Chapter One – Part 2
Dimly, Allison heard Macy yelling, "Make way, make way— the lady's going to hurl. Move it. Move it."
Macy maneuvered her up the stairs, through a crowd of costumed teenagers. Witches, vampires, spacemen and soldiers blurred into an amorphous mass of sound and color. Allison still had enough mind left for her to be embarrassed at the scene she was making. Then the pain flared again and all she could concentrate on was not falling over.
She barely noticed the crashing sounds behind her.
Macy got her to the bathroom and knelt her over the toilet. Allison blinked at the blue water in the bowl. It rippled into colors that made her eyes hurt as badly as her head. "Alone," she managed to say.
Her nose— whiskers and all— fell into the toilet, splashing blue drops on her face.
"Girl, I don't think—"
"Please. Leave." It took all of Allison's breath to say those two words.
After an eternal pause she heard Macy back up and the door close.
She started hyperventilating into the toilet— deep gasping breaths. She tried to clamp down on the pain by force of will.
She pulled herself upright, one hand clamped on the sink. She swayed and almost fell over. With a shaking hand she pulled open the medicine cabinet, spilling a bag of cotton balls, an open box of Q-tips, and a plastic cup filled with Band-Aids.
She cursed David's parents as she knocked aside antacids, prescription bottles, bunion pads, cough medicine—
Aspirin, Advil, Tylenol, Motrin— please, something.
She managed to find a bottle of generic headache medicine behind a bottle of Peptol Bismol. The Peptol Bismol fell into the sink as she tried to fumble open the child-proof cap on the aspirin.
She accidentally ate part of the cotton batting as she dry-swallowed a handful of pills.
She gagged and sat down on the tile floor. The pain made her dizzy. She leaned her back against the door and closed her eyes. Red flashes shot across the inside of her eyelids in time to her pulse. After a while, she heard a knock on the door.
"How you doing in there, girl?"
"Fine, Macy." Allison spoke while moving as little as possible.
"No 911?"
"No. Go watch Ben put something through his nose."
"You'll be all right?"
"I'll survive. Join the party."
It was a few moments before she heard Macy's steps recede down the stairs. The pain slowly became bearable. That's how she dealt with the headaches; sit still, breathe, wait for the painkiller to kick in.
At least their frequency was diminishing.
She didn't know what was worse, the headaches or Chuck. Both were responsible for her godawful attendance during the start of the school year. Both were something that she wouldn't be able to make anyone understand. She'd been to the doctor twice for these headaches and— supposedly— nothing was wrong.
Her mother thought that the headaches had been psychosomatic, some sort of stress, something that showed that Allison couldn't deal with school.
Something like Chuck.
Allison wouldn't admit that.
That was why she couldn't talk to her mom about Chuck. It would be an admission to her mother that she couldn't handle herself. She never again wanted to hear the condescending tone she'd heard from her mother after the second visit to the doctor, "What's the real problem?"
The question made Allison want to scream.
Since then, Allison had kept her headaches to herself, spending too much of her allowance on Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, even Midol. Unfortunately, that meant over two months she had collected over a dozen unexcused absences on her record that Mom didn't know about. Her teachers, according to school policy, had the right to flunk her for that alone.
Allison still didn't know what she was going to do when report cards came out. Her mother would freak.
"The doctor didn't find anything wrong," Allison said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Allison sat in David's bathroom long enough to tell four people to go away. None of them was David. Allison didn't know whether or not she was grateful for that. She didn't want to admit that her feelings toward David were changing. They'd been together since they'd started high school. But in the last two years she'd changed, and David had stayed David.
I don't need to be thinking about this.
Allison opened her eyes and found that the light in the bathroom wasn't painful any more. As she pulled herself upright, she saw the mess she'd made of David's parents' bathroom and felt deeply guilty. Band-Aids and Q-tips had scattered all over the floor. Bottles filled the sink and spilled on the ground. Worst was the Peptol Bismol, which had opened to splash thick pink liquid over the sink, mirror, and wall. She looked down on herself and was surprised to find that nothing had splattered her costume.
She pushed the fading headache from her mind as she did her best to repair the damage she'd wrought. Cleaning the mess ended up being easier than figuring out how all this stuff had fit in the medicine cabinet in the first place. She ended by tossing out the Q-tips and the nearly-empty Peptol Bismol bottle to make room for everything else.
She hoped David's parents wouldn't notice.
She finished by cleaning herself up.
Between losing the nose, blue water stains, and smudging from the palm of her hand, she had to wash off the makeup on her face. It took a while to remove the black and yellow stripes. In the end, all that was left of her costume above the neck was a pair of black ears peaking out from her blond hair.
There were red rims around her eyes, but it didn't look like she'd been crying.
She grimaced and fished her nose out of the toilet. She wrapped it in toilet paper and promised herself that she'd disinfect the thing before Halloween came around.
She opened the door and peeked outside. The party was still going on downstairs. She could hear it. It sounded like a lot fewer people though. She caught a glimpse of a clock through a bedroom door. It read eleven-thirty.
I was in there two hours?
"Time flies when you're having fun," she muttered.
