Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (18 page)

Rysa’s attention deficit meds weren’t in her backpack. She fished through the lint under her laptop, catching only a pen and the corner of her wallet. Wads of paper and a few stray coins filled the bag’s recesses, but her pills were nowhere to be found.

If she was going to dig in her bag without getting too many stares, one of the back tables in the Continuing Education Building’s basement coffee shop was a good place to do it. The café had bright, warm lighting and a bright, earthy scent, and was fairly secluded.

Not that she trusted herself to be thorough. No meds equaled a super-sized portion of “flighty” and a bottomless cup of “hyperactive.” The headache ratcheting from her eyebrows, over her scalp, and to the base of her auburn ponytail wasn’t helping, either.

She dug her hand into her stupid pack again even though she knew she was wasting her time.

Her friend Gavin sat on the other side of the table tapping a pencil against an assignment. They’d known each other since her freshman year and he’d long been more accommodating with her attention issues than most of her other friends, probably because he wanted to become a doctor. She was, after all, good “patience with a patient” practice.

Still hoping to find her meds, Rysa pulled a notebook out of her bag and slapped it harder against the table than she meant to. The table wobbled, a loud
clunk
popping from its uneven feet.

Gavin’s hand jerked up and he leaned back.

Do you want help with your chemistry or not
? he signed, his hands moving through the American Sign Language with quick precision. He wore hearing aids, but they signed, too.

“Yes.” Rysa looked directly at him so he could read her lips clearly, knowing full well she’d also narrowed her eyes, even though she didn’t mean to. Her head throbbed and was adding an edge to her already annoying issues.

She rubbed her forehead. “Sorry.”

She did need his help. This close to finals, if she didn’t figure out her assignments, she’d fail another class. The University would kick her out. She knew it.

Gavin’s shoulders slumped and he crossed his arms—his way of giving her the silent treatment. He’d frowned about twenty minutes into the first problem when it became clear that helping her would take all night.

But how was she supposed to focus on homework without her attention meds? One more dip into the bag produced only a crumpled five dollar bill. She dropped it next to her notebooks.

Gavin scowled this time, his gaze following her hand as it dipped into the bag again.

It’s not like he always understood his class work. She’d helped him with Human and Environmental Policies last semester. He’d been a chore, no matter how much she tried. 

Did I mess up your evening
? she signed, her hands working as fast as his through the ASL. She scraped her stuff into her bag and plopped it onto the floor next to her feet.

“Were you sexting with that sophomore again?” she asked. This time she didn’t look at him. His hearing aids worked just fine.

Gavin sighed, his expression flat. He usually had the laidback calm of someone who’d just finished a good workout. Women found it charming. The boy had more contacts in his phone than the University had numbers in its database.

Gavin’s pointer finger twitched as he pointed at her bag next to her feet.
Isn’t it a little late to be popping stim meds
?

The headache flared, a semi-nauseating ping that made her bump the table. Her calculator slipped off a book, jarring her chai. A splash plopped onto her Chemistry Principles syllabus.

Steam rose off the course description as if she’d dropped acid on it, not hot tea.

A yellow stain spread across the syllabus and her attention snapped to the paper. The liquid ate away the words and they bled onto the tabletop, destroyed by her impulsiveness. She blotted at them, blinking.

“Rysa?” Gavin signed something, too. She didn’t catch it.

He sniffed and the titanium in his ears flickered with the light from the television behind her head. She’d sat with her back to the little café’s screen for a reason. News crawls and no meds didn’t mix well.

This morning, when she’d come down to the kitchen, her mom had been watching the news. A suburban Chicago mall exploded last night.

Later, on the drive to campus, the radio announcers had been on and on about big fires in several of the towns along Interstate 94, between Chicago and Minneapolis.

At school, pundits had infested the news channels blaring in the student unions, bobbing their heads and pushing up their glasses, ranting about terrorists or gas leaks or 911 calls that may or may not have indicated a suicide bomb—

“I’m sure you left your meds at home.” Gavin leaned back as he spoke.

Rysa usually didn’t get this flustered. Or this… distracted.
Must be the headache
, she thought.

Why don’t you breathe so you can drive home
? Gavin signed.

Breathe? Her syllabus disintegrated on the table, ruined by a splash of hot and random, much like her academic career. She stared at it even though she didn’t want to. Her mind hyper-focused on the one perfect representation of her time at the U and it wasn’t going to let it go.

“You should talk to Disability Services.” His chair groaned as he shifted around again.

A new rainbow of reflections danced across his hearing aids and her attention honed in on the brilliance in his ears. She stared like a deer caught in headlights.

Gavin’s gaze jerked up to the screen behind her.

The images must have changed.

Rysa closed her eyes, refusing to turn around and be caught by the news. She’d spent her last class staring out the window toward the east, her anxiety creeping up for no obvious reason.

Whatever stalked the states east felt like it was about to burst from the horizon and scorch all of campus—and her in particular. The effort it took not to freak out was what probably triggered the headache, and was as big a contributor to her inattention as anything else.

Today was not a good day to forget her meds.

Gavin said something again. Her face scrunched up as she tried to parse it.

“Rysa, did you hear me?”

He’d said something about Disability Services.

What are they going to do
? she signed back.
Follow me around and nag me all day
?

They’d turned her down for a translator position when she applied last year even though she’d aced the exam and had no hearing difficulties of her own. Her damned ADHD reared its head during the interview.

His jaw tightened.
Pulling ninety-ninth percentile on all three parts of the GRE will only get you so far with grad school admissions
.

She pressed on her forehead again. School, the fires—and to make things worse, her mom’s obvious pain this morning before she left the house—all combined to make the perfect Storm Rysa.

At breakfast, her mother had held out a glass of orange juice, her hand shaking and her joints swollen and red. Rysa downed the juice in three gulps, more to keep her mom from worrying than because she wanted it.

The juice had distracted her, which was why she’d forgotten her meds. They were probably on the kitchen counter between the empty glass and her mom’s prescription pain killers.

“I’m going home.” She needed to get away from all the campus television screens. The blinking made her squint.

Gavin touched her wrist. “I just want to make sure you’re alright before you go off to graduate school. I can’t help you with your courses if I’m in Boston and you’re somewhere in the Rockies.”

She stared at his fingers until he let go. Her head throbbed in short, intense pulses and his exasperation wasn’t making it better. She reached for her damned bag again. Maybe she had some acetaminophen. At least it would take the edge off the pain for the drive home.

Get some sleep
.
That helps
, Gavin signed.

She pressed her temple. Her head felt as if every muscle on her scalp was about to fight-club her sinuses.

The pain hadn’t been this bad a moment ago. The war raging inside her skull flared into her vision. The coffee shop’s lights blasted down as if she sat under a hot spotlight. The slick counters glinted as if fire popped off their surfaces. The scent of coffee filled her nose with a bitterness that made her sneeze and the smell of scones coated her tongue with gag-worthy sweetness.

In one sudden moment all the chaos about school and the world and her mom fell away.

Nausea rushed in.

Her mouth opened. Blades of blinding light stabbed behind her left eye. Terrible, hideous light coming out of nowhere and burning like she’d looked directly at the sun.

“What the hell?” she gasped. A real gasp, one that, in a split second, forced air all the way down into the base of her lungs. Her hands clutched her forehead.

This wasn’t withdrawal symptoms because she missed her meds. Her brain just exploded. She was going to keel over in this little coffee shop under the Continuing Education Building and that would be the end of everything and she’d die.

Spots appeared in front of her eyes and floated like wiggly balloons between her and Gavin. They churned, full of heat and glare and fire, each one its own burning, liquid universe. The spots didn’t look real but she knew if she reached out, if she touched one, it would ignite and she would feel it burn her hand.

One of the weird, liquidy fire spots ruptured. Her nose filled with an acid stench so overpowering she stopped breathing.

I’m having an aneurism
, she thought. She must be having an aneurism. Only an aneurism explained hallucinations she could smell and feel.

“Gavin…” She choked out the whisper. Her gut mirrored the pain behind her left eye, squirming with an infestation of the fire bubbles. Her hallucinations burst in her stomach and ate her flesh. She’d have retched but the muscles of her belly and chest wouldn’t move. They wouldn’t respond.

Gavin stood up and pointed at the screen behind her head. He hadn’t noticed her panic. “A gas station in Stillwater exploded!”

Half an hour from campus. Her chair fell over when she turned toward the screen. The seatback scraped against the concrete floor and a nauseating metallic screech filled the coffee shop. The sound rasped against her ears, solid and seemingly touchable, like the spots.

Gavin stared at the screen behind her head. The freshman server behind the counter stared at her.

“What’s happening?” Rysa’s lips formed the words, but no vocalizations left her throat.

Gavin’s gaze jumped from the screen to her and his face blanched. He shouted at the freshman. His mouth moved but she didn’t understand.

He seemed to yell something about calling 911.

Gavin, the freshman who stared at her with terror-filled eyes, the coffee shop’s now grating halogen lighting, the darkening evening outside, all spun as if the planet got on a carnival ride and left her standing alone in the void.

Warm air hit Rysa’s nose as she pushed through the shop’s door. The spots that weren’t real—couldn’t be real—took on a sharpness that would slice her open. Monsters would come out of her wounds. Fiends that would eat her whole.

A word whispered through the haze of pain. A word that sounded not like her thoughts, but also like her at the same time. Like she heard an echo of herself. Like her future self—the Rysa who was about to land fully inside of whatever hell caused the aneurysm and hallucinations—was yelling backward in time trying to warn her present, freaked-out self.

Ghouls
.

Rysa screamed. She had to run. The spots chased her.
Ghouls
chased her, but the world fuzzed out as if someone had slapped a dirty bandage over her eyes.

Another spot burst, but this time a memory flashed: Her mother at the kitchen counter watching the television. She’d rubbed her knuckles and Rysa had wrapped her arm around her shoulder. “Go to class,” her mom said. “I’ll be fine.”

The evening gloom slammed down on Rysa again. Shadows swam. The scent of the humid summer air managed to push through the phantom burning in her nose.

Her hand hurt. Her nails dug into the real skin of her real palm.

Gavin, his nose bloody, staggered along the path toward the parking lots down the hill from the Continuing Education Building. “Don’t hit me again!” he yelled.

She hit him? He glared at her like she was some kind of monster.

“I don’t… I d-don’t understand,” she stuttered. They stood on the hill, half way between the coffee shop and the student parking lot, standing under the streetlight where the path intersected the walk from one of the campus barns. But she didn’t remember—

Another spot ruptured. Orange and hot yellow dropped over the world like a curtain.

She stood alone in the glaring yellow bullseye of a different streetlight. This one flickered like a strobe, buzzing and popping as if it was about to explode. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the pulsing shadows.