Finals week was always the worst manifestation of the sickness. Everyone would emerge from their dorms and cluster in pods, complaining about how little sleep they had had the night before. I wondered, if they added up all those hours of complaining and slept, instead of complaining, if they might actually get eight hours a night.

That Friday, John and I ate noodles from a nearby shop. It was on a street that crawled with college students eating cheap take out and delaying dealing with their health problems until thirty years down the road. This shop would specialize the spice level of your food. I chose no spice. I had so much heat in my life, I felt like a pot boiling over. John got a number six, a level hot enough to burn someone who wasn’t used to spice. He told me that he had once eaten a huge lump of wasabi on a dare and that his tolerance for spice had gone way up.

“So, what’s going on?” he said, fishing for the reason I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in weeks.

“I’ve been really busy. People have been harassing me about school and EMS is really hard. I just want to move forward. And they’re both messing the other up.”

John pulled a cluster of noodles towards his mouth with chopsticks. I followed suit, hoping he would respond.

“I’m going to be honest. I thought you weren’t interested anymore.”

I set my chopsticks down and drank the water, washing my confession down with the noodles. “I don’t think that Ruby and Carl like having me around. And Sandy makes things so much worse when we spend time together.”

“Don’t worry about Sandy. She’s a friend. She’s been a friend for years.”

I took another gulp of water to swallow my contrary opinion.

“We can talk about something else if this is upsetting you…” he said. “Do you have plans for winter break?”

I smiled, wondering if he could have picked something that I would have thought was happy. Of course he thought winter break was a good choice. “I’m going home.”

“So am I!” he said, happy we had that in common. “But only for a little bit. I’m staying here for some of it. Holidays are more fun when you have people who want to drink with you.”

I smiled and we talked about nothing, though our mouths moved, for the rest of dinner. He walked me home, past the dimming street lamps and the cavernous arches of the campus. At home, he closed the door by pressing me against it. I was thankful for the darkness and for the fact that John obviously didn’t want to talk. I hadn’t complained and I hadn’t asked for help. Maybe I should have but my pride was like a snake that had swallowed its prey whole at that point. I wasn’t changing my position.

My test was two days away when I sat down and started studying in earnest. I needed a ninety-five to pass the class. I had almost given up when I calculated that. But instead, I whipped out my past tests and homeworks and pulled up the answer keys for each of them. I worked through every problem, laying my head against the problem when I really wasn’t sure, hoping some of it would enter my brain by intellectual osmosis. I subsisted on ramen and pop tarts from the vending machine, which I realized later were not brain food and generally left me without energy and still hungry. I took breaks from studying to write the papers and study for the tests in my other classes. They seemed inconsequential compared to the magnitude of effort needed to pass my single statistics class.

Walking into the test room was like entering the stadium for the last football game of the season. Everyone was talking, their voices rising to a fever pitch. I slid into a seat, a suitable distance from the people around me. The sign when we walked in had encouraged at least two seats between students. I wished for at least two miles between me and the test. I had been encouraged to bring two writing utensils. I had brought four pencils and three pens and arrived twenty minutes early.

The test was what we had expected, a mix of problems we had seen before with different numbers. I worked through them methodically, plugging numbers into formulas and remembering trends, tricks that I had found in the answer keys. The numbers and words were each hurdles for me to overcome and I was determined that no hurdle would stop me. The last question was the only one that I was unsure of. It required the use of a formula that we had been taught two weeks prior and hadn’t used since. Already, most of the people had turned in their tests, gathered their belongings and raced out of the room to celebrate. I tried to keep my focus, pressing my pen hard against the page, to make my focus as laser-like as the dot. I put my best guesses down and kept at it, playing with the formula, trying to learn the way it worked on the spot.

They called for the tests to be turned in and I put down some last minute scribbles. I hoped the TA grading my test would be generous with their partial credit. I clopped down the stairs with the rest of my class and placed my test in the folder that contained the first two letters of my last name. I was herded out of the room by the energy in the crowd. Out of the room, I let the cool air wash over me and sat on the bench. I used my computer to turn in the three essays that I had written as the rest of the students tumbled over each other like puppies.

I went to the EMS office to relax, to get out of the jail cell that was my room. Ruby was there, but she and Akul weren’t sitting near each other. They were both buried in their paperwork.

“Long night?” I said.

They didn’t even look up. “You have no idea,” Akul said. “The art students need to learn that eighty hours with no sleep plus power tools does not equal positive outcome.”

I picked a spot on the couch and sunk into in. I felt bad for the art students, for the damage they had caused themselves, for Ruby and Akul, who had landed all the possible paperwork in the middle of finals week, and for myself, because I was going to have a hell of a time waiting for my grades to come in.

It was pure torture. I would have switched places with any of the art students to not have had to go through the next few days. I checked my email like a flickering light. My phone never left my hand, just in case someone should need to contact me. It was survival of the fastest to respond, the ones who could think on their feet, and I wanted nothing more than to be off my feet. I received the email a few days later, but it was not the email I had been expecting. Expedient. It was my advisor, telling me she had received my grades before they posted them to the student portal. Could I come in for a meeting? I scheduled the meeting for as late in the day as possible. If it was really bad, I knew I could sleep it off and think clearer when I woke up. I couldn’t sleep too much, I had signed up for a shift that night, but even then, I knew I would want something to distract myself.

That night, I dreamt a sentient metal ball covered in foot long spikes was chasing me. I was running down hill, so the sentient spiked object was gaining ground. I kept running but it was almost too late. I arrived at a cliff. I had only second to react. I jumped and woke up, too afraid to close my eyes again. I tried to keep them open, holding my eyelids back with my hands but my exhaustion was stronger than my fingers and I was teleported back into being stabbed by the spikes.