“Mr. Parker!” shouted Mrs. Mullhooney indignantly as I threw open the door and stepped into the hall. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t answer her. Mrs. Mullhooney was cool; I would expain it to her later and she would understand.
It was lucky for me that the boy’s bathroom was directly across the hall from Mrs. Mullhooney’s room. I almost made it without attracting any attention, but at the exact moment I stepped out of Mrs. Mullhooney’s, a girl from the neighboring classroom stepped out of her room. She was petite with lightly tanned brown skin, with long, frizzy-looking dark hair braided behind her. She wore a startled look on her face and stared at me with huge, striking gray-green eyes. It occurred to me that she was pretty, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to smile or even just nod. I probably looked like hell, anyway. I turned away from her and stumbled through the door of the boy’s room.
I opened the door to the first stall and dropped to my knees, banging the door closed behind me with one hand and flipping up the toilet seat with the other. The smell of cigarette smoke that lingered in the bathroom and the butt floating in the bowl I leaned over didn’t help my nausea.
The heat came next, radiating throughout my body as if someone had stuck me inside a furnace.. Fever. I must have the stomach flu. I peeled off my green army jacket and tossed it aside, then squeezed my eyes closed to stop the world from spinning and prepared myself to lose my breakfast.
Except the puking never happened.
Instead, the dizzy, pounding feeling in my head intensified, and I found myself falling sideways in slow-motion. I ricocheted off the side of the stall and landed on my back on the floor. I found myself thinking that it was probably the filthiest place in the school I could have chosen to faint. But the thought didn’t last long and I didn’t faint, because right then, I started convulsing.
Oh God, I thought, I’m having a seizure. How could I be having a seizure? I don’t get seizures.
I knew a kid back in middle school who used to get seizures. Most of the time when it happened it was no big deal; you could just see his eyes roll back in his head if you were paying close attention. He was a decent enough kid, so I’d step in front of him and use my wider frame to cover his skinny one so the other kids couldn’t see. Once or twice during the school year, though, he had a full on, fall-on-the-floor-and-thrash kind of seizure. Watching it had been scary as hell. As I laid there on the bathroom floor, unable to control my body, it was exactly what was happening to me.
Or was it? I remember the kid told me that seizures didn’t really hurt and he wasn’t aware of what was happening when the big ones came. I was definitely aware of what was happening, though, and it did hurt. The heat inside of my body ratcheted higher. It was like someone had doused me in gas and lit a match. I was on fire.
My back was itching and burning. My arms and legs felt like I was being stretched out on a medieval torture rack. And I had a weird, tingling, pins-and-needles pain at the base of my spine. It traveled up and down my back like an electric current.
I opened my mouth to call out for help, but no sound came. I was lying on my back like an upside-down cockroach that couldn’t flip itself onto its legs again.
That was when I thought I started hallucinating. Of course, I wasn’t hallucinating, but I wouldn’t figure that out until later. Because right then, my right hand turned into a huge black cat’s paw. I would have screamed if I could. It turned back into a hand in the very next moment, so fast I knew I had to be imagining it, but then my left hand turned into cat’s paw. At the same time, I felt a horrible pressure in my jeans, as if they’d suddenly shrunk by five sizes, and I heard the sound of fabric ripping apart. The seams of my t-shirt popped, then the whole back of the shirt ripped up the middle. The pounding in my head kept getting worse and worse, my vision got watery, then really sharp, and instead of sounds coming from down a long tunnel, I felt like I could hear everything happening in the whole damn school.