Flash Fiction: Magic Fever

Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie had to read the blog’s title twice before she grasped the words, and two more times before she understood it. She glared at her phone, then closed the window and went to check CNN.

There it was. Suburbian Cheerleaders Attack Magic Fever Patient and Drink His Blood; A Deadly Fad Diet.

Marie skimmed the article.

Skinny girls hear that AHDS patients never gain weight. They kidnap a twelve-year-old boy from the projects, starve him because they read that AHDS patients are most infective when they’re stressed out, cut his neck open a few times, and drink him down as best they can. They get sick, convulse, then die, and the kid “recovers” in a psych ward.

“It’s a tragedy,” the article quoted one of the skinny girls teachers, “they were such bright, promising young women. Things like these wouldn’t happen if we didn’t push such unrealistic standards of beauty on our young girls.”

“Come on, you’re next.” Sho’s annoyed voice startled Marie away from her phone screen. “I don’t wanna be late to class again.”  

Marie shuffled to the nurse’s office, swallowing a comment about Sho knowing more math than their teacher anyway. It was hardly an insult. Another girl in their class once asked him if Virus X made him smart. 

“I was smart before I was sick,” Sho had told her, dark eyes not moving from his textbook, silencing the nasty giggles around them.

The school’s pale green hallways seemed narrower than ever as Marie navigated through her day, trying to strike a balance between looking down at her shoes like a mouse and glaring at everyone around her. Her eyes met their head cheerleader’s at the end of the day, and the striking blue gaze forced Marie to remember a picture of the young black boy who’d been tortured for days by cheerleaders worried that they were getting too heavy for the top of the pyramid. His sunken cheeks and hooded eyes had glared from the bottom of the article, right after the cheerleaders' teachers lamented about her bright student’s wasted life. 

Marie looked away from the head cheerleader and stepped out into the hot city summer. Her family had moved to the city a month after Marie was officially diagnosed with AHDS. She hated it. The cement streets absorbed sunlight and then spat it back up, until Marie felt like she was inside a pressure cooker. Trees were few and far in between, trapping the smog in the air that Marie had no choice but to inhale, though not breathing wouldn’t kill her permanently. The first few weeks, she’d cleaned huge, black boogers out of her nostrils every single night. Her sister Sarah, who didn’t have Virus X’s sentinels in her blood, got one of her eyelash follicles infected and clogged up. She needed a month’s worth of eyedrops.  

“Everyone was talking about those cheerleaders at school,” said Sarah that night. They shared a room because their dad couldn’t afford a big house in the city.

“Marie?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “At least they won’t get fat.”

Stupid girls they’d been, no matter what their teacher said. Out of 100,000 people infected with Virus X, 99,000 didn’t survive the first twenty-four hours. Of the remaining ten-thousand, nine-thousand didn’t survive the next twenty-four hours. Of the last thousand, nine hundred cleared the virus and became immune for life. And the last hundred . . . the last hundred never got fat, and maybe those were good enough odds for some people.

If Marie had been given a choice, she’d have risked getting fat.

Next day was the same as always. She got in line for her pills in front of the nurse's office, and she even remembered to stand behind Sho to avoid annoying him. Her classes were a daze, as usual, and the cafeteria food was staler than normal. Marie didn’t technically need food to taste good anymore, but there weren’t that many AHDS kids at her school. Did no one care about the healthy kids shoving grainy pizza down their throats?

Marie liked the small bathroom hidden behind the janitor’s lounge a few feet away from the cafeteria’s back entrance. Though it tended to get dusty, it never got stained by pee droplets from girls who were too afraid to sit on public toilet seats. The water at the sink never got warm, but it wasn’t like the cold could hurt Marie anymore.

A knife could, but only for a moment.

A moment was all the head cheerleader needed.

When Marie turned away from the sink, flapping her hands to help dry them, an arm slashed at her chest. Marie gasped, a scream trapped in her throat, and reached for her chest as she stumbled backwards. Sticky blood touched the pads of her wet fingers before she felt a brief flash of dull pain, then her skin started knitting close. 

Marie wiped her bloody hand on the white sink, gagging as though a little cut could hurt her. The sight of blood had always made her dizzy, and Virus X hadn’t cured her of that.

The cheerleader made a strange noise, forcing Marie to remember where the real danger was. She looked up, then stopped breathing when she caught the cheerleader’s hungry stare. The girl’s blue eyes, perfectly outlined by kohl, widened before she brought the stained knife up to her lip gloss-shiny lips. Marie tasted vile when the cheerleader’s tongue wiped her blood from the knife.

The cheerleader dropped the knife on the floor and whirled around, flying out of the bathroom like there were hyenas on her heel.

Marie stared at the knife, then at the mirror over the sink. A red stripe had bloomed in the center of her chest, highlighting how small her breasts were. The cheerleader’s looked bigger, so she wouldn’t have to worry about looking like a kid forever on the very slim possibility she caught Virus X, survived, and then became a vamp.

Marie zipped up her sweater and went about her day.

~~~

This is another of my very early stories. The theme of a magic disease plays a big part in the novel I'm working on now, though it's completely different than what I imagined here.