The Silence

Chapter Four

Julian:

I'm dying. That was the only thought running through my head as I lay there in the school's sick room. The nurse had been nice enough to close the curtains on my side of the room but there was still too much light and it felt like it was burning my eyeballs. I groaned as I covered my face with the sheet on the bed.

I hadn't had a migraine in so long I forgot how much they hurt. It felt like someone was drilling through my skull from the inside out and I could barely breathe. I tried to move my head onto the pillow and the throbbing almost made me pass out. I bit my lip to muffle my moan. I couldn't hear it, but I didn't want to make a noise for anyone else who might be in the room.

The migraines had started when I was 12. One day I'd come home from school early with a headache and a stuffy nose, and my mother had put me to sleepiness just before her shift at work started. I don't remember much about that week but my mother said I had such a bad case of the flu, I'd had to go to hospital. Then one day I'd woken up perfectly fine. My fever was gone. My headache was gone. I felt great... Except I couldn't hear anything.

The doctors had kept me in the hospital for weeks, I'd had so many tests done I could barely remember how many doctors I'd seen. My hearing came back briefly and went away slightly again in one ear. Then a week later I couldn't hear properly in both ears again. I got dizzy constantly. The headaches started again and of course there was the ringing... The ringing was what had finally made sense and the doctors all came to the same conclusion. Early onset Ménière's disease. My mother had been devastated and I ...I hadn't known what to feel. I couldn't hear much, and probably never would again, but at least I knew what was wrong with me.

I was just breathing through another wave of pain when the sheet covering my face lifted up and I opened my eyes slowly. I blinked through the tears blurring my eyes and ...It was that boy again. He was the only one in the school I'd seen get away with wearing a leather jacket instead of the school blazer. He was looking at me with a frown on his face and asking me something but the ringing had started again and I couldn't hear anything else. I watched his lips.

"Julian? Are you OK?" I hissed through my teeth and my vision blurred again, so I closed my eyes and gripped the edge of the bed until I could think again. He was still there when I opened my eyes. Still talking.

"I'm sorry." I whispered. "I can't hear you right now." He stilled and nodded so I knew he heard me. I let out a small sigh and shut my eyes again. "Migraine." I had my eyes closed so I must have imagined it, but I think I felt his hand on my shoulder and very briefly, the smell of cigarettes brushed under my nose.

The next time my eyes opened, the room was much darker and from what I could see from the clock on the wall, I had fallen asleep. The boy from earlier was still here, leaning against the wall, his face lit up by the light of his phone as he typed. I must have made a noise, because his eyes fell on me and he sat up straight.

"You're awake." I read on his lips. I wanted to nod but my head still felt like it was full of bricks so I stuck my hand out of the sheet and motioned for him to give me his phone. He hesitated, but he gave it to me and I exited from the music app on his phone. I found the note board and opened that. The light was boring into my eyeballs, but if I squinted it wasn't so bad.

'Thank You.' I typed and handed it back to him. He smiled at his phone and he typed back,

'I didn't do anything, but OK.' He had stayed when he didn't have to. Why HAD he stayed? If he was in the sick bay, didn't that mean he was sick too? And he'd sat on the floor beside me for a few hours...