Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down

Chapter Four

  I have always been something of a morning person. I craved the sunshine with its warmth and light, and I always felt better when my skin held a nice healthy tan. The early bird gets the worm was my motto, even during the summer months when I didn’t have to get up quite so early for school.

  But the next morning I felt like death warmed over. Sure, I expected to be tired from being up for most of the night, and the position I’d fallen asleep in on the couch wasn’t the most comfortable, but that didn’t explain why I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. It wasn’t that I felt stiff and sore all over; I felt completely drained, as if I’d come down with the flu. Maybe I’d picked up a bug at the hospital?

  Even the light hurt my eyes, and I rooted around for a pair of sunglasses after closing all the blinds in the apartment. Food sounded like a bad idea, but coffee was appreciated, and after using up all the hot water in the shower, I managed to get dressed for school in time for my eleven o’clock class.

  The Central Coast Academy of Fine Arts boasts a wide assortment of classes designed to turn out some of the country’s premiere talents in music and art. I’d gotten in on a scholarship for Voice, something which brought enormous pride to my parents. Growing up, my parents had always been fairly restrictive. My mother was a high school music teacher and my father taught elementary mathematics in Santa Clara where I grew up.

  As a child I took piano, guitar, singing, even dance lessons for one brief summer before it became clear it was not my forte, before focusing on voice. I’d always been taught that school came first, and even though I had an aptitude for music at an early age, it was never an excuse to turn in less than my best efforts at the academic classes as well. It turned me into kind of a perfectionist, which drove Bridget up the wall sometimes. And remember what I said before about the reputation as something of a book nerd? It came from being forced to carry around the classics, even when they weren’t on the assigned reading list. My mother thought it would broaden me, but what it really did was narrow my social scope.

  But at the CCA, I found other kindred spirits who’d rather be singing in four part harmony to dead languages than going to the beach or shopping, and I finally felt like I’d found my place in life. Okay, so maybe sometimes I wished we would focus on something a little more contemporary, but I was firmly on the classical path, with an eventual career in choral music or possibly even Jazz on my horizon. Most days I was happy with that path, and it was easier to put one foot in front of the other than wander away and risk losing my footing altogether.

  But not that morning.

  That day it was acutely painful to be around the other students on campus. The halls seemed too clogged with bodies, the laughter too shrill, and the music… While I normally found missed notes a little painful to my well trained ear, that morning they were positively excruciating. The cloying smell of perfumes and body sprays and stale smoke… they made my already sensitive stomach lurch, and I quickly lost any ability to focus in class.

  I’d seen Bridget in the same state plenty of times after a night of too many excesses, and now I sincerely regretted my lack of empathy. The next time I saw her hung over, I vowed to turn off all the lights and be as quiet as possible. Only why did I feel as though I’d partied like a rock star the night before, when I’d felt fine when I went to sleep?

  My biggest mistake was in trying to eat at lunch time. Despite the nausea, I couldn’t shake the feeling like I had to eat something. It wasn’t so much a growling stomach as a sharp hunger, a craving I couldn’t quite pin down. It led me to the snack stand by the auditorium to try and find something to tempt my fancy. The smell of cooking hamburgers made my mouth water, and all of a sudden I was ravenous. I wolfed down the burger in thirty seconds flat, washing it down with a Diet Coke. The feeling of satisfied fullness only lasted about five minutes before the pain started, stomach cramps strong enough to make me break out in a sweat, and I barely made it to the ladies room in time before it came back up again.

  Sitting on the floor of the bathroom stall, my cheek pressed against the cool metal wall, I closed my eyes as my body shook weakly. Something was seriously wrong with me, and I put my hand to my neck to feel my pulse. I felt the throb beneath my finger and then….waited, waited, waited… for far too long before the next weak pulse. This must be what dying feels like… The shot of adrenaline that went through me at that thought sped my heart up for a beat or two and then it slowed again. I had to get out of that bathroom and find some help, but my limbs wouldn’t obey me. To my growing horror, I felt that same paralyzing heaviness take hold of my body that I’d felt in the morgue. And then it didn’t matter anymore as I slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.