Apocalypse, Steve Harrington

Chapter Sixty. Four Words

SIXTY
— four words

tw: vomiting

THIS IS ABSOLUTE HELL.

      There's a thin layer of sweat gathering between the creases of her forehead. Her clothes seem to stick to her body, in a sickeningly cold, disgustingly moist way. Her fingers are closed around the toilet-bowel of the third-stall in the movie-theater bathroom, which is somehow nastier than whatever is leaving her stomach, right now. She's dry-heaved so many times, her diaphragm hurts. And, frankly, if she were to asked to pick between literal death, or reliving the current moment . . . she'd asked them to bury her.

      The nausea is brutal. Because, every fifteen-seconds, the puking stops. It stops, and she's breathing steadily, and then . . . her stomach is crawling up to her already-burning esophagus. Her dark-brown hair is tangled between her fingers, and she's spewing and coughing over the toilet. She's not sure what she's throwing up, exactly . . . popcorn, she assumes, because she hasn't eaten anything else in thirty-one hours.

      "Oh, God," she chokes, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. With a low and heavy hum— it's more of a groan— she rests her clammy-hands on the tops of her thighs. Her eyes are screwed shut, and she's muttering hopes and prayers that this ends soon . . . a continuous loop of,  'please, let this be over', is running through her thoughts.

She hears his Adidas sneakers squeak against the tile-floor of the restroom. Her chest tightens, and she's going to be sick again, because, god, this is embarrassing. This is worse than the time he had to hold her hair back at Bogie Cardinale's Halloween party (and that was bad). They had just kissed, if her memory is serving her right, and she's dry-heaving over a disgusting movie-theater toilet. She's not even able to shout, curse at him, and tell him to leave, because her gag-reflex is triggered, and she's spilling-her-guts, again.

Is it over? Is she still in hell? Is she still sick? There's a momentary fish-bowl effect, like her ears are clouded, and when it's over, she can hear everything. The faucet is dripping, and she's panting, and . . . Steve is sick in the stall beside her. She smacks her lips, and lifts her head, "jeez, Steve, are you puking?"

The sentence leaves her lips, and so do the final contents of her stomach. It mixes together in a disgusting half-gag, half-gurgle, and she's hunched over the toilet in one final thirty-four second interval of gut-aching sickness.

"You're the o—" he pauses, and breathes deep, "you almost barfed on my work-uniform."

      His coughing and spewing over the toilet-bowl is worse than her own, she thinks.

There's a silence, after that. She flushes her toilet, and cringes when it all goes down. Her knee is pressed to her clammy-chest, and she's smacking her lips, and she's trying her hardest to process what had just happened. Not what had just happened, actually . . . what had happened in the past day? Two days? Day-and-a-half? Or, fifteen-minutes-ago, Steve had kissed her. Her mind is alarmingly clear, now, and she's remembering it all, "I think," a pause, and she licks her dry-lips, "did we puke ourselves into consciousness?"