s k i n

p r o l o g u e

The hardest part of watching the people you love go through the Sickness is not being able to sympathize.

I thought I knew. I thought I understood what it felt like. To be a freak. An outcast among outcasts.

I was one of the few unaffected by the Sickness. I thought I was the freak. For eleven years, since the Sickness first made its appearance, I was still myself. My sister, Cori, was only a year old when it started. Once she hit five, it got her. My dad not long after. And just this year, my mom too.

It affected everyone differently, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally. It was always weird, a lot of times terrifying, and there were the few who died. Every case was different.

My mom lost her mind.

My dad started growing plants on his body.

My sister grew horns.

My best friend woke up with the skin of a serpent.

My uncle disintegrated in the night.

Nothing about the Sickness made sense, so it was a complete medical mystery. Less than five-percent of the world was unaffected today. I was one of the few.

There was no cure. No way to stop it. People just kept dying, getting sick, changing in strange, unnatural ways.

My sister was the first person infected that I was close to. She was perfectly healthy, but one day my mom noticed little nubs on her head, just above either temple. They grew slowly as she aged, evolving into the curly brown horns she has today.

A few months after Cori was discovered to be infected, my dad was diagnosed as well. He started to grow various small plants randomly on his body. The doctors weren't sure what to do, so all they could do was give him a special lotion to try and stop it from continuing. It helped, but not much. He still sprouted little flowers every once in a while.

Next was Uncle George. He wasn't returning any of my parents calls, so my dad finally went to his house to see if he was alright. That was when Dad found a pile of ashes on my uncle's bed in the shape of a human. It wasn't the first case of spontaneous combustion in our town since the Sickness appeared. I witnessed a girl burst into flames in my fifth grade class a year later.

One day when I was thirteen, my best friend Kellin Drake didn't show up to school. Days passed, and I was getting worried. At the end of the week, I finally got him on the phone. He explained the Sickness had gotten him too. When Kelly returned to school the following Monday, I saw what he meant. His skin had been replaced with tiny, rough green scales, like that of a snake. Still had his scruffy red hair, but his eyes had changed to a deep red and his fingernails turned a dark black. He always joked At least I don't have a tail! to which I would reply Not yet, anyway! just to piss him off.

For years, I watched as the Sickness slowly took hold of my classmates. There were only three of us left unchanged. Most of the effects were subtle on the other students, but there were always the few like Kelly and Cori with noticeable traits left by the Sickness.

Sometimes the Sickness didn't effect you physically. Sometimes, it effected the mind.

A girl in my class, Paige Benson, claimed she could hear others' thoughts, and I believed her wholeheartedly. Kelly once asked her what he was thinking, and she took a moment to figure it out. When she did, she cringed and yelled, "You fucking pervert!" I'd never laughed so hard before. After that, anytime she passed him in the halls or caught him looking in her general direction, she made sure to call him Perv loud enough for the other girls to hear. She started calling me Creep because she'd heard me thinking about another girl in our class who happened to be Paige's best friend.

Holland Song was the most beautiful girl in the world. We were friends in elementary school, but we grew apart when the girls started forming alliances against the boys at recess and I started to develop a crush on the little blonde girl. She was always beautiful, even after the Sickness reached her. It barely effected her, only changed her green eyes. She now had the eyes of a cat, yellow and slit and still beautiful because they were her eyes.

At the end of my junior year of high school, the Sickness took my mom from me. It stole her mind, drove her mad, and she would've killed me and Cori if our dad hadn't been able to overpower her. The doctors shipped her off to a psychiatric hospital, and I'd only been able to see her a handful of times since.

The Sickness was a curse. I had to watch everyone I ever cared about suffer through it, and I was helpless to be there for them. There was nothing I could do or say to let them know I understood, because I didn't understand. I had no idea what it felt like to suddenly become something different.

Until everything changed Monday morning.