AUGUST IS A FEVER

1

Lies. All you told nowadays were lies. All you knew nowadays were lies. You lived and breathed the untrue, it was how you lived. No - it was how you survived.

It all happened when you were eleven years old. It all happened so fast too. You were in your room playing with a pink hippopotamus plush toy you had named Kitty. With the help of your hands, Kitty was flying across the room, jumping from place to place as your imagination ran wild. The sound of your parents closing the door to your father's office rang throughout the hallway outside of your room and into your ears, cutting off your imagination and your game of pretend short.

This had become a daily occurrence. Your parents with your father's laptop going into his study to do who knows what. They were keeping secrets from you, sure you were in the fifth grade but you weren't foolish enough to be completely clueless. They were hiding something and frankly you had enough. You were sick of being left in the dark of whatever they were watching on that damn laptop.

You stood up from off of the carpet in the center of your room, and with Kitty in your arms, you began to walk over to the door, hoping to get some kind of information of what they were keeping so secret.

You remember hearing from your father's office the audio of President Gray projecting his voice from the laptop. It was the first time you had heard him in months. Your young brain was telling you it felt like years ever since you weren't allowed to watch TV, play on the family computer, or on your mother's phone anymore. Something was up.

You couldn't comprehend what he was going on about, something about a disease that had gone viral?

Everheart's Disease, later named Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration or IAAN for short was fatal and only affected children ages eight to fourteen. You were right in the age range of that, that knowledge sent a chilled shiver down your spine. You didn't understand half of the words President Grey was saying, but you knew they were bad news.

Little (Y/n) looked back on the past couple of months. You remembered being in your fifth grade class, doing your weekly Friday multiplication timed exams. The day was going normal, nothing gave away anything to suspect the awful thing that happened next.

You sat up, your back aching from being hunched over your desk, trying to keep your peers eyes away from your quizlette to prevent them from cheating. It's what your teacher, Mrs. Benson, taught the class to do. As you sat up to relieve the ache in the small of your back, you saw the boy across from you, your classmate sit up too. A lot more quickly and lot more urgently.

You shrugged it off, that boy Damien was a pretty weird kid, you wouldn't put it past him to do something like that. What was out of the ordinary however was the sudden grip on his wooden pencil beginning to tighten until his knuckles went white. Then his pencil snapped.

"Damien, are you okay -" You began but gasped softly when you saw his face. His eyes went from their original blue color to a bright glowing orange. His mouth was beginning to open wide slowly. Part of you feared his jaw would unhinge from the rest of his skull. "Damien?" You asked softly as you began to reach over to him but jerked your hand back when he began to violently shake.

His eyebrows furrowed into a tight knit expression, it looked as if he was being told something as devastating as his parents dying. Although It wasn't his parents who were dying at that moment. The whole class jumped when you screamed bloody murder as Damien fell off of his blue plastic school chair, dropping dead to the green carpeting below.

"Students, stay calm, I'm sure he just fainted." Mrs. Benson said frantically as she jogged up to the body on the floor. Your classmate next to you hugged you tight in an attempt to comfort you from the trauma you just endured from witnessing the class clown die right before your very eyes.

Mrs. Benson kneeled over and pressed two fingers on his neck to feel for a pulse. To feel for anything, something that signaled life. Tears pricked her eyes as she pressed an ear to his chest that had stopped breathing, trying to hear a heartbeat. There was no use. She grabbed the walkie talkie that was hooked onto her belt before she attempted to comfort the class. The air of the classroom was tense and thick, full of worry and suspense. He was dead and everyone knew it deep down. The reality of it just hadn't hit them as suddenly and immediately as it hit you.

"He's okay. He's fine. He just - Damien's okay, there's no need to worry." Mrs. Benson lied. A white lie to all of your faces.

"No he's not." You murmured to yourself, but partly to your teacher. "You're lying."

Mrs. Benson gave you a quick thin smile in an attempt to comfort you, placing her hand on your knee as she began to speak into her walkie talkie with a shakey voice.

"We've got a code DS in room 217." Mrs. Benson spoke. The person across the line answered immediately, frantically even.

"The name, I need the name." The man tried not to trip and fumble over his words.

"Damien Connor." Your teacher said before putting her walkie talkie away. Just a few moments later you heard footsteps running in the hallway before the security team along with the two school nurses ran into the room.

Later when you got home, the local news reporters confirmed the truth. Confirmed what you knew the moment you saw the blue leave his eyes and be replaced with a burnt orange just like how you saw the life leave them and replace them with the grim cold truth of death. Damien had died that day and you were pulled out of school. That was the last day you were allowed to watch Television. It was also the day you caught IAAN from Damien Connor unknowingly, and yet unlike him, you survived it.