Page 23 of What You Wish For

Fine. I’ll just say it. I have epilepsy.

Mild epilepsy.

A touch of epilepsy.

Just enough to know for sure, as I sat there and felt all the sensations inside my body, that I was having an aura.

Which is actually a type of seizure in itself—it just doesn’t feel like one.

I felt the nausea gather in my stomach like storm clouds. I sat upa little straighter and I pushed back my chair from the table an inch or two.

Alice noticed. “You okay?”

“I just feel a little… off,” I said.

“Are you having an aura?”

Alice was one of the very few people who knew.

I made an O with my lips and blew out a controlled, frustrated sigh, and said, “Probably.” LikeOf course. Of course this is happening.

Stress was a risk factor. Ironically.

I’d had it bad as a kid—really bad. Bad enough that my third-grade best friend had disinvited me from her birthday party after witnessing a particularly bad one in the cafeteria. Then it had gone away in middle school—and stayed gone for so long, I thought I was cured.

But then, not long after I moved here, it came back.

Just a mild case. Not bad, really, in the bigger picture. I tried to remember that. But just… the idea of it? The knowledge that it was back? That a seizurecouldhappen at any moment? Knowing that I wasn’t cured? That I was still the same person who might get uninvited to a sleepover?

It was enough to shift my whole conception of myself.

But that wasn’t something I talked about—ever, if I could help it. It was just something I carried around like a little ice cube of fear in my chest.

And so Alice attacked the symptoms over the cause. “Maybe you should start dating someone.”

“Dating someone?” I asked.

“You know. Preventatively.”

“Who?” I demanded. “Raymond the security guard?”

“What about that guy in IT with the earlobe rings?”

“Earlobe rings are a deal-breaker for me.”

“What about that guy Bruce who does tutoring?”

“He’s married to the girl who runs the coffee shop on Post Office Street.”

“Didn’t the new fifth-grade science teacher just get divorced?”

“Oh, my God, Alice!” I shrieked. “He’s, like,forty!”

Alice didn’t endorse the hysterics. “You’ll be forty someday.”

“Intwelve years.”

“The point is,” Alice went on, “if you could just fall in love with somebody—anybody—real quick, then your heart would be too happy to care about any of this.”

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