Chapter 2

Her world disappeared in a flash of blue.  The doctors called it an ‘aura'—her only warning before a seizure.

Just a tiny flash of indigo.

It was a beautiful shade, ironically.  Like that of a perfect sky or a calm ocean.  It might have even been her favorite color, if it wasn’t for what always followed after.

After the blue…

The entire world went dark, like the aftermath of a particularly brutal punch to the head.

Everything stopped like a train skidding to a halt.

Then, the fear took hold—she could taste it.  A tiny metallic spot just there, on the tip of the tongue.  The same bitter flavor as when you unconsciously ran your tongue over a drop of blood.

The taste always made her cringe, but then…

Strangely enough, she never remembered much after that.

A flash of indigo would appear, the fear would choke her, and the next moment she would wake up dazed and shaking on the floor.

Sometimes the amnesia seemed like a blessing.

Once she regained consciousness, she could almost pretend that the seizure had never happened—just a silly daydream that left her curled on her side with her heart pounding like mad in her chest.

Sometimes, not remembering was a good thing.

But other times, like now, when she opened her eyes to nothing but the startled faces of her fourth period math class, not remembering didn’t seem wonderful.

A part of her couldn’t help but wonder just why they looked so terrified.  The true reason why they stared down at her like they were afraid she was contagious.

She could read the fear in their faces…

“Miriam? Can you hear me?”

She dimly recognized the frantic voice of Mrs. Clarke, the math teacher.

“Are you okay?”

No.  She wasn’t okay.

Blood coated her tongue.  The familiar fear made her feel sick, shaky, sore—like she’d just run a million mile marathon.

From above her head she could hear the gaping students begin to mutter among themselves.

“What the hell was that?—”

“It’s her, remember?  That girl who has seizures…”

She blocked it out.

“I’m fine,” she managed to say around her throbbing tongue. She could feel blood dribbling down to coat her chin.

“Just…just lay down for a minute,” Mrs. Clarke urged, reaching up to run two trembling fingers through her short blond hair.

She was crouched on the floor with her high heels digging like knives into the cheap carpet.  The tops of her pale knees stuck out from her slightly too short brown skirt.

Mrs. Clarke was one of those teachers who seemed too anxious to relate to a bunch of teenagers.

Miriam had always thought that there was an air of regret about her.  As if she had never wanted to be a high school math teacher but a modeling career had fallen through, or something like that.

Leaving her to teach high school algebra as a last resort.

“Should we call an ambulance?” The question came from a girl with frizzy brown hair, who stood near the door. “She might need supplemental oxygen or something…”

Mrs. Clarke shook her head even as her gaze darted to the old-fashioned telephone mounted to the wall by the blackboard.  “I-I’m not sure…”

Her hands shook as she worked to rearrange her cream blouse.  Those frantic blue eyes bulged from behind her contacts.

Miriam almost felt sorry for her.

She was new after all, just a few weeks into the job.  Unlike the other teachers, she had yet to learn the drill.

“My uncle,” she grumbled through the pain of her swollen tongue.

“He’s the football coach!”  A burly boy announced from the back.  “I’ll go get him.”

“R-Right.”  Mrs. Clarke nodded and rose shakily to her feet.  “Her Uncle works here…right…”

She looked confused.  Her eyes darted helplessly to the blackboard where the remnants of an algebra equation waited to be finished.  When she glanced back down, Miriam hated the look on her pretty face.

Guilt mixed with a bit of pity.

“I’m so sorry, Miriam,” she said in a low voice as the other students began to jockey around the isles of desks to get a closer look.  “No one told me.  I-if they had, I would have never…”

Guiltily, she glanced at an overhead projector which sat abandoned in the corner.

Miriam tilted her head thoughtfully as she observed the dusty piece of machinery.  It was an ancient old thing that had been dug from the depths of a storage closet when the smart board in the classroom stopped working.

Mrs. Clark had dusted it off, plugged it in and flipped the switch to demonstrate equations on the back wall while the network was fixed.

And then…

Blue.

Mrs. Clarke’s finger reaching for the dusty switch was all she remembered, right before a brilliant flash of indigo.

After that she must have fallen from her desk, she realized reaching down to rub her sore knees.  In the chaos, her books had been scattered to litter the floor in loose pages of notes.

Beneath her chair, her backpack was tipped over like a casualty of war.

And not just her stuff.  The people in the desks near hers all had stuff of theirs fallen on the floor.

She wanted to clean up the mess—anything was better than facing the pity wafting down from all sides.

She reached out halfheartedly for someone’s crumpled blue notebook, only to realize that her fingers shook too badly to grip it.

“I’m such an idiot,” Mrs. Clarke muttered under her breath, biting her bottom lip.

It never ceased to amaze Miriam just how far some people were willing to go just to feel guilty for something they had no control over.

According to the Wikipedia entry under epilepsy bright, flashing lights could be enough to trigger an episode.

But…that didn’t seem right.

While she could never remember the exact cause of her seizures, the light explanation felt wrong.

It was too clichéd—too generic.

Besides, based off the generic explanation her doctor had given every year since the seizures first started, they were nothing more than unexplained electrical bursts inside the brain.

They were random, and couldn’t—in theory—be ‘caused’ by anything.

“It’s fine,” she said thickly, racking her mind to think of the polite words her doctor had told her to explain her seizures.  “You can’t cause them.  They’re—”

“Step aside!  Move!”

Miriam turned to find her Uncle Sal barging his way toward her through the thick chain of students still clustered around her like a crowd gaping at a new animal in a Zoo.

He wore that tight, angry look he got whenever his players botched an easy win.

It was that same look that made him both a feared and respected gym teacher who didn’t take any illegitimate excuse from anyone looking to skip P.E.

His amber eyes burned from beneath shaggy eyebrows as they latched onto hers.  “You good?”  He asked, as if she had just fallen on the field and scraped a knee.

“Yeah.”  Miriam nodded, but he was already turning to fix Mrs. Clarke with a look that made her flinch.

“You gonna tell them to get out of here, or am I?”  He inclined his head toward the staring crowd—of which, the smarts ones were already beginning to scramble out of the room.

“Y-yes.”  Mrs. Clarke gulped at his tone and waved her hands to shoo the nosy students away.  “Come on everyone…out.”

Miriam couldn’t help noticing the way the woman wobbled in her too-high heels as she scrambled out after her own students.  After today, she couldn’t help but wonder just how long Mrs. Clarke would last at Wafter’s Point high.

But, then the door closed behind her and with a sigh, she released the breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding in.

“Well…”

She glanced up just as her uncle perched himself on the edge of a desk nearby.  He still wore his Gym sweats with a whistle dangling from his sweaty neck.  He was panting too, she realized, and her eyes caught a tiny bead of sweat dribbling down from his forehead.

She wondered if he had run all the way here from the field.

“It’s been a while since you’ve had one of…these, kiddo,” he said heavily.

Miriam nodded, mentally she catching herself from adding, ‘at least, in front of other people.’

Her Uncle sighed, bunching up the bottom of his oversized white tee-shirt to dab at a bead of sweat which had rolled down to his chin.

“…I thought they were under control?”  He posed the question hesitantly, as if afraid of the answer.

Control.

Miriam might have laughed if her tongue wasn’t throbbing.

After months without a public incident, everyone—her uncle included—seemed to think that it meant she was getting better.  That the seizures seemed to be under control, and with that thought in mind, everything would be just peachy keen again.

Out of sight, out of mind.

But, the truth was…

They were only getting worse.

Last year, a seizure every month or so was enough.  Now, she was lucky to have a week go by without a flash of metallic blue.

That wasn’t even the worst part.

Today was just the first time the seizure hadn’t assaulted her while she’d been alone.  Just last month, she came to at the bottom of the steps to basement while doing the laundry.  A few weeks later, a flash of blue had appeared just as she lit the stove to start dinner.  Thankfully nothing had caught fire.

Yesterday, she had woken up in a puddle of mud with the taste of copper on her tongue after experiencing another ominous flash of blue on her way to school…

Her uncle didn’t know the half of it.

No one did.

“You’re still taking those pills aren’t you?”  Her Uncle asked brusquely, in that same stern tone he used to question his players when they missed a drill or skipped a practice.

“Yes.”  The lie played like a well sung song.  It hardly bothered her to utter the word anymore.

In a way, she did ‘take’ her pills.

She took them out of the bottle, mixed them into a cup of water and poured them down the drain.

“You took one this morning?”

She looked him dead in the eye this time, though something cold squished in her gut at the fervent hope she saw in them.

“Yes.”

He exhaled sharply and ran a hand through his graying red hair.  “You know what this means…”

“Yes.”  Miriam nodded even as she dragged her knees beneath her chin and pressed her hands flat against the floor for balance.

Doctors.

Hospitals.

A revaluation of her medication.

The same old tired routine.

“I know…”

Her uncle watched her with an unreadable expression in those murky, brown eyes—their only family resemblance.

“Get your stuff,” he said, moving to his feet.   “I’ll drive you to the hospital.”