Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap

Zara tapped the end of her pen against the edge of her desk, her eyes trained on the Calculus homework before her. She had never considered mathematics to be a difficult subject, because it was her favourite. She absolutely loved the way each problem had a fixed answer that could only be reached following a specific set of calculations; this was unlike some of the other subjects—such as History—where most of the information was biased, opening a window to a world of different perspectives and possibilities.

Mathematics gave Zara's life fleeting snippets of uniformity, making her forget, even just for a moment, how really chaotic it was.

In that moment, Zara longed to find the limit for the function under the first question, but she couldn't hear herself think.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The inside of her head was like a lecture hall. The voices talked over each other, each one trying to be heard over the next. There was yelling, whispering, moaning—they talked about each other, about her, about random shit. Zara was the professor at the front of the room, her weak voice attempting to shush the hundreds of others. She couldn't think, she couldn't speak, all she could do was sit in her claustrophobic room, rereading the first question dozens of times in order to make some sense of it.

Yelling, more yelling. Her ears rang and her head began to spin. She ground her teeth together, she furrowed her eyebrows, she clapped her hands over her ears, wishing that she could just shut them all out.

Please... her own internal voice mewled. Zara squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, again and again until the letters and numbers before her began to tremble before her.

The numbers bunched up together then flew apart; the letters shook violently until one by one they began to fall off their respective lines and into a pile on the bottom of the page. Moments later, they began to snake upwards from the broken heap, hypnotised by the inaudible music of a charmer.

Everything else on the page bounced around madly: a few numbers jumped off the page and onto the floor, rolling away from Zara and under the bed. Others danced around, growing and shrinking in size, contorting into shapeless black blobs that stained the white page.

Zara watched the entire scene with widened eyes, her mouth gaping open in fright.

She didn't know what to say or do. Was she hallucinating? Was she dreaming? She pinched herself, but the crazy scene before her didn't seem to go away—

Suddenly a "pi" figure broke out of the now slithering serpent of words that moved around the page, and Zara's eyes went to it. It too began to grow—more and more until it was so large that it began to push everything else off to the page, their fates similar to their companions.

Meanwhile, the voices in her head had momentarily subsided. But then, their volume immediately began to rise together, a choir singing a crescendo in time with the growing "pi".

Once it had reached the size of a full page, it began to shimmer and to transform into...a house?

It looked like one of those crudely drawn ones, done by a kindergartener in an art class. Zara stared dumbfounded, willing herself to speak, to say anything, except no words seemed to want to come out of her mouth.

Something began to burn her hand, and she yelped, pulling it away from the flame that had taken shape on the bottom left-corner of the page. Zara could feel her hand pulsating with pain—she turned it over and saw that a large gash and formed on her palm, the skin raw from the burn. Tears began to pool in the corners of her eyes, and she clasped the wrist of her injured hand with her good one and looked back at the page which was now completely enveloped in flames. 

They rose into the air and into the shape of the distorted house, the voices in her head yelling at a pitch so high it was unbearable. Zara screamed, or at least she thought she heard herself scream, and attempted to stumble out of the chair, but it tipped backwards sending her crashing to the floor and hitting the back of her head.

As quickly as everything started, it stopped.

Her eyes flew open after seemingly blacking out, and she panted, her head spinning. Zara laid back against the floor, her legs tangled in the ones of the chair, a dull ache pulsating in the back of her head. She stared at the flaky ceiling above her, unable to move, to shift a muscle. Her body felt as cold as the wooden flooring and just as stiff. She tried to form coherent thoughts in her mind and failed, still in shock. What had just happened?

A loud robotic beep resonated across the quiet room.

Once.

Twice.

A text.

Zara willed her arm to move, and it did, albeit slightly. She used a hand to remove her glasses; one of the temples had broken off. Why did she have them anyway? Her vision was nearly perfect. Zara flung them across the room, and closed her eyes.

It's okay, I'm back. This was her, her own voice. She held her breath for a moment, expecting the others to began talking again. Nothing. She's gone. I'm back, she repeated again, with more determination. She must've had one of those moments again—strangely, the previous scene flickered in and out of her memory, in jagged parts.

The homework. Calculus. The house. The fire. Then, it all vanished in thin air.

She didn't know what the fuck had just happened, but she would fight through this on her own, like she always had. Zara wasn't going to look up her symptoms, for fear of what she would uncover. First the voices, now, the passing out, the amnesia, and now...the hallucinations. It was all going downhill; whatever she had was getting worse, but she could handle it.

She wouldn't speak of this to anyone. This was and would remain her secret.

Zara tried to sit up again, and this time it worked. Dizziness began to overtake her, and her skin crawled with pins and needles, but she brought a hand to her forehead to calm herself down. Slowly and very carefully, she detangled her legs from the chair and stood up. She almost lost her balance but she managed to steady herself by gripping the edge of her desk. Her eyes darted furtively to the Calculus sheet, but it looked normal. Plain and normal. She was plain and normal. Zara even checked her hand. It was unscathed.

She sighed and went to pick up her cellphone, squinting through her glasses at the green blinking light of the tiny screen. Why was she even wearing those glasses? Last time she remembered her vision was pristine. She pulled them off her face and placed them on a pile of textbooks.

Zara? The text was from Aurora. It was uncommon for her to greet her that way. It usually was with a "hello" or a "hey", to which Zara would always respond with a "sup". Her thumb hovered over the keypad, unsure about how to reply.

?

She settled with a question mark, playing it safe. While she waited for Aurora's answer, she gathered up her pens and dropped them into her pencil case, zipping it shut. Enough homework for one night.

The hazy thoughts cleared themselves as she made her way to the living room, phone in hand. Zara didn't want her memories to disappear, like they seemed to be doing with increasing frequency—she was going to have do something about it.

The phone beeped again.

I need to talk to you about something. Zara stared at the tiny green screen. It was completely out of character for Aurora not to write in text language. Something must be wrong with her.

She dialled her number—the phone rang, but Aurora didn't pick up.

Okay then.

I don't feel like calling, came her hasty reply, can we text?

Kk.

Zara picked up the remote and switched on the TV. She flipped through the channels, looking for something to take her mind off things, but without cable, there were only about ten channels she could look through.

I fought with my parents again...

Zara bit her lip. She knew about Aurora's difficult situation with her almost-inexistent parents, but Zara personally didn't know how to deal with it.

Her own parents were dead.

She decided not to reply. When she changed the channel for the fifth time, a news anchor appeared on the screen. She was blonde—her hair was cut into a French bob—and she wore a pink blazer with a golden flower brooch above her right breast.

That should be alright, Zara thought, standing up to go scavenge in the kitchen.

"...And yet another four dead from gang-related violence..."

The woman's monotonous voice filled the air, and although Zara wasn't paying attention to what she was saying, a voice other than her own was comforting.

I don't know what to do...

The fridge was practically empty, with only a carton of expired milk and a cartoon with three eggs occupying it. Zara went to rummage through the cupboards, but there was no food in sight, not even the shadow of a tin of cookies or anything edible. She sighed and went back to the living room.

"...the NYPD promises to crack down...The Jaguars..."

The chief of police appeared on the screen, his thick and bushy moustache bobbing up and down with every word. Zara's attention went back to her phone.

Well what can I do to help you? She rubbed the side of her face and passed a hand through her hair. Her stomach burned from the hunger, and now her friend was having family issues.

Tapping a finger against her chin, she thought about how to reply. At a time like this, staying at the lair wasn't such a good idea for Aurora—Zara knew too well how antsy she became in complete solitude.

Come over? Gramps isn't home.

Simon wasn't home. Zara hadn't realised until she had typed it out.

Tomorrow? After meeting.

Okay, she could do that.

Pack your bags.

-:-