Lance tried to sit up but was immediately overwhelmed with dizziness and nausea. He leaned forward and grabbed the trashcan that sat near his bed, and vomited convulsively into it.
When his stomach tired of trying to turn itself inside out and a tentative calm settled into his core, he released his hold on the soiled wastebasket and lay back down in his bed. Sleep nudged at his mind and pulled him closer. There was something he needed to check, but the urge was fading along with his vision. Soon the only sounds in the room were soft snores and the occasional rustle of clothing as he twitched in his sleep.
When he woke again, his window was a dark eye gazing out at the night dappled with stars. A full moon shone in the silence-filled room and coated everything with a silvery glow.
Lance breathed heavily as he looked about his room for the second time that day. Each object he inspected threw deep shadows and the only other illumination came from the horizontal slit at the bottom of his door.
He blinked several times and picked the cutting grains of sleep from the corners of his eyes. When his vision cleared, he sat on the edge of the bed, recalling the pain and dizziness that had assaulted him so viciously earlier in the day. At least he thought it was the same day, but for all he knew a week may have passed. He waited for over a minute for queasiness to rear its ugly head, surprised when none came. A thought sprung into his mind, and his eyes searched for the familiar shape of his notebook. He breathed out in relief when he saw it lying half on, half off his desk. He got to his feet and took several unsteady steps across the threshold until he was able to grasp the gold door handle.
A glow emanated from the kitchen at the end of the hall, and although the light was dim, Lance still squinted into it. His head felt as if it had been put in front of a semi’s tire and run over violently, but he continued to make his way toward the light.
When he entered the kitchen, his thoughts had cleared enough for worry, his ever-present friend, to settle into its regular place in the base of his stomach. The room was empty, as he had feared it would be. His mother wasn’t there. He had hoped she would be sitting at the far end of the table, maybe bruised and beaten, but there. Perhaps sipping out of her worn coffee cup that said in bold letters Dance in the rain, revel in the sun! But there was only silence that met him, unhindered in the small room.
Lance hobbled over to the entry, scanned it quickly, and made his way back down the hallway to his parents’ room. He reached out and grasped the knob, the memory of the last time he had entered their room floating to the surface of his mind.
He’d been doing almost the same thing that he was now, looking for his mother. He’d come home from school early, the trundling yellow bus that so often left him at the foot of their long drive over twenty minutes late had been sparsely populated that day. The stops had flown by until it was Lance’s turn to step down the three long steps onto the brown snow that coated the edge of the road.