The Crowded Lecture Hall

The blue book lay open on Luther’s fold out left-handed desk. He used his right hand to write. Nearly every seat in the lecture hall contained a student. The class? British Literature. The topic? Donne’s poem “The Relic.” The essay prompt? Describe the use of language in the poem. Luther’s essay? He wrote that Donne really hoped someone would come out to the graveyard he was buried in to dig up his grave. He wrote that Donne was really posing a dare to the reader, to open his casket, to see if there really were two skeletons, in a lover’s embrace, in death. Luther had taken three pills of Aderol before the exam.
He became aware of an unfamiliar pain in his neck. It was located near the bottom of the back of his neck, where the neck hit the spinal cord, at the cervical vertebrae. As he turned to his right, in an attempt to stretch, or crack the pain out, he saw Penelope sitting in the seat next to him. She put her finger to her lips. She closed her blue book and covered it coyly with her elbow. She told him there was no cheating, no copying her essay ideas.
Luther woke up and looked at the clock. It was 10:30 AM. He flipped his sheet off, from right to left. Then he placed his right foot on the floor, followed by his left. As he stood up to a fully erect position, the pain at his cervical vertebrae made its presence known once more. He leaned and held his torso as far to the right and as far to the left as he could, in an attempt to mitigate the stress that had unexpectedly and very noticeably introduced itself to his neck.
After all of his stretching, his neck felt slightly better, but the strangely acute feeling of the pain persisted. It did not hamper his movements. It did not debilitate his nerve endings. He was not in agony, but he was very conscious of the pain, and it helped to make him feel that the rest of that Saturday was destined to be a very bad day. He thought that smoking a bowl would take some of the edge off his pain. He walked into his living room and opened up the cabinet in the table next to his couch and took out his bong. He put on the Hold Steady album Separation Sunday and smoked and took a bong rip when Craig Finn sang “And she said there’s gonna come a time, when I’m gonna have to go, with whoever’s gonna get me the highest,” and then when he sang “Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick, but after I get sick I just get sad, cause it burns being broke, hurts to be heartbroken and always being both must be a drag.” When he stood up again, he was laughing. Then he noticed the pain again. A wild rush of thoughts breezed through his chemically-altered mind and he decided that the pain was a sure sign of spinal meningitis. He had heard that it only took twenty-four hours to kill whoever had contracted it. He decided that he would do everything he would ever want to do in the last twenty-four hours of his life.
He was glad it was all going to be over soon.