Latest workshopped piece

The way I heard it, she got so hot that she couldn't feel her body aches any more. That's when her trouble started: no aches meant no way to tell if the pain in the back of her neck was getting worse. Fearing that she would overheat, her mother showered her half-conscious body and took her to the hospital. Her death was all over the news the next morning.

I woke up that morning as I always did and my mom got me ready for school,her hands still shiny from the splattered grease of the breakfast she had just made. Back then I couldn't understand the news so my mom had to break it to me on the way to school. Somebody died, somebody my sister knew well, somebody she was friends with, best friends even. Tragic.
After taking role, my first grade teacher broke it to me even further.
"Today, another adolescent passed away of a disease that has been going around lately. Does anybody know what the name of it is?"
I felt good about myself because I knew the answer but decided to keep quiet. When no one answered she wrote on the chalkboard:

M E N I N G I T I S

"Meningitis," she explained. "It's an inflammation of spine right up here," she points, "at the top of the neck.
"It's claimed the life of a total of three people in the past few months. Does anybody know how you catch it?...Nobody? Well, it's a bug you catch the same way you would any cold or flu: sharing drinks, food, et cetera."
The word still meant nothing to me, meningitis, except that she had died of a ten-letter word. I would never see her again. Then again I never saw her in the first place, only in pictures much later. I would hear the word echoed many times over in the months to come, though. PSAs on the television showed parents how to check to see if their kids had meningitis:
"Slowly lift your [child's] head up, then drop it down to rest it on the top of your [child's] sternum."
The messages got so pervasive that they prompted my dad to say in a half-serious tone weeks later, "I think I might have meningitis," as he repeated the motions from TV.

My mom picked me up from school at noon, right before my sister's secondary school lets out. When we got there, no warning from my mom about how upset my sister would be could have prepared me for what I saw.
In the courtyard just beyond the gates sat my sister, surrounded by friends trying to comfort her. I learned later that one of them, Fernando, was finishing up an explanation of why he and others thought Sabrina, the name of the girl who died, didn't suffer that much.
A friend of Fernando's told him about an out-of-body experience he had when he nearly died from a motorcycle accident. Tragic. He said he saw the ambulance drivers pick him up and take him away. He also saw the doctors working to stabilize his condition. He saw himself lying unconscious for a long time afterwards. Some people wanted to believe that happened to Sabrina: that the heat made her body so numb that she didn't have to feel much of the pain, only witness it.
As I approached my sister I could tell she had been crying for a long time. After I hugged her, she tried to force a smile as hard as she could (and believe me she looked like she tried so hard). That's when I realized I'd never seen her so upset.
And I never have since. I never brought up Sabrina or meningitis again, in fear that it might make her cry again. I even got nervous several years later when a movie came out called "Sabrina," of which we saw a preview in a rented movie. After the preview I turned my head to her real slow to gauge her reaction. All she said was "Oh, Sabrina... what a nice name for a movie." That's the moment I realized she had made peace with her friend's death.
And the word "meningitis"? Well, I'm surprised it gained as much power over our lives as it did. Even today I catch myself from time to time, slowly raising my head upwards only to let it drop at the top of my chest.

-TM