Twist of Fate

Chapter 6: Conditions

The first time my condition ever struck was when I was five years old. I and my brother and sister were waving at our parents as they drove away. They were going out to have fun, and I happily waved to them. Father was driving the car but he still waved back and smiled at me. I was smiling like the happiest kid in the world when it happened. As my father waved to me, he was distracted and didn't see the large eight-wheeler coming from the opposite direction. It happened in an instant. One second he was waving at me, the next the car is hit and flips over like you see in movies.

  Except it wasn't a movie. As my older siblings screamed and panicked I just stood there, expression frozen as I went completely numb. My heart began to hammer in my chest and I shook like a leaf in the wind. I started toward the totalled car that held my parents, but my sister stopped me. She had tears running down her face but I felt nothing. She hugged me tightly, trying to shield me from the accident, but I still saw. The car was upside down and the side hit by the eight-wheeler was smashed. The window was broken on that side, so I could clearly make out the bloody forms of my mother and father.

  A thought came to me then. If I hadn't waved, Father wouldn't have been distracted. He would've seen the eight-wheeler coming and they would still be on their way to have fun. They would still be alive. If I hadn't waved, they would still be here now. If only I hadn't waved.

  Their deaths are my fault.

  The world faded into the darkness and remained dark until I "woke up". I awoke to find myself in the hospital and that I had slept for an entire month. My siblings were indescribably relieved I had not been lost as our parents had, they actually cried. I made a vow that day to never leave them as our parents did.

  My one month of slumber was labeled as a trauma induced coma until the incident repeated itself.

  The second time my condition struck was just over a year later. It wasn't by the same circumstances though. I had taken up gymnastics and overdid it. After many hours of rigorous training, my heart hammered and my body shook. I was completely drained of energy and blacked out from overexertion. I awoke completely restored to find my siblings crying once again. I was fine, it was the length of time I slept that caused the reaction.

  I had slept for a full three months without a single sign of awakening. The doctors labeled this as a coma as well, caused by anemia. No one disagreed as they had no reason to doubt or assume it anything else. They had no reason to assume what I had was a one in a billion disease. Not then. Not until several years later.

  The third time my condition struck was when I was eleven years old. My older sister, Claire, and I were in the shopping district when it happened. We were having a perfectly nice day until she forgot her bag in a store and she asked me to wait outside for her. I was humming aimlessly to myself waiting for her. She was a mere fifty feet away when I lost her.

  A bright smile lit up her face when she started towards me, but fell as the building she had just exited exploded. Horror graced her lovely face and she called out to me. Flames consumed her body and I watched with wide eyes. Again, I had lost one of the only people who accepted me right before my eyes. Heat blasted against me but I didn't move as I stared at where my sister once was. I couldn't move. The feeling in my limbs drained away as I became number inside and out. My heart hammered and trembled more than ever before.

  Before I was consumed by darkness as she was by fire, my sister's last words rang in my ears.

  "Live, Lareria!" Claire had said. "You must do your best and live!"

  Then there was nothing

  I opened my eyes in what seemed like a moment to see my last surviving sibling. I was genuinely happy to see him but he seemed different. There was a mirror in the room and I looked in it to see I was exactly the same, completely unchanged from the last time I had looked at myself. But my brother was different. It wasn't hard to tell how different. My brother, Keshaun, looked older.