As soon as Ben woke up, he knew something was wrong. First of all, it was a Sunday morning and his body had decided to wake him at five in the morning. Second, he was drenched, absolutely drenched, in sweat. His back and chest and even the insides of his legs were soaked and slippery. He rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, where he pulled off his boxers and T-shirt and mopped himself off with a hand towel. He fumbled around in the medicine cabinet, wiping his palms off twice before getting the child safety lock off the container of ibuprofen. He swallowed two pills with a handful of water before staggering back down the hall and crashing into his bed.
He woke up hours later to his mother’s cool hand on his shoulder. “Ben?” He could hear her, but her voice was fuzzy, distant. He clawed around on the nightstand for his hearing aids. He felt his mom place them in his hand. He slipped them in, but when he tried to open his eyes the world felt too bright to look at. He pulled the covers up over his head.
“Too early,” he groaned.
“It’s three in the afternoon, Ben. Did you go back out last night? I thought I heard you go to bed, but Dad and I went out to Home Depot this morning and you were still out cold.”
“No, I didn’t go out,” he said. “I think maybe I’m sick.”
Mom’s cool hand snaked underneath the covers and found his forehead. Her hand was so blissfully cool. He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to become the hand, to live in the place where flesh was cool and comfortable. His own felt stretched and stiff and sore. “Jesus! Dan,” his mom yelled, “get the thermometer!”
A few seconds later he heard the door open again. “What’s going on, buddy?”
“It’s just a fever, Dad. I took some ibuprofen or something. I just need to sleep some more and then I’ll be fine.” But he wasn’t even convincing himself and was a tiny bit relieved to feel his mother push the rubber core of the digital thermometer to his temple. Both his parents stood over him. He could feel their anticipation like he imagined he could feel the digital pulse of the thermometer measuring the speed at which the atoms of his skin were moving and translating that into a numerical measurement of heat. It beeped.
“104,” his mom said. “When did you take the ibuprofen?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “Early.” Mom pressed a few more pills into his hand, which he downed with a glass of the most incredibly cool and delicious water.
“Can you eat anything?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I just want to sleep.” As he drifted back into slumber, he could feel the worried whispers of his parents outside the door. He slept through the rest of the day and most of Monday.
Monday afternoon, his mom bundled him into his track pants and his soccer sweatshirt and hustled him out to a pre-warmed car. He slept most of the way to the doctor’s office. The doctor’s waiting room was so bright, and the primary colors and burbling fish tank seemed like instruments of torture rather than cute throwbacks to his childhood. “How old do you have to be before you can get a real doctor?” he grumbled in the waiting room.
When the nurse called his name, he stood and shot a backwards glance at his mother when she tried to follow him. “I got this,” he said.
“Well, just make sure he doesn’t tell you it’s a cold virus. I really don’t think it’s a cold.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Dr. Ellsworth’s exam was quick and painless. At one point, Ben almost nodded off as the doctor listened to his chest and felt his lymph nodes. “It could be a virus, Ben,” he said. “But we’ll have you do the blood draw for mono just to be sure. There’s a lot of nasty stuff going around right now.”
“My mom made me come in.”
Dr. Ellsworth smiled. “That’s pretty common.”
The test came back positive for mono, and after briefly researching the topic online, Ben realized he was completely screwed. He had to get extensions on all of his semester finals, and he was bedbound for a week and housebound for another.
During that first week, whole days seemed to pass in a blink and then two hours might crawl by in infinitesimal increments—the approximate length of commercials on the low-budget cable channels. Ben floated in and out of consciousness, getting so bored with TV that he tried to read, but he found it too draining and the words began to undulate on the pages. On one semi-lucid afternoon, Tyler stopped by and sat at the end of his bed.
“Your mom said as long as we don’t make out I can’t get it,” he joked.
“I’m not really in the mood anyway,” Ben said. He lay there while Tyler told him about some random gossip at school. Apparently one of the Driver’s Ed teachers was arrested for peeping in windows.
“Perv,” Ben said.
“Yeah,” Tyler agreed.
“What have you been up to?”
Tyler shrugged. He looked almost self-conscious. “Not much. Hanging out with Megan a lot, I guess.”
“Huh,” Ben said. He watched the afternoon light sparkle on the wall above his bed. He was pretty sure he was hallucinating at least part of it. “Do you love her?” He wasn’t even sure the words had come from his mouth. It seemed he could see them in the air like the specks of light against his wall.
Tyler made a choking sound and then gave a small, constrained laugh. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “How do you know?” He felt like the words were just floating out of his mouth on their own.
“I don’t know. I don’t feel that way about her. Not like—”
Tyler paused. Ben looked at Tyler, taking in without discomfort how uncomfortable Tyler looked.
“Not like Jer, or you.” He was quiet for a minute. “That’s weird, right? Those are the only examples I can think of.”
“Not weird,” Ben said. He shook his head and closed his eyes against the spinning sensation it produced.
“I can’t ever imagine her knowing me like you do. Is that gay?”
Ben shrugged. He wasn’t really sure what Tyler was so afraid of. What did he really have to worry about? The more anyone got to know Tyler Nuson, the more they loved him. “It’s okay to have flaws,” he said, thinking of his hearing. He felt a bit angry being the one to explain this to Tyler, who seemed to have none of his own. But Tyler didn’t pick up on his tone. There was more Ben wanted to say. More he thought he probably should say if he were a really good friend. But he was so tired. He let his eyes flutter shut. When he opened them again, it was dusk and Tyler was gone.