Chasing Orion Read Free Page B

could live with that. It was the second definition that always got me: “an unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness or discomfort.” Now I ask you, what in Sam Hill is that? I felt mentally uneasy about twenty times a day, especially with the thought of going to a new school where I had zero friends.
    I was very malaised. Sometimes I got so malaised that I really wanted to get in an ambulance and go straight to Saint Vincent’s. But what if I only came in with malaise and not the rest of it, the phase two stuff, like difficulty swallowing? A nasal voice (that seemed very weird to me. Bugs Bunny has a nasal voice, for crying out loud). I could imagine the nurse or doctor saying to me, “What hurts?” or, “What are your symptoms?” and I would say, “Malaise, real bad malaise.” Where do they go from there? It would be kind of embarrassing if I didn’t have polio. So the question was, how long would I suffer from malaise before I’d turn myself in? Or would I die of embarrassment? Truly terminal embarrassment, I thought.
    The other symptoms of phase two were easy to check for. Stiff neck, muscle pain, high fever. I did this now as I read the list, which I didn’t really have to read, because after reading it for two years, I had memorized it.
    But it was hard now to read these symptoms without thinking of the girl next door. I wondered how it had been with her. What had she actually felt? Headache? Mild fever? Most of all I wondered how she caught it — at a swimming pool? A movie theater? To me the scariest thing about polio was that you never knew who had the live germs until it was too late. By the time someone had the disease and you knew that person was sick, the actual germ could no longer be transmitted. But that didn’t mean that the sick person recovered, not the way a sick person did from, say, the flu. Those people recovered completely and went on to live their lives. Not the same with polio. Yes, some did recover, but for a lot of people who had polio, their lives were changed forever because the germ attacked the nerves in their spinal cord so they couldn’t breathe on their own, or it might paralyze their legs. In the beginning they called it “infantile paralysis.” They thought only babies got it. Not now. Anyone could get it. But oddly enough, I could not get it from the girl next door. She was no longer infectious. The germ had died in her and left her body as some kind of wrecked monument.
    It was too depressing to think about, but I have to admit I had a kind of morbid curiosity. I wanted to meet her in the worst way. I was just tired of reading about polio, seeing the pictures in the paper, hearing the warnings on the news. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most famous polio victim ever. He became president. But he had never been in an iron lung, just a wheelchair. Still, he’d accomplished an awful lot. I didn’t think this girl — this Phyllis — would have a chance at anything. A woman in an iron lung, president? Ha! Then I felt really terrible. I shouldn’t have made a joke. It wasn’t a real joke. I guess it was a desperate joke. Still kind of mean.
    I had had enough of reading about polio symptoms, so I flipped to the movie section.
    “Omigod! Emmett, you’re not going to believe this!” I yelled out.
    “What?” he called from his bedroom.
    “
Mrs. Randolph’s Brain
is opening at the Vogue Theater.”
    He was in my room in a flash. “You’re kidding!”
    I shook my head slowly. “Nooooo.”
    “Ah, crap.”
    “You’ll sneak out, won’t you? You’ll go with the guys from the basketball team.” I shook my head again. It seemed so unfair. Emmett had a car. He had freedom. Teenagers could do anything, or at least a lot that their parents wouldn’t ever find out about. But eleven-year-olds? It was too pathetic to even think about.
    Emmett picked up the paper and started reading the review. “Rose Belton gives a subtle performance as Vivian Randolph, a Nobel