"Lissa?" Jill tossed her purse in the corner as she walked into the apartment, her dark hair sticking to her forehead in the sweltering heat. She knew that it always irritated Lissa when she left her purse there, but at the moment, Jill wasn't all that interested in making Lissa happy. "Where the heck have you been?"
Not that Jill was completely furious with her friend. She'd managed to put up with Lissa's addiction to J-pop and Lissa had coped with Jill's love of cheesy Lifetime movies; they'd long ago gotten past the point where one or two little irritations could flare up into anything more. Which wasn't to say that Jill didn't want a damned good explanation on why Lissa had flaked out on her tonight. "Lissa, are you in here?" she called out as she turned the corner into the living room.
"There you are!" she said with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. Sure enough, Lissa was lounging in the easy chair, stripped down to her underwear and basking in the breeze from the new window fan they'd bought when the air conditioning went out yesterday. "Hey, what's the deal? I called the apartment twice and your cell three times. Remember? Dinner with the Glimmer Twins tonight, I was counting on you to provide moral support?"
Nothing. Lissa didn't chuckle at Jill's pet name for her oh-so-emo brother and his oh-so-emo girlfriend, she didn't muster a half-hearted defense at how they were Jill's family, not hers...she didn't even look in Jill's direction. She just sat there, staring out the window with a tiny little smile on her face.
"Lissa?" Jill called out again, a little softer and a lot more sympathetically. "Lissa, are you all right?" Jill started to worry a little as she took in the scene fully. Lissa didn't have her earbuds in; she wasn't listening to MP3s or anything. She didn't have the TV on--she hadn't even turned the lights on in the room. The only light coming in was from the neon sign above the twenty-four hour laundromat across the street. Even if that had been enough light to read by, Lissa didn't have a book in her hands.
"Lissa, this isn't funny," Jill said, approaching her slowly. The closer she got, the more worried she became. Lissa was breathing, at least; Jill could see her chest rising and falling slowly in the dim red light. Her eyes were open, but she didn't react to Jill at all. Jill saw now that Lissa wasn't just lounging in the easy chair; she was sprawled bonelessly into it, her whole body utterly limp. Her short blonde hair was matted to her head with sweat, as though she hadn't changed position in hours.
Jill put a hand on Lissa's shoulder and shook her gently. Her skin felt slightly cool and clammy to the touch. "Lissa, can you hear me?" she asked. "If you can hear me, say something."
Already, Jill was thinking ahead to the moment when she'd have to run to the phone and dial 911, but she tried one last time to grab her friend's attention. "Lissa," Jill said, grabbing both of her shoulders and pulling her half-way out of the chair to look her in the face, "snap out of it!" She was uncomfortably aware of the tinge of hysteria in her voice.
But thankfully, Lissa did exactly that. She blinked once, twice, then looked at Jill with a slightly dazed expression on her face. "Oh, hi," she said muzzily, the smile gradually fading from her lips. "I...I didn't hear you come in." She shivered, despite the heat, and looked around her in confusion. "Why's it so dark in here?"
Jill hadn't even realized just how tense she'd been until that tension snapped. She smacked Lissa on the shoulder and said, "Don't do that to me! Jeez, I thought you were dead or something."
"What are you talking about?" Lissa asked, a trace of hoarseness in her voice. "I'm fine, I'm just kind of thirsty, is all." She stood up, her legs shaking just a tiny bit as she did so. "Really," she said as she went into the kitchen, "I don't know what you're freaking out about. I just kind of zoned out a little, is all. It's not such a--omigod." She burst back into the living room. "It's nine-thirty!" she shouted.
Jill looked at her, still more than a little worried about her best friend. "Um, yeah," she said. "I was telling you that when I came in. You totally blew off dinner."
Lissa looked more than a little worried herself, now. "You don't understand!" she said. "Last I remember, it was a quarter after five! I lost four hours sitting there, Jill." She pointed at the chair, her finger trembling.
Jill took in the expression on Lissa's face and remembered the way she'd been sitting there, totally unresponsive to shouting or shaking. It wasn't hard to believe that she'd been like that all night before Jill walked in. "It's okay, Lissa," she said. "Just...calm down, and try to tell me what happened."
Lissa looked anything but calm. In fact, she was getting more agitated by the moment. "I was...I was getting ready to go," she said. "I'd just gotten out of the bathroom and I was about to hop in the shower, and I decided to plug in the fan before I left so that the apartment would be a little cooler when we got back." She looked back at the fan as she walked over to the chair. "And then I decided to sit down for a few seconds and cool off before I took a shower, so I wouldn't have to use lukewarm water."
"And I sat down just like this," she said, returning to her seat. Jill noticed that it was still damp with four hours' worth of sweat. "And I...felt nice. It was...the crystal...pretty, so..." Lissa trailed off into silence. Jill looked over at her. Once again, Lissa wore the same faint, distant smile on her face, and already her limbs were relaxing into that same utterly limp posture. She let out a tiny sigh as her breathing slowed. Her eyes locked into a vacant stare.