Deviating from the Norm (A "Freaks and Geeks" Fanfic)

Chapter 4 - Tread carefully

Sunday. Homework crunch time. Unfortunately, it also seemed to be Homecoming fallout time as well. Throughout the entire day I kept receiving calls from friends and, more so, former teammates. Apparently, my fallout with Brett wasn't intriguing enough to warrant any calls from the group, but news from Homecoming certainly was. Vicki had made quick work of spreading the word, evidently. Donovan Matsen was now addicted to pot and was so high at the dance he didn't even know how to talk right... or so I was told, at least. I wasn't sure who to be more pissed with- Vicki for being the predicable gossip girl she was or Kim for feeding the, as she would put it, shit-stirrer. I did my best to pour oil on the troubled waters during every call, but after a while it just felt like I was trying to fight a riptide and losing, badly. If I was hearing about it this much in less than twenty-four hours, it would burn through the school population like a wildfire on Monday.

My dad was somewhat excited by all of the attention I had been getting again. I think he was under the impression that my team was calling because I was going to get back into football, not because I was the subject of some juicy chatter. I didn't want to squelch his mood, as it was a nice change of pace to see him smiling when he answered the phone and handed it off to me. By the same standards though, if he even thought about bringing the matter up, I would really have had no problem turning back into a disappointment for him by continuing to denounce the sport.

My mother, on the other hand, was simply annoyed by the nonstop interruptions to her daily routine. When she started acting like that, behaving oddly or becoming irrationally angry at the drop of a hat, it truly worried me because I was never sure if she was just having a bad day or if she was getting sick again. For as long as she could remember, she had always had periods of time where she felt completely horrible, both physically and mentally. When it happened, she... well, she changed. It was kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There was really no other way I could think of to explain it. She simply wouldn't act like herself. She would become mean and spiteful, act incoherent in both her words and her actions, and become altogether unpredictable. There was a strong physical reaction as well. Her whole body would swell, as if she had been stung by a bee and it was affecting her all over, especially her arms and legs. Once the changes took over, every movement was pure agony for her. She had been diagnosed with everything under the sun, and when her current doctor became frustrated with the lack of progress on whatever they thought she had, they would drop her. Each new doctor disregarded the previous one's conclusion and came up with one of their own. It was an endless cycle of nothing. Her most recent physician, Dr. Hudson, decided upon a radical prognosis and proclaimed my mother had Lupus. Actually, he said a long, medical name that I was incapable of remembering, but Lupus was the short term for it. It was complicated and, as far as I could tell, fairly mysterious to most medical professionals. Usually a doctor will hand out a little pamphlet for whatever conclusion they had made for their patient's medical condition, containing information on what the condition is, symptoms, how it will affect you, treatments, etc, but when my mother left Dr. Hudson's office after he diagnosed her with Lupus, she walked out with nearly twenty different pamphlets on lupus and the various other ailments it could cause. There would have been more, but the receptionist kindly informed us that there were a number of leaflets that the office simply didn't carry. Dr. Hudson had put my mother on a new plethora of medication, but warned that until we truly knew what was wrong, it may not help matters much. Even with a new doctor and a new diagnosis, we were still left in the dark as to what to expect or how to make it any better.

The beginning of the school week had, at long last, finally arrived. It wasn't like I was really looking forward to it, but better to get it out of the way than continue to dread the inevitable. I made my way out to the patio before the first bell of the day rang to see who I could spot. I quickly identified Daniel sitting at our normal spot on one of the metal tier benches of the bleachers, getting in a little nicotine fix before the school day started.