The Thursday Just Passed

         A week ago I passed in a story for English class that, at the end, disclosed a piece of information about the author: me. That piece of information was that I hate waking up for school so early in the morning. This is one thing about me that, over the years, has managed to stick with me… until the Thursday just passed.

         It started just like any other day, with me waking up in (for lack of a better word) a rage. I decided that I would stay home that day, because I felt particularly tired.

         I enjoyed sleeping in so much that I decided not to wake up until noon.

         When I finally did wake, I went up to my computer as I always do, and signed in to MSN Messenger. After listening to a few tunes, shortly after signing in, a message popped up. It read: “hey what r u doing tonight”. It was one of my friends, one I hadn’t talked to in a while.

         I responded, “not really sure”

         “coo man i need to find someone that wants to do shrooms,” he let on.

         “if I can get one of my buddies to come out with a car then we can go on tour and do them”

         “yeah man that would be sweet” And with that conversation the night’s events were already put into motion.

         After a few hours, and after I finished my chores, two friends (who I will call Jeff and Steve) arrived at my house. Shortly after, my brother, Ben, asked Jeff (the driver) if he would take him into Bedford to do his tax returns and told him there would be twenty dollars in it for him. Jeff quickly agreed and we were off to pick up my friend (who I will call Mark) who had four grams of shrooms.

         As I walked out the door, my dad told me to be careful.

         We drove, uneventfully, until we saw Mark walking down the road. We picked him up and turned around.

         On our way back, going past my house and into Bedford, I ate my two grams and washed them down with the Gatorade Mark bought at the store. Shortly after I devoured mine Mark had eaten a gram and a half of his, and traded the other half to Steve for a half a gram of weed.

         As we made our way into Bedford Steve went about snipping up some weed and rolling it into a perfect joint. By the time the rolled up cardboard filter was placed in the end we were already on the highway.

         The joint burned quickly and the boost it provided was enough to allow the shrooms to kick in a little early. My last sober memory of the night was sitting in the parking lot of Irving saying, “My legs are right tickle-ee. They feel like they’re gonna float away.” After that point, everything became a sort of swirling, melting, shifting haze.

         I remember bits and pieces of blurred thoughts, scattered laughing; as well as a mild feeling of impending doom in the back of my mind, but I would try not to pay attention to that. Thinking back on those feelings of doom, I think they originated because of what happened at the last exhibition—the only other time I had taken two grams of shrooms.

         After a while of driving through Bedford—a place I was far from familiar with—for a while, we finally arrived at our destination: H&R Block, where Ben would do his taxes. When he stepped out of the car, my enjoyable buzz was beginning to intensify at an alarming rate.

         As the effect of the poison in the mushrooms grew, so did my paranoia and the feeling that something was wrong. The four of us began to drive around again, my buzz now replaced with a dizzying ocean of lights and colors, and only the most obscure of coherent images filtered into my reality.

         After driving for about a half an hour, and after watching countless lights melt and shift positions drastically in an instant, we drew near, once again, to H&R Block.

         Just as we were turning off the road and into the parking lot, I remember feeling sick. Suddenly my vision began to fade (I knew what was happening, as I had experienced it once before) and I spoke, “I’m fading away. I’m… fading…”

         The next thing I remember was looking around the now parked car at the three faces looking in my direction. I didn’t feel like anything was wrong.

         “You just had a seizure,” Steve said whilst dropping a solid hundred ton chunk of fear and anxiety on my head.

         “Don’t say that… Don’t say that!” I cried, hoping to see a sneer creep across Steve’s face to let me know it was all a joke. I knew it wasn’t, and suddenly
I felt the cold sweat and weak drowsiness that go hand in hand with a seizure.

         At the last Hants County Exhibition, months ago by now, I had also taken a seizure from mushrooms and it scared me to the point where I spoke seldom for the rest of the night, and called my dad to get me immediately. I remember talking for weeks about the experience and how, “That could’a been it, man.”

         And as I sat in the car realizing what had happened, ’clues’ began to force themselves into my thoughts, convincing me of my doom. I remember thinking about all of the talk about mushrooms in the days leading up to the trip and how many times people said to me, “don’t take another seizure,” then laughed and I would join in. This, to me, was a clue.

         I thought about how my dad told me to be careful, and how I did anything but be careful. I thought about how that might be the last thing he ever said to me. I even drew clues from ‘Lord of the Flies’ to point to my ever nearing death. I thought of Simon, and how he’d had a seizure shortly before he was killed. I thought of the irony that would be realized (not by anyone’s thoughts mind you, as I didn’t share this information with my friends that night, but by the ‘universal mind’ if you will) if I died after making it only that far in the novel.

         The panic of my friends coupled with all of these ‘clues’ was all it took to prove to me that I was, in fact, dying. By that point, Ben had been in H&R Block for about forty minutes, but I couldn’t wait that long, I needed help.

         In a fury, I told Jeff to get me some orange juice. I knew the vitamin C would help to neutralize the poison. To my dismay, nay, to my terror none of us had money.

         I was still sane enough to think of all the ways I know to scam people and get free stuff. I instructed Jeff to go to the Chicken Burger’s drive-thru.

         When we got to the speaker I didn’t wait to hear anyone on the other end, “Could I get a Minute Maid orange juice?” and I paused for a moment, searching for the right words, “and is there any way we can get it for free? We have a diabetic with us… It’s not a joke or anything. It’s pretty serious.” There was a pause that seemed like five minutes before a reply was made.

         “Drive through to the second window please.” We obliged and moved forward.

         We reached the window, where three girls were waiting—I could make out that there were three, but I couldn’t say what they looked like for the life of me, my vision was far too blurry.

         A hand holding what appeared to be a small orange container reached out to me, “one of you is diabetic?” I grabbed the container like it was a cure,

         “Yeah…” my voice was faint and suddenly I was aware of the cold dew littering my face. “Thanks a lot”

         “No problem,” her voice was saturated with sympathy, and that made the situation seem much direr.

         I peeled the lid off the plastic container and Steve said, “Down it man,” A phrase that indirectly told of the desperateness of the situation. I listened to him and the sweet juice was gone in two gulps.

         We drove towards H&R Block once again and parked in the same place as before (I think). We sat, waiting for Ben.

         Finally I had too much and I began to freak out. “I think I’m gonna… I don’t wanna…” I hesitated to say the word, half thinking that I would be tempting fate, “…Die.” There was silence in the car, and the three wide eyed and worried faces didn’t help me feel any better (nor did the fact that there was only one person, Jeff, who was of at least semi-sound mind).

         “I think we should go to the hospital… Jeff, go now. We gotta go to the hospital!” My voice reeked of panic and the car was started within seconds. Just as we began to pull away, there was a knocking on the car door. Ben opened the door and sat down,

         “I got thirteen-hundred dollars back!” He said, cheerfully.

         “We gotta go to the hospital,” I heard one of my friends say. “Jake had a seizure”.

         Ben laughed and looked at me, “figures… seizure boy”.

         “I think I’m gonna die Ben!” I hollered

         “I think you’re just on shrooms Jake,” he said with some certainty.

         After minutes of arguing about whether or not I was dying, we arrived at the decision to go to the hospital.

         We drove, and talked. At times I would feel okay, but randomly I would find myself in a panic. One moment I would laugh, and feel relief. The next I would feel the warm wave that is panic wash over me and I would say something like, “Where’s this hospital?” I would do so as calmly as possible because, throughout this whole terrifying experience, I was trying to prevent my friends from being as scared as I was because they were on the awful drug as well.

         When we arrived at the hospital I tried to put my sweater on, but couldn’t find my way through the grey desert to the neck hole and quickly gave up. I looked at the doors, ready to go in.

         “Do you really think you need to go to the hospital Jake?” my brother asked.

         “I feel like I’m going to die! Maybe it’s just the drugs, but I had a seizure! What if..?!”

         “I’m tellin’ ya Jake, it’s the shrooms. I’ll buy you some milk and take you home and you’ll start to feel better.” I weighed things out in my mind: We would have to tell where we got the shrooms. Mark would be in trouble for giving them to me. Ben was the only completely sober person in the car.

         “You decide for me Ben. You’re the only sober one here… I just don’t wanna die…” I was putting my life in his hands it seemed.

         “C’mon Jeff, let’s go to the store then go home.” Ben said, and we began to move again.

         We drove for what seemed like forever and all the while I tried to convince myself I was going to be okay. We arrived at the store and soon after, we were gone again, and I was chugging from a liter bottle of milk.

         The drug started to wear off during the drive home, but the feeling of death closing in was still clear as ever—merely masked by what I perceived at the time to be lies from my own mind, used to ignore the gravity of the situation.

         Somewhere along the way home I managed to hook my MP3 player into Jeff’s stereo and push play. A few songs went by, and I tried to focus on them; to fight the drowsiness that was pulling my eyes shut (for I feared going to sleep would be giving in to death). These songs didn’t help. I gave up, and closed my eyes.

         My thoughts were still saturated with worry and fear, and I started to think about what I would do if I lived... How I would change if I was given another chance. I remember renouncing all drugs in my mind, as well as cigarettes. I told myself that, given the chance, I would change.

         Suddenly, as if to say, “you’ve had enough. You’ve learned your lesson,” a new song came on and the lyrics soothed me.

         “…When you’re riding sixteen hours,
         And there’s nothin’ much to do.
         You don’t feel much like writing,
         You just wish the trip was through.
         Here I am, On the road again…”

         I related to the song (especially “You just wish the trip was through”), and it turned my horrifying trip back into something pleasant. I had my good buzz back, but it was different this time—I felt safe and no longer feared death.

         I kept my eyes closed until I got home so I could watch the colorful morphing patterns and images that my mind pumped out with some help from the poison. The clearest hallucination I had while my eyes were closed is very hard to describe. It was a solid image but consisted of many girls laying this way and that.
What was strange about this image was that the girls’ skin was very unnaturally colored. The majority of the skin was a pale baby blue color but it was also stamped with dark blue diamond shapes, comparable to the design on a diamondback rattlesnake. Stranger still, arms and legs everywhere in this image were pulsating and joining to the arms and legs of the other figures. All of this reminded me of the visual representations of music that you see in music videos.

         We finally arrived at my house and I said to my friends, “sorry for the scare boys.” There was a wary chuckle from all of us. I also thanked Jeff for the shrooms, despite the terrifying events of the night.

         I left the car and staggered as I walked, realizing that this was the first time I stood up since I took the shrooms about six hours earlier. I made it into the house and down to my room, where I slept.

         The irony of this story is that I, a guy who hates getting up for school so much that he wrote a story about it, was able to wake up the next morning, and instead of growling in anger as I did most other mornings, I smiled and took a deep breath, thankful that I was able to wake up and go.