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Figuring on at least one day of procrastination left me with basically tomorrow to cram in the great vacation I had planned. I needed to get out of my parents’ house right away.

My mother came in my room with a breakfast tray and unaccountably agreed. I should have known something was up when she further announced that she had taken the morning off from her frighteningly successful real estate business to take me home. (She could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, as the saying goes, though frankly she would never waste her time with something so low commission.) She even helped me pack.

I dozed in the car, awakening when she shut off the engine to the facade of a building I’d never seen before. I blinked. “This is not my apartment,” I said brilliantly.

“I made an appointment with Dr. Nagata for your face.”

I opened my mouth automatically to protest her highhandedness, but the words never came out. I was worried about my skin, too. It hadn’t cleared up and the red scaly rash had spread to my hands and neck. It was spreading so fast I could swear it had gotten worse in the car.

After a careful examination, and a bunch of tests to which I was too tired to pay any more than the vaguest attention, Dr. Nagata ordered me to stand outside on the sunny landing. He stood with me, watching my face and his watch with equal concentration. “Umm, hmm,” he concluded after a couple of minutes. “Just as I thought.” He escorted me back into the private room and bade me sit.

Regarding me over his half glasses with that stern compassion doctors do so well, he told me the problem, explaining the results and implications of all the tests he’d done.

He misread my blank, disbelieving stare as confusion and added, “What it boils down to, Jo, is you have become allergic to the sun.”

“Oh, no,” my mother said. Yes, of course she had insinuated herself into the room with me. “You mean like that poor little girl on
60 Minutes
who can’t go out in the sun or she’ll die?”

What?
What kind of designer quack had my mother taken me to? Was he even a real doctor?
Allergic to the sun
, I mean, really! “I’ve gone out in the sun my entire life,” I said, “and have never had a problem before. ‘Allergic to the sun’ seems a little extreme. Are you sure it’s not a simple allergic reaction to my face lotion or some sort of side effect of my flu? The problem
is
coincident with my cold, and it’s not only my skin that has been affected. My vision has been a little blurry too.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “In fact, it might be the other way around. The flu symptoms you had might have been your body’s way of responding to the allergy, and I’m not surprised your vision is a little blurry. After all, the cells covering your eyes would be sensitive to the sun’s rays as well.”

At my mother’s gasp, the doctor paused and turned toward her, as if to offer support. My mother has that effect on men, but their instinctive efforts to prop her up are completely unnecessary. If anyone can take care of herself, it’s my mother.

I must have made some sort of noise, for the doctor turned back to me and said, “I realize it sounds odd. Frankly I’m a little hesitant in calling it a sun allergy, because as you said, it’s rare, it’s unlikely, and to be frank, it’s rather unheard of for someone to develop it so late in life. But as Holmes said, ‘Once the other stuff has been ruled out, whatever’s left, however unlikely, is the answer.’”

Evidently, the good doctor couldn’t make it as an English professor and had gone into medicine instead. As my mother and I sat silently contemplating my sunless future in respective states of horror and denial, he spelled out the rules, which boiled down to no exposure to the sun, not even through a window.

“You’re kidding, right?” I burst out. “How am I supposed to get around? Wear a ski mask in the car? What about my job? There’s not a room in the school that doesn’t have some light coming in through the windows.”

Dr. Nagata listened patiently to my whining, even venturing an opinion that yes, the ski mask wouldn’t be a bad idea so long as I wore a really good sunscreen under it, though he would supply me with something a little better. He went to a supply closet in the corner of the room and after a few minutes’ rummaging returned with a small, clear package containing something beige and squashy.

My mother poked suspiciously at the lump of cloth. “What is that?” she asked, curling her lip in disdain.

“It’s a top of the line face mask. Lightweight, stretchy, molds instantly to any face shape, and best of all, it’s rated SPF 75,” he said, beaming as if he’d pulled out the cure for cancer. “You’ll need to wear it any time you’re outdoors during daylight hours (though, of course, it would be best if you avoided daylight altogether), and any time you’re in a sunny room.”

“So—all the time?” I said.

My mother looked horrified. “Surely, she can get away with sunscreen when she’s inside.”

“Well, now.” He spoke jovially, as if all we needed was little perspective. “I suppose it’s not really necessary once the sun goes down. And if you’re in a dark room during the day, a high SPF would probably be sufficient, but I think you’ll find the mask so comfortable, you’ll wear it all the time. I think it’s really rather sharp.”

He took our silence for agreement, but my mother and I were just too appalled to contradict him. He wrote me a prescription for some seriously heavy-duty sunblock and another for something to soothe my skin. He also gave me a note for the headmaster explaining my new “disability”, and advised me to use copious amounts of aloe, and then his nurse herded us out the door.

I spent the rest of the day alternating between freaking out and total denial, before surrendering to the common denominator—self-pity. I hate to admit it, but as I discovered to my great shame that afternoon, I am weaker—and more concerned with my appearance—than I’d ever thought I would be. My mother had rubbed off on me.

I was so upset I had to go out for emergency fries. I ordered a double bacon cheeseburger to go with them and ate every scrap. Then I went home and worked my way through about a pound of chocolate.

About the time I reached for the mint chip ice cream, I began to feel claustrophobic, probably from being so fat in such a small apartment, and forced myself to go out for a walk. I didn’t care that it was after nine at night. In fact, I almost wished someone would put me out of my misery by sticking a knife in my back or shoving me under the wheels of a truck.

Questions without answers shot though my mind again and again. How would I live? With these insane restrictions, I didn’t know if I could keep teaching. How had this happened? Why me? I hadn’t wanted to say anything to Dr. Nagata in front of my mother, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the emergency room doctors might have missed something. Maybe I had a rare disease they hadn’t tested for! Maybe Will
had
infected me with something. It was a little science fictiony urban myth, but maybe he hadn’t bitten me out of misplaced lust or lame Goth fantasies; maybe he had some disease that made him bite me
and
could explain my sun allergy…like some mutated form of rabies! I don’t think the emergency room had tested me for anything like
that
. Did I need to go back? Had I been unusually thirsty lately? I made a mental note to look up the symptoms of rabies and to do a full Internet search on obscure diseases. Will had an accent—he must have traveled around a bit. Maybe he’d picked up something in some dark corner of a forgotten forest in Eastern Europe. Been bitten by some insect or animal—wasn’t that kind of how AIDS had started?

As my thoughts got weirder and more absurd, I walked faster and faster, fueled by anxiety and my umpteen-thousand calorie snack. I walked at warp speed for over an hour, not paying much attention where I went.

Once or twice I thought I heard footsteps behind me but I didn’t see anyone when I turned to look. Frankly, I didn’t much care if someone accosted me. I almost relished the thought of taking out my stress on someone fool enough to tangle with a well-sugared woman on the edge.

By the time I’d circled back and my apartment was nearly in sight, I was exhausted. I hadn’t fully recovered from the flu and this was far more exercise than I’d gotten in the last seven days combined, but my freakout was over. I had come to terms with Dr. Nagata’s diagnosis and no longer felt the need to research every disease in the world in an attempt to prove him wrong. All I wanted to do now was crawl into my bed and go to sleep.

I was about to turn down my street when I noticed a small, dark car cross an intersection a couple blocks up. I couldn’t be sure of the car’s color, but I was pretty sure it had a bike rack on the roof.

Gavin?

The car had had its right turn signal on and would drive right past me, up on the next block. My fatigue was forgotten. I made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and ran up a side street for a closer look at the car, but I hadn’t gotten more than halfway when the car whizzed by, little closer than it had been the first time.

“Damn!” I said when I could catch my breath.

I turned and headed home. It only took a few steps before I was sure the car had a bike rack. By the end of the block I had convinced myself it was Gavin’s car.

Was he stalking me?

I
had
worried about Gavin after I’d learned he’d lied to me about being a taxi driver, but only a little. With all that had happened lately, I hadn’t really given him much thought. I thought about him now.

He’d had the run of my apartment that night while I lay dead to the world in my bedroom. I hadn’t noticed anything missing, but for all I knew, he’d gone out and made copies of my keys. Maybe tonight he’d gone back in! As these chilling thoughts ran through my head, I became aware of my footsteps echoing loudly in the still, cool night air, like an auditory beacon for muggers and weirdoes. It wasn’t long before I had that strange feeling again of being followed. I picked up my pace.

I was only two blocks away from my apartment, but it might have well have been two miles. The quaint stucco houses and duplexes usually charmed me with their whimsical architecture. But tonight all I saw of the arches, recessed doorways and winding staircases were dark looming shadows large enough to hide a homicidal maniac
and
his chainsaw. I stepped off the sidewalk and walked down the middle of the empty street. Just in case.

As I passed the dark, silent alley behind my apartment building, my downstairs neighbor flicked the light on in his bathroom. Pale yellow beams radiated from his tiny opaque window into the alley, illuminating a small area near the dumpster. Something there caught my eye: a faint gleam of leather, as from a man’s shoe, moving smoothly and silently from the penumbra of light back into the shadows.

My heart thumped loudly in my chest and my mouth went dry. I wanted to run, but I knew I couldn’t risk it. I didn’t have enough of a head start. My only recourse was to act naturally, pretend I hadn’t seen anything, and hope whoever was hidden in the alley wanted to stay that way as much as I wanted them to.

I rounded the corner of my apartment building at a slow saunter and managed to get as far as the mailboxes before I gave in to panic and ran full tilt up the stairs to the second floor. I fumbled badly with the locks, turning the key in the wrong direction before I finally got the door open. Once inside, I slammed the deadbolt and latched the security chain that my dad had installed the day I moved in. Though I wanted nothing more than to run to hide behind my couch, I stayed by the door and tried to quiet my breathing as I listened for footsteps or breathing on the other side.

I couldn’t hear a thing. After a few minutes my heart stopped pounding as if it were trying to escape from my chest, and I got up the courage to peek around the edge of the blinds. I didn’t see anyone out there, but turning my back to the shadows
in
my apartment made the hair on the back of my neck stand out.
Was someone
in
my apartment?
Making as little noise as possible, I crept over to the chair where I had dumped my purse earlier, pulled out the cell phone and carefully dialed 9-1-1. Keeping my finger hovered over the
Send
button, I picked up the heavy flashlight I keep on my bookshelf in case the power ever goes out and went through my apartment.

I looked in every room and behind every door, checking every possible hiding place, including my tiny joke of a linen closet that has built-in shelves a mouse couldn’t stand on, and under my bed, as if someone could possibly have squeezed in with all the crap I store there. When I was finally satisfied I wasn’t harboring any murderers, I turned off the phone, put the flashlight back on the bookshelf and collapsed on the couch.

It was definitely time to bust out the mint chip ice cream.

“Are we watching a movie?” my students asked excitedly as they entered the classroom Monday morning after the holidays and saw the curtains drawn. It was a temporary solution to my problem, at best, as the ill-fitting, cracking curtains only blocked part of the light. Don’t ask me what they were made of. Plastic? Polyurethane? Old toilet paper rolls and kindergarten paste? I wasn’t sure what I would do when lunchtime rolled around and direct sun came streaming in through the gaps.

That’s denial speaking—I’d have to wear the mask, of course. I just didn’t want to.

“No, we are
not
watching a movie,” I said to the usual chorus of boos and whines. There was a brief moment of silence while I drummed up the nerve to tell them about my sun allergy. I took a deep breath, blocked off my emotions as best I could, and threw myself to the wolves. The response was overwhelming. I’d never seen my students so excited inside the classroom.

“No, I am not the elephant man.”

“Yes, I do have to wear that mask on my desk when I go out during the day.”

“No, I am not planning a new career as burglar, but that’s a very good idea and I certainly will consider it.”

“Yes, the test will still be on Friday.”