first started happening, when he had first realized that people did not believe the things he said, he had tried to fight it. He had staged knock-down fights on a couple of occasions, with teachers skeptical of even the smallest things—that he had lost a book, that he had forgotten an appointment, that he wasn’t feeling well. Especially that last thing. Nobody here believed him when he said he was ill, no matter how ill he felt, and he’d felt ill often these last few months. He went to the infirmary and they took his temperature and told him he was all right. He felt so weak he could barely stand up straight, and they told him he looked well enough to them. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. He thought it might all be psychological. He was homesick. He was somehow getting around to punishing himself for his father’s death—although that was ridiculous, considering the fact that he had never felt guilty about his father’s death before. Whatever it was, he had learned not to tell people when he felt unwell, not even when he felt sick enough to pass out, which was something he had done at least once, fortunately only nominally in public. He had been sitting in the cafeteria in the off-hours trying to study for his American History class, and the next thing he knew he’d just—not been there.
He got up to the second-floor landing and stopped. He could barely breathe. His mother had had better wind when she was still smoking two packs a day. He came around the landing and started up again. There were so many things he had learned not to do here or not to mention. They didn’t like it when he read books on his own that weren’t required for study. They were always reminding him that his grades were mediocre and that he wasn’t getting his work done. He needed to be concentrating on his assignments and not wasting his time with trashy, pop-cult novels. He supposed there was some point in that. His grades were mediocre. He must not be studying hard enough. What was worse, he really wasn’t reading much of anything except those trashy, pop-cult novels. They were, these days, all he could get himself to understand. It would be interesting to know when that had happened, too.
Halfway up to the third floor, he stopped again. He was winded again. He could barely see straight. He took three or four deep breaths. His throat hurt like hell. It often did, these days. His head hurt, too, in that dull throbbing he had come to associate with “not having any air.” He counted to twenty. He flexed his fingers. The joints in them hurt. He started back up the stairs again. Why was it that his life reminded him so often of the old, original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where all the people who were taken over by pods were so unnaturally, unchangeably calm? He was not calm. He was nervous and stressed all the time. He twitched when he least expected it. He still felt like a pod person.