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I glared at him, ignoring the sudden uptick in my heartbeat.

“Shove off, little brother,” Cameron reminded him with a laugh. She was rewarded with a scowl. She flicked her fingers at him, as if he were nothing more than an annoying drop of water on her fingers. “Go on, shoo.”

Andrew sauntered off. I watched him go.

“Maggie?” Cameron blinked at me. “Are you okay? You had a weird look on your face…”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. But I wasn’t. And Andrew was only the least of it. I stuffed the last of my pizza in my mouth and stood up, swinging my backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go,” I said abruptly.

Cameron looked at her half-spaghetti and tilted her head a little, considering whether it was worth it to protest. Then she shrugged and grabbed the apple from the tray, discarding the rest.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“I dunno. I just want to walk around.” “Well, I need to go to the bathroom,” Cameron retorted.

I rolled my eyes.”Let’s go.” We turned through the courtyard and slipped through the mass of people that were ever-present in the grassy lawn that sprawled across the back of the school, between the parking lot and the first brick classrooms. Cameron, lankier than me, led the way, squeezing through closing gaps and turning on her heel to duck between people. I was shorter, and struggled to keep up. My dark hair chose this moment to be a bother and kept spilling across my eyes. I brushed it away. It sprang back, as if intent on getting me lost in this sea of people. When I looked up again, Cameron was gone. I scanned around for Cameron’s light brown hair, brown backpack. I became aware of the light, the sun pained me, and a pounding headache struck needles at my head. No, no, not here, not now, I thought, desperately scanning for Cameron. As brown and purple dotted my vision, Cameron emerged at my side.

“Come on, let’s go.”

“What about your bathroom break?” I felt the words slide out of my mouth slightly jumbled.

“I already went.”

“What?” I tried to pick out something, anything, from the world that was spinning before me. All
I could feel was the sun; heat pressing onto me skull; light lancing into my eyes. “Already?” I
mumbled blearily.

“Yeah…you were standing there for at least five minutes. I thought you were right behind me.” Cameron turned to look at me. In the same instant, heat crashed through my body. Cameron flinched and jumped back, knocking into a blond, pig tailed girl.

“Oh, sorry, Tammy,” Cameron mumbled hastily.

“S’ok,” Tammy replied, more out of habit than forgiveness. I watched her blue eyes as they saw me curled up on the pavement, and Cameron disheveled and flustered. Then she shrugged – stranger things had happened before – and turned back to the conversation. Cameron shook me to consciousness. “Are you okay?” she hissed, for what must have been the third time that day.

I blinked my eyes slowly, trying to bring a sense of coherency to my current situation. “What happened?”

Cameron relaxed slightly. “You fell asleep. Maybe this is what it’s all about. You’re just getting migraines and spacing out and fainting of lack of sleep. You need to go to bed earlier tonight.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Cameron sighed. “No. You need to tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know what’s going on! I was fine last week but now…” I knuckled my forehead, trying to ease the throbbing.

“Then we need to find out.” But the bell rang, drowning out any further discussion.