Time frame: Several weeks before the outbreak
POV: Ellis
Main event: No idea why he's mad.
Did I ever tell y'all about the time that Keith was mad at me and he didn't know why?
I show up at his house one day, because my mom skipped goin to work because she had a migraine. Since I was doin band practice, my house was off-limits. I didn't want the noise to hurt my mom's head, so I told her to call me home if she needed anything at all and off I went.
When I got there, Dave and Scott and Kale were already in the garage and Keith comes in from the house, takes one look at me and heaves this big sigh. It confused me, because he sounded mad. I was thinkin, "If seein me makes you mad somehow, why the hell did ya invite me to your house?" But I let it go, and as we practiced, he tried to ignore me as much as he could, not including me in anything. If we talked at all, he had this odd tone in in his voice that came off as real nasty.
So I called him out on it eventually and I was like, "Buddy are you mad about somethin?" He tells me that I know what I did, and really I didn't, so I told him I had no idea why he was mad. I had to press the guy for several minutes and he finally admits that he don't have any idea why he's mad, but he is.
"Keith," I sigh, "if you don't know what I did to make you this mad at me, isn't it possible that you had another seizure and made up the whole thing in your head? Maybe nothing happened, hm?"
"Oh no," He is insisting, "no way, boy. You did somethin. Aw, you DID. DO. SOMETHIN. I got heartburn and I never get heartburn unless I'm pissed off at you."
I point out that he gets heartburn when he drinks too much hard alcohol, eats anything with tomato in it, sleeps on his stomach, yells too loud, gets into a car accident, goes campin, goes huntin, smells fish for too long, or cooks over a hot stove/fire.
He starts to get even more mad, and accuses me of makin all that up on the spot just to make him feel stupid and I really did not do that. All of those are reasons why he gets heartburn. But we don't argue about it for too long, because he starts to lose motor function after about 10 minutes and I can tell he's gonna have a seizure. He gets this far away look on his face and his head lowers. So I just get him to lay down in the yard real careful and wait until the guy has his seizure only a couple of minutes later. I was the one what went with him to the doctor when this started happenin so the doc actually told me what to do for him instead of his family. All our friends were gone by then and I do what the doc says and protect his head.
I didn't have anything to support him with so I just held his head loosely on my lap and waited til he was done thrashin around. I went through this with him several times before and when he came back together, he didn't remember bein mad at me in the least.