The nausea and vomiting went on and on. It even got worse. I was eating almost nothing and drinking just enough water to keep me from landing back in Emergency. Of course, I went back to the doctors, who ran about every test in their considerable arsenal until my stepmom’s money ran out. We had no insurance and had nearly depleted her bank account.
I began losing weight and grew paler every day over the next few months. All the color began to fade from my hair, leaving it a stark white. Even my eyes, which normally people remarked on for their unusual color—an odd kind of aquamarine—now just looked pale and sunken and an ugly shade of dull green. Like with swimming, my dreams began to shatter into more pieces than Humpty Dumpty after he’d fallen from the wall.
My father had been a single parent—originally from Greece, but after he met my stepmom, he moved to America for a better life. Funny, but I didn’t remember my mother or much of anything about living in Greece or the Greek Isles, just brief flashes of white sands and an achingly blue sky. My father said I was probably traumatized by my mother’s death. Our name, Theos, was Greek, or so I believed.
My dad was good to me, if a little distant, though he always saw to it I had everything I needed. Like for instance, after he moved us to America, he bought a pool. It was one of those above ground pools, and I’d been just a kid. We really couldn’t afford it. I remembered swimming in that thing every day, though, as a kid. The neighbors said we were “putting on airs.” Another strike against my dad, who wasn’t popular in the little narrow-minded town where we lived. I think it was because we were both so different.
My dad was really handsome and exotic looking, with black hair and green eyes. His eyes were like mine, only not with that weird shade of blue mixed in. He kind of stood out from everybody else in this small town like a sore thumb, and never really fit in. My stepmom went to church on Sunday, but she could never get him to go with her, another strike against him in that Bible Belt town.
Then when I was not quite twenty-one years old, my dad was killed in a weird car accident. He’d fallen asleep coming home one night from a late shift and hit a tree, and the police said he had died instantly. The weird part was that he was on the phone to my stepmom at the time of the crash. He had been talking to her and was wide awake, even joking about taking a long hot shower as soon as he got home. His death had been a terrible shock and it left a huge hole in our lives.
The next thing I knew, my stepmom started acting scared, and she pulled me out of the classes I’d been taking at the local junior college and took off with me in the new car we bought to go to Knoxville, Tennessee, a much larger city a few hundred miles away. She had relatives there and said she needed a change. We got a small apartment, and I started getting sick not long after.
My stepmom was nervous and said maybe it was because I wasn’t swimming every day, like my father insisted I needed to. She kept at me to go to the Y and continue my swimming—even got upset when I refused. She said she thought it would help me, but that was crazy. How could swimming every day possibly help? This was just after our trip to Tybee and I had become afraid of the water, even after a lifetime swimming. I didn’t feel well enough to go in the water anyway.
I had made myself a vow never to go back in the pool, and I was determined not to. I had developed a phobia about water that grew daily by leaps and bounds.
Meanwhile, my health was getting worse. There was my white hair then my skin which turned as gray as ashes. My eyes were sunken in my head. I thought I must have some kind of aggressive cancer or wasting disease, but the doctors couldn’t seem to find any problem.
And every day, my mother went hungry so she could buy medicine and food for me. It was intolerable, so I loaded myself in her car one day and drove to the State Unemployment office to see if I could find some kind of job.
That’s where I first met the “lovely” Dragon Lady.
On this particular morning, I was sitting at the Dragon Lady’s cubicle, so sick and weak from my unidentified disease I could barely hold up my head. I had been begging for some scrap of a job which I would no doubt be unable to perform if it called for much more than napping throughout the day. I glanced down at the job description the Dragon Lady had just handed me. It most definitely didn’t look like I’d be napping.
I hadn’t gotten far yet, but the job so far described a mansion of eleven-thousand-square-feet, so I’d venture a guess that nobody who worked at that house ever napped. Or slept. Or allowed deathly sick, wasting-away-to-nothing, hair white as snow weirdos to even walk past the huge metal gate protecting the big estate known as Magick Hill.
It was a stupid-ass name for no doubt stupid-ass rich fucks. In my opinion, the gate with the name on it in the picture she slid across to show me was both obnoxious and ostentatious. Overkill too, since their so-called sanctuary was located near Knoxville, which was a decent sized city, but not exactly a huge metropolis.
Pushing the paper holding the job information back across the desk to the Dragon woman, I sighed and weakly asked, “Is this some sort of sick joke?” I was so tired of my fucking life. Too sick to be employed and too stubborn to just go ahead and die already. “We both know I’m not qualified for whatever these rich folks need, so why even dangle this opportunity in front of me?”
She gave me the look she always did—no empathy and totally bored with having to assist with my job search. “The only joke here was that another agent must have slipped your resume into the stack I scanned and emailed to Mr. Magnus, the employer. If anything, I’m all too well aware of your…” she looked me up and down, “many shortcomings.”
“Dying isn’t a shortcoming,” I snapped. “Being ill in this country without healthcare is a fucking bitch. Try to at least pretend to have some empathy.” She merely pursed her orange lips. Her eyes didn’t soften at all.
Leaning forward, she said, “I get a bonus whenever I get a good match, Mr. Theos. Let’s be honest with each other…you aren’t going to be a good match for any employer. In other words—you are a waste of my time and this state’s resources. Facts are facts. It isn’t my fault you’re in this situation.” She shrugged. “Have they tested you for AIDS?”
I gasped and was completely shocked into silence. Surely I’d heard her wrong? Even as uncaring and politically incorrect as she’d been from our first meeting until now, I would never have thought she would actually say something so cruel and personal out loud.
Completely humiliated, I slowly turned my head to see that every eye in the room had fallen on me and Dragon-face.
“Why would you ask me such a thing?”
“Well, considering your…lifestyle, I thought the question was appropriate. If you have a diagnosis, I can get rid of your file and send you over to Medicaid.”
“My lifestyle?” I felt my face burn hot. With as much dignity as I could muster, I jerked up my backpack and grabbed my walking cane. When standing, I hobbled just a bit, but it was, all in all, graceful for me. “Yes, I’ve been tested. I appreciate your…concern. Have a good day.”
I needed to hustle—tears were threatening to fall, and wouldn’t that just be fucking peachy?
A strong hand wrapped around my upper arm, offering the additional strength I so badly needed but didn’t want. I intended to jerk away, but the grasp was firm—very firm. I glanced up, intending to give him a piece of my mind. I couldn’t stand pity, but for some reason my brain stopped connecting to my mouth. The guy was gorgeous. Tall. Dangerously good-looking—even wickedly so.
That was such a strange thought, I hesitated and let him hold onto my arm.
“Easy, Kailar,” he whispered softly. “I’ve got you.” He turned to Dragon-face, saying, “You think it would be a good idea to pack up your desk and leave this office immediately, don’t you?”
Dragon Face blinked her eyes rapidly, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him.
The handsome man was still talking. “You realize that no person deserves to be treated with the disrespect you’ve demonstrated today, so you’ve decided to find another job better suited to you. Maybe as a bill collector or with the IRS.”