I lay writhing in my dimpled bed. Seeing as how I sleep in the same place every night, a large, Zach-shaped divot has formed, contoured to my disgustingly arched back. It was one-thirty in the morning when my stomach decided that it had had enough of its life and hung itself from my rib cage. Or perhaps the entire pizza I had eaten earlier that night attached a vest of dynamite to its chest and performed a spoiled-food Jihad against my infidel intestine. Either way, I couldn’t sleep.
The seconds inched by; every one punctuated by a new feeling of agony in my stomach. After the fourth hour, my stomach, deciding that I was done on one side, flipped the pain over to my back. It felt as though someone had taken a baseball bat to the arch of my back. But, that someone had inserted the baseball bat into a Civil War era cannon and fired it at point blank range. I passed the time with my eyes closed, pretending I wasn’t awake. I would close my eyes for half an hour and look at the clock that mockingly showed only a five minute time lapse. It was 5:45 in the A.M. before I angrily took my spot on the couch and slept until 7:17.
Seven seventeen loudly announced her presence in a pulsating tone that grated on my ringing ears. I hobbled out of bed and contemplated existence. Mainly, I contemplated why in the world I was existing, and what I could do to make it stop. But it was the day of the Advanced Placement United States History exam: a three hour monster that was the apex of my countless hours of backbreaking work in that class. I made it to the testing site, looking like I just rolled out of a burial plot, and hunched over the test. Wobbling over the 75 history questions (which I was informed numerous times that I am never, ever allowed to discuss with anyone, ever, under penalty of emasculation by the College Board) I fought back the urge to vomit all over my Answer Document. After writing about the CIA conspiring to kill Martin Luther King Jr. (which I’m not making up: I mean, I may have made up the conspiracy, but I actually wrote it), I sweated and dizzily stutter stepped my way to my next class.
A curious side effect of my illness was the fact that it was temporarily cured by walking around. I’m not sure what kind of disease I had, but it’s the kind that debilitates your stomach so you cannot eat or have any energy, and then makes you walk around to get better. I wish it had a name so I could make bracelets to cure the son-of-a-bitch. Anyway, between my near-death-experience and my talk to my track coach, the jaunt had made me think I was better. She said I should try to go to the meet. I wanted to go home. But I thought, hey! Maybe I’ll feel better! With the kind of optimism only found in crack heads and born again Christians, I made my way to the dank quarters of my math class. The details of which bore even me, but I did see Heather Prato as my substitute teacher. Anyway, at 2:30 I went home.
Here I was, home alone the day of the AP history exam when I had a very important track meet, watching the Hallmark channel and Comedy Central until I passed out. If there was ever a worse time to be sick, I cannot think of one. Maybe while you’re receiving the Nobel Prize for curing Nausea or at dinner with the President of China. And so I lay writhing on my herringbone couch, thinking how I could have had a rocking party. I knew I wouldn’t have had a party. But either way, I couldn’t sleep.