Title: Day 4
Author: tarotgal
Fandom: Looking for Alaska
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not my characters! I make no money from this.
Summary: Pudge comes down with a cold during his first month at school.
Notes: Written during my 12 Ficlets in 12 Days in 2012 project for dreamer_613

114 Days Before

I’d survived my first exhausting week of classes that were significantly harder than I’d anticipated. If I stayed up late studying and working on homework assignments already, it didn’t bode well for the rest of my career at The Creek. And I’d survived the typical newbie dunk in the lake which turned out to be a whole lot less than typical thanks to duct tape and the luck of the draw in roommate assignments. So when I woke up in the morning with my head all stuffed up and my throat literally on fire, I knew I’d probably be able to survive whatever hellish bug I’d come down with.

The thing is, I’d hoped to survive it in bed.

“Up and at ‘em, Pudge,” the Colonel’s deep voice boomed out at me through the morning darkness of our room.

“Can’t,” I croaked back to him, startling myself at the state of my voice. It was like the sounds of words caught on my breath and grew rougher or muted, coming out as awkward pre-pubescent and squeaks.

“Homesick again?” he asked, apparently missing the light cough I muffled into my pillow, not wanting him to hear anyway. “It’s not going to get any better with you lying there feeling sorry for yourself and missing your mommy. All you’re going to do is fall behind in class.”

I didn’t want to tell him I was already behind in class. Or that I hadn’t been missing anybody—least of all my mother—until he mentioned it. And now all I could think about was the way she’d sit on the edge of my bed and rub my arm through the covers whenever I was sick. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, as I had every night since my dramatic near fatal drowning, and usually I was burning up in bed because of it. But I had the sheet and blanket pulled up over me and still felt a bit shivery. If my mother had been here, she’d have been taking my temperature by now. And that would be kind of nice, I had to admit. But the Colonel was most definitely not my mother and right now I just wanted him gone so I could go back to sleep.

“Fine,” he said finally, and a rustle of noise told me he’d grabbed his bag. “I’m not your babysitter.” He was nearly out the door when I felt the tickle in my nose strike. I turned my head to muffle the sound into the pillow, which worked just fine as I sucked in gasps of breath. But the sneeze shook me free of my position. “ah-Hatchoo!”

And the sneeze stopped the Colonel in his tracks. “Pudge?”

I wasn’t done yet. “hah-Ahhtchoo! Hetchhoo!” I didn’t have allergies and I didn’t get sick all that often, so I hadn’t thought to bring a box of tissues to school with me. Besides, a teenage boy sticks a box of tissues in the corner of his bed and you just know what they’re used for; I’d probably never heard he end of it from Alaska when she stopped in. Now, however, I wish I’d had one. My nose was runny and if I kept burying my head into my pillow, the pillowcase would be disgustingly damp before class was even supposed to start. So I just sniffed.

“Aw, damn it, don’t do that.”

I hadn’t realized the Colonel was still there, though I guess I hadn’t heard the sound of the door close, not that I would have been able to hear it over my sneezes. Or my sniffs. My nose was running so much I almost couldn’t stop it with sniffs. It was getting out of control.

I heard footsteps go from one side of the room to the other. Then a toilet paper roll was plopped down in front of me. “Blow your nose and get up.”

“No class,” I said. “I think I’m sick.”

“Oh, so you’re brilliant now,” he replied. “Of course you are.”

“Is it not meningitis?”

“What?”

“Louisa May Alcott’s last words.” Another author I’d never read but sometimes it wasn’t hard to memorize last words.

The Colonel didn’t seem interested in my “talent” just then. “You need to get up. Class starts in ten. We should have enough time to get there.”

I blew copiously into a wad of toilet tissue. It was weak and flimsy and didn’t do much of anything, except that I didn’t feel the overwhelming urge to sniffle just then. “I’m not going to class,” I tried to explain to him. He just didn’t seem to get it. If he could feel what I did, the full, throbbing head and the itchy, ticklish nose and the scratchy, hot throat… he wouldn’t want to go to class either.

But he answered with, “Right. But I gotta drag you over to the health center and get back in time for my class. Can’t have students calling their roommates in sick; you have to make an appearance and get a note if you want to skip when you’re sick. I won’t have time to get you there unless we leave now. Good thing is,” he said, pulling back the covers, “You’re already dressed.”

I knew that outside this room there would be a hundred kids heading to classes or coming back from the cafeteria, none of which had slept in their clothes and none of which had a terrible, rotten, awful head cold compromising them. But I still found myself hugging the toilet paper roll to my chest as the Colonel forced me into my sneakers and ushered me out the door. If my luck held, we’d run right into Alaska, who would surely declare me the most pathetic thing she’d ever seen and never want anything more to do with me.

But we didn’t. And the walk to the health center was quick and virtually painless. We passed a few students I recognized—weekday warriors among them—but the sense of humiliation I felt was actually quite low in the end.

“This is Miles Halter.” The Colonel leaned against the counter at the health center. “He’s sick and I’m going.”

I sat in a bright yellow plastic bucket seat for fifteen minutes before they let me in. I shuffled inside with my pockets bulging from used toilet paper. They did all the routine things: checked my weight, my blood pressure, my temperature. But every time the nurse came with me with a tongue depressor, I got the urge to sneeze. “hah-hahTIShhhh!” I couldn’t help it, but I think it was pissing the nurse off a little. She would stand there, waiting for me to finish sneezing and blowing my nose, tongue depressor in hand. Then, as soon as she told me to open my mouth and I tried to take a breath through my nose stuffed-up nose, the breath would tickle and I’d sneeze again. “hahhTchooo!” Finally, the nurse gave up, scribbled something on my chart, and told me the doctor would see me soon.

For ten long minutes, I resisted the urge to lie back on the table. Those strips of paper covering the table weren’t anything as comfortable as my sheets back in the room, but I felt dizzy sitting up and my nose wouldn’t stop dripping. I could have made it a couple minutes, maybe even a handful of minutes. But after ten, I gave up and fell backward, lying down and closing my eyes. Dark bliss washed over me. There was a throbbing in my sinuses as they tried to adjust to my new horizontal orientation.

“Mr. Halter?”

I groaned inwardly and, with great effort, forced myself to sit back up. The doctor could have been older than almost all of my professors. I knew at once he wasn’t the kind of guy you could pull anything over on. He’d done this for so many years he’d be able to tell when a kid was faking to get out of taking a test. He didn’t have the presence of some kindly old, small town doctor either. He seemed annoyed to be called upon for something as trivial as a head cold. “Nurse tells me you can’t stop sneezing long enough for her to look at you.”

“Sorry.”

“Hold your breath, kid.” He stuck the tongue depressor in, pressed onto my tongue. “Say ‘Ahhh’.”

I managed it. I didn’t sneeze. At least, I didn’t until after he’d pulled the tongue depressor out and nudged a box of tissues close to me.

“hah-Tishoo! ahhChoo! Hahshooo!” I blew my nose about a dozen times. It was already starting to hurt when I touched it.

When I finished and opened my eyes, the doctor was standing there with a ziplock baggie. “Decongestants, VapoRub, Cough Drops, Nasal Spray, and tissues. Take one pill every eight hours, take the rest as often as you need. If you don’t get better in a couple days, I want to see you back here. You okay to get to your room?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t remember the direction we’d gone, but the campus wasn’t that big and I was somewhat familiar with it by now.

 It took me about twice as long to find my way back, but only a second to flop down on my bed, glad I had the lower bunk. I pretty much passed right out and didn’t wake up the rest of the day.

*

“You should eat something,” the Colonel tried reasoning with me after I told him I wasn’t hungry. “If you don’t have dinner, you’ll lose some of that pudginess, Pudge. You’ll waste away to nothing.” I was even less hungry after the threat.

I saw him pull a cigarette out of a pack and head toward the bathroom. Was he worried about me? Was something else going on? He stuck his head out and gestured for me to join him by tilting it back toward the bathroom. I heard the shower running and I stumbled over, slipping inside. The hot water was on full, but the shower wasn’t effective enough to do much. The steam helped though, even as I coughed and snuffled into some of my newly acquired tissues. I felt a bit clearer, and when I spoke, I didn’t sound all that stuffed-up at all. “Put out the bloody cigarette.”

He looked at me quizzically and took a long drag.

“Saki, an officer during World War I. He didn’t want the Germans to see the smoke but he said it too loud and got shot by a German sniper.”

The Colonel laughed and didn’t put out his cigarette.

“Thanks for dragging me to the health center this morning. You didn’t have to.”

“Sucks to be sick,” he said with a shrug. “You want me to smuggle something out of the cafeteria for you?”

I nodded. I still wasn’t hungry, but the gesture was what was important and I could probably force down anything short of a buffrito.

“Okay, but rule number one about being sick here is that you don’t repay my kindnesses by getting me sick. Understand?”

I nodded again and tried to hold my breath. But the steam made my nose run and rubbing at it made it tickle. And before I knew it, I was caught up in a sneezing fit and being led by the arm back to bed. “hatchhh! Hah-Atchoo! Hahshoo! Heh-huh-Hahshoo!”

I tried to stay awake until the Colonel got back. As you might suspect, plenty of famous last words had to do with sleep, and they were all running through my head as I sat down on the couch—everything from J. M. Barrie’s “I can’t sleep” to Byron’s “Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight.” More writers. I started to drift off.

There was a knock on the door. It couldn’t be the Colonel, and if it were a band of people about to barge in and throw me in the lake again, they wouldn’t knock. Heck, an angry pitchfork mob probably wouldn’t knock either, I reasoned, so it was most likely someone friendly.

I just hadn’t expected it to be Alaska. She looked me over from head to toe, frowned, and said, “You look awful.”

I walked back to the couch and sat back down, pulling the tissue box onto my lap. I sniffed and rubbed my nose, trying not to look worse than awful. Because I felt worse than awful.

“I’ve got some whiskey. That might help. Want me to get it?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll get it anyway.” But she sat down on the arm of the couch. It was loose and wobbled, but her balance was superb. “Are you planning on missing class tomorrow too?”

I shrugged. “Prob... probably. hatChihhh!”

She pulled a book out of her bag and held it out at arm’s length. “If you don’t feel like doing homework, you might feel up to reading.”

“Are you sure you want to give it to me? I’m all sick and germy.”

She handed it over. “Enjoy. And don’t worry. If I catch this from you, then I get a nice break from class. I’m not saying I don’t love class. There’s just a lot of other things I’d rather do. So it’s a potential win-win.”