Her arm hesitated, than rose up towards the closed door, placing her hand flat against the wood. Black smeared the wood as it was transferred from her fingers to the door. Like a cottage marked by the plague, as the villagers not afflicted with the disease steered clear of her room, as she lay dying in a pile of hay and rags, the bloody, pus-ridden boils covering her face and body.

The room was becoming colder by the second. Spencer shivered, as she tilted her head and rested it against the door, her parent’s voices curiously muffled as the sound attempted to burrow through the splinters and cracks of the wood.

Fire roared through her chest and she slapped her free hand against the bare skin above her breasts. She swallowed a portion of it down, the rest appearing in the form of heavy tears that painfully shoved their way out of Spencer’s pin-sized tear ducts. Her lips remained tightly closed, her breath heaving in and out through her nose, a tiny whine following each breath.

She hated every second of this. She hated it. Every second. Every wasted second spent fighting the bug. Every wasted second she lay here unable to just walk downstairs and throw her body at her parent’s feet begging for mercy. Every wasted thought spent trying to outwit the bug, only to be ambushed, broadsided by its keen awareness of Spencer’s weaknesses. She fought hard to think back in time, to when this all began, trying to pinpoint the exact moment it struck, her definite location, what the hell she was wearing, who she was with?

She could only recollect back so far, until the pain began again, blocking her mind’s path from wandering, forcing her head down towards her desk, eyes on her test, pencil poised, ready to fill in the bubbles.

Snot hung down from her nose, mixing with the tears, and sticking to the small crevasse above her upper lip. What was left of Ashley’s letter had filtered into the plush fuzz of the carpet, where it would mix with the dust particles, chipped toenail remnants, and pieces of dirt that had broken free from the bottom of her sneakers. Spencer ran her palm carefully across the carpet, as solid bits of the letter flicked and catapulted upward, resting precariously upon the tips of the carpet’s threads.