Heather Anne

About an hour after I posted that last post, claiming that my birthday was the best birthday of all the birthdays, I was hit with The Plague.

Look, it’s not that I haven’t always felt a little sorry for people who died of Ebola or whatever. It’s just that I’ve always found it hard to empathize with a pandemic. But not after Saturday night. Saturday night when Amy found me shivering in the kitchen floor, begging for death.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” she asked, rushing to my side.

“Bubonic,” I whispered, wiping the cold sweat from my head with the back of my arm. “Bubonic plague.”

Amy sat up with me for hours, spooning medicine into my mouth because my hands were shaking too badly for me to do it for myself. In between each dose of Emetrol, I would crawl to the bathroom and vomit, and then crawl back out into the kitchen and curl up on a pile of laundry. It was pathetic, and the only thing that kept me from giving up and walking toward the light was that Amy had a basket of birthday presents for me in her bedroom that I hadn’t yet opened.

Early Sunday morning, I made it back into bed. Amy came in to check on me, and when I opened my eyes to look at her, I noticed a terrible, horrible, no good sight on my bookshelf. I pointed weakly at it. Amy eyes followed my finger. “But they’re all there,” she said.

I shook my head.

Amy looked all around my room, under piles of clothes and shoes and papers and Legos and who knows what all. Finally she emerged with a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. “Is this the one?” she asked. “A second copy?”

I nodded.

Amy shelved it beside its brother copy, and I smiled weakly. “Thank you.”

I slept almost all day yesterday. And today I ate nine pieces of bread and some rice. I’m on my way to recovery. Most people who had The Plague were never able to say they recovered. But most people who had The Plague probably didn’t have a best friend who knew the power of a dozen Harry Potters, stacked neatly in a row.