Towson General Hospital, Department of Neurology. Towson County, Baltimore, Maryland. June twenty-fourth, twenty-twenty-five. Eleven-thirty AM.

What’s the first word people think of when they’re in a hospital? That thought circulated through my mind as I lay on the examination table. And the answer was…antiseptic, a ten-letter word that rang like a chime in my brain.

Outside of the usual doctor’s visits in the past for my childhood booster shots and the usual spate of colds and the flu, I’d never been seriously ill. But this time, a stabbing pain deep in my skull told me that this examination would lead to the specialist finding something far worse than a sprained knee. 

Lydia, my foster-sister-slash-girlfriend, lay quietly on another examination table next to me, an EEG helmet on her head, and her face twisted with pain. “Headache,” she whispered. “I still have it.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I murmured. I also had a helmet on. It was tight, and that didn’t help with the pulsating sensation that rattled around the inside of my skull.

The room, an off-color white, reminded me of one of those pre-fab houses that I’d seen on television—functional, sterile, and totally impersonal. Cold air entered via a ceiling vent. It mixed with the aforementioned antiseptic smells, and that only served to intensify my headache.

Writers often penned romantic scenes with their MCs in bed together, whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears, saying that death would come but not today, for we are among the living, and we shall stay that way.

Call that complete and utter BS. In our case, the location, as well as the odors, combined to make this experience anything but romantic. Lydia turned her head in my direction. “Jord, is this going to be over soon?”

My full name was Jordan Maduro, but Lydia was the only one who ever used my nickname. I couldn’t resist giving a tiny dose of sarcasm. “I hope so. My head is killing me, my body feels like a herd of pissed-off elephants trampled on it, and I haven’t eaten anything today. Otherwise, life is good. You?”

Snark delivered, she replied with one word. “Same.”

Our neurologist, Doctor Mason, a short, spare man in his fifties, listened to our banter with a faint smile, then stepped back from the examination tables and checked the readout from both machines. 

I tried to relax and got nowhere. However, our examination seemed to be over, as Mason gently removed Lydia’s helmet first and then mine, giving us a reassuring smile as he did so. “Okay, you two. We’re finished.”

Finished? Yee-hah, Tex, let’s party! 

Or not. Lydia got up first, pulling paste from her long hair. I tried rubbing my curly locks and it looked like my head was snowing. “Guess we’ll have to shower later,” Lydia muttered.

Later was the operative word—we had to eat first. We’d been here since ten AM, waiting our turn, and our foster mother, Mrs. Andrews, sat in a nearby chair, worrying her rosary beads together. When the doctor made his pronouncement, she jumped up, asking anxiously, “Are they going to be okay?”

Doctor Mason smoothed back his thinning black hair and gave her a reassuring nod. He could afford to be confident. I didn’t share his feeling. “They’re fine, Ms. Andrews. The EEG and MRI tests show them to be perfectly normal.”

Normal. These past two weeks hadn’t been normal, and Mason’s assertion that nothing was wrong bothered me. My problems, as well as Lydia’s, had started about six months ago. At first, it was just a headache or a backache that would disappear in an hour or so. Then it became a day or so.

After that, those stabs came more often. For the last thirty days, they’d been with me almost every day. Same with Lydia. Combined with blinding headaches, we had shortness of breath, and joint pains. All those symptoms pointed to something seriously wrong, but according to the specialist, we were perfectly healthy.

My foster mother didn’t seem so sure. “But they both have the same…uh, symptoms, and that doesn’t make sense.”

I swung my legs over the table and offered my input. “And to add to that, if I’m so fine, then why do I feel so rotten?”

He shrugged, which pissed me off even more. “Your body’s adjusting,” he replied. “If you use your computer a lot, staring at the images or text is related to eyestrain, which can trigger headaches. Shortness of breath is just nerves. As for your joint pains, most of the time, it’s just your bones lengthening. The cracks and the aches are your body’s way of adjusting to that growth spurt.”

“Aha,” I said in the manner of a detective who’d just discovered a vital clue to crack an extremely perplexing case.

The doctor then waved his hands to dismiss my claim. “Jordan, I know that you’re concerned, but you’ve had blood tests, an ECG, two EEGs, and three CT scans. All of them showed that you’re healthy. Same with your sister.”

“Foster sister,” Lydia put in.

I glanced at her, nodded, and then focused my gaze on the doctor. Lydia’s last name was Horiuchi. She wore a look of discomfort as well as acceptance, although she had every right to be as angry as I was, mainly because she’d been suffering from the same problems. 

Summer vacation should’ve been the bomb, but so far, it had been more like a lit firecracker abruptly dunked it in water. It wasn’t because I didn’t have a summer job. It wasn’t because I didn’t have many friends to hang out with.

It was all because that, in six months, January seventh, to be precise, I’d turn eighteen. While that was bad enough, my grades weren’t great, so not going to university was a foregone conclusion, and my health…call it iffy, at best.