The Portal & The Panther

portal_cover 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.

Usually you can barely hear the announcements from inside the bathrooms, but I could hear them as if the volume was turned up to full blast and I had my ears pressed against the speakers.

“HEY MECKSVILLE HIGH!�� DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE’S STILL TIME TO JOIN THE YEARBOOK STAFF?!”

I could hear the voices coming from Mrs. Mullhooney’s room and from the room next door where the girl in the hall had come from.�� Despite distance and two doors between us, I heard them as if they were standing right next to me, shouting at me.

“DID YOU HEAR ABOUT JARED AND JADEN?�� I HEARD THEY GOT INTO IT AT THE GAME LAST WEEK…”

“AND THEN I SAID TO HER, ‘OMG! I KNOW YOU DIDN’T JUST CALL ME A’–”

“…ANYTHING THIS WEEKEND?�� ‘CAUSE, YOU KNOW, I MEAN IF YOU WANT, WE COULD…”

“…NO, THAT’S STUPID.�� SHE’S NOT LIKE HER FRIENDS…”

Somewhere in the girl’s room next to me, a toilet flushed and a stall door opened, then bounced twice.�� I tried to cover my ears with my hands, but my arms didn’t want to work.�� I kept trying to move them up towards my head, but they just wouldn’t cooperate.�� And my hands had turned into big cat’s paws again.

If the noise was unbearable, the smell was worse.�� The boy’s bathroom had smelled awful when I walked in; now it was as if someone had swabbed the floor and all the toilets with a q-tip and then stuck it under my nose.

That’s when I finally passed out.

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