Kissing Disease

The first day, it was just an item on Carrie's news feed. She was riding to school, taking advantage of the free wi-fi on the bus and the twenty-five minute commute to campus to check up on her social media, and one of her friends posted it to their page with the comment, "Dang, Nebraska! Smooch much?"

Cassie clicked on the link, and an article popped up with the headline, 'New Strain Of Mononucleosis Hits Nebraska Town'. She scrolled down, more because the article was small than because it was interesting. "Valentine, Nebraska," it said, "has recently earned a little unwanted fame due to an outbreak of a new strain of mononucleosis that has affected as many as 1,100 out of its population of 2,737. The town, best known for the special postmarks it places on Valentine's Day envelopes, first began reporting cases last week.

"CDC officials in Atlanta have stated there is no cause for concern-although the strain does appear to be affecting adults who have previously been exposed to the Epstein-Barr virus, the symptoms seem to be relatively mild and mental and physical fatigue are being reported as the most noticeable sign of infection. It seems unlikely, though, that this year people will want a Valentine's Day card that has been licked by one of the residents of this small town."

Cassie chuckled to herself and closed the article without giving it another thought. She distracted herself with cat videos and Internet memes, and when it popped up in her feed again just before she got to campus, she didn't bother looking at it a second time. Valentine, Nebraska was utterly removed from her day-to-day life, fifteen hundred miles away and smaller than the university she attended. It didn't seem like anything there could possibly matter to her.

That didn't stop her from showing the article to Lacey over lunch, when it popped up on her feed again between classes. "Did you see this one, Lace?" she asked. "You're pre-med, I'm sure someone must have forwarded it to you."

Lacey nodded, her face tinged with just a hint of exasperation. "I think I've seen it seven times this morning," she said. "It's all over my timeline." She paused, the hint of a smile breaking across her face. "It's totally going viral." She waggled her eyebrows as her smile broadened. "Get it? Eh? Eh?"

Carrie threw a french fry at her, and steered the conversation to the calculus homework that was due in just under two hours. She put thoughts of Valentine, Nebraska out of her mind for the day.

*****

The fourth day, it was trending on Twitter. "#KissingDisease spreads like wildfire across Nebraska," one tweet said, with a link to an article that said the victim count in Valentine was up to 2,520 confirmed cases and hospitals in six nearby towns had admitted patients with symptoms matching the new strain. The CDC admitted that the new strain appeared to be highly contagious, and advised against 'exchanging saliva' (Cassie snorted at that) with anyone who had traveled through Nebraska in the past four to seven weeks. They continued to insist that there was no cause for alarm, though, as the symptoms of the disease remained mild and there had been no serious cases.

Cassie got to the campus center expecting to find everyone talking about it, but apparently there was a rumor that the Terps were going to fire the women's basketball coach. As it was, only Byron, her lab partner in Chemistry, even mentioned it. "Did you see what the CDC said?" he asked her.

She nodded. "Something about not kissing anyone from Nebraska." She smiled, but he didn't smile back.

"Anyone who's been to Nebraska," he corrected. "In the last four to seven weeks. That's the incubation period for mono. I did a little research online," and Cassie made a personal decision not to roll her eyes at that point, because Byron was one of those guys who was always an expert after five minutes on Wikipedia, "and it says you can be contagious even before displaying symptoms. So you can be infecting people and not even know it."

Cassie nodded, suddenly wishing she cared more about basketball. Byron seemed a little too into this. "Yeah, it's got to be rough for the people who live out there," she said.

Byron put his hands to his temples, then gestured outward explosively. "Don't you get it?" he said melodramatically. "That CDC warning isn't worth shit! All these people from Nebraska have had a month to spread this stuff around, maybe even two, and they've probably given it to people who've given it to other people by now. The CDC is telling people to watch out for everyone who's been to Nebraska, but by now there's a ton of other people who have it and don't even know it!"

"Well, yeah, okay," Cassie said, both because he was probably right and because Byron had a tendency to keep raising his voice until you agreed with him. "But I mean, it's not dangerous, right? I had mono in junior high. You just feel like shit for a few weeks and all you want to do is sleep."

"It's going to have a huge economic impact," Byron said ominously. "I read that it could cost the United States up to two hundred million dollars in lost wages and productivity."

After long moments of internal debate, Carrie asked the question that was bouncing up and down in the front of her head, demanding to be asked. "Where did you read that?"

"There's a whole thread about it on Reddit," he said. Carrie bit her tongue, but he must have seen the look on her face because he said, "There were a lot of people saying that! It wasn't just one guy or anything!"

Carrie decided to ask what Byron thought about the basketball coach.

Later that day, on her way home, she messaged her friend Gena, who'd decided to go to school in Kansas City. "Any sign of mono out your way?" she asked, adding a smiley face at the end just in case Gena had gotten one too many queries like that in the last few days.

"3 or 4," Gena responded after an hour or two. "All in quarantine. No biggie, I don't kiss w/tongue."

Carrie shot her back a ":P" smiley, followed by, "Look out! Kissing monster gonna get U!" That was the last she thought about it that day.

*****

By day seven, CNN had started round-the-clock coverage. Seventeen states were now reporting cases, and the CDC was encouraging anyone who was symptomatic to voluntarily quarantine themselves. "While the disease does appear to be mild," a spokesman said at a press conference that the news networks seemed determined to repeat every twenty minutes, "this is nonetheless a disease that we are taking very seriously. Please make every effort to avoid contact with infected individuals, and if you are infected, please try your best not to spread the disease."

Carrie kept half an eye on the screen as she ate breakfast. She wasn't freaking out or anything-the furthest east anyone had reported a case had been Ohio-but it didn't seem nearly as remote as it had a week ago. As she watched, one of the reporters asked, "Is it true that the chronic fatigue is worse in this strain than in other versions of the Epstein-Barr virus?"

It was a little unnerving to see the CDC spokesman flounder for an answer. "Well, it's-there are some unusual aspects to the way the virus is presenting itself, but..." He looked off-camera for a moment, then back to the assembled reporters. "I'm sorry, but at this time all I can say is that the disease does not pose an increased risk to the public. We are taking all necessary steps and can only reiterate our recommendation to voluntarily quarantine if symptoms present themselves."

Carrie let out a small, worried sigh as she dumped her dishes in the sink and went to the bus station. She felt weirdly exposed, standing in the small shelter next to a handful of other commuters. She knew it was irrational, the same kind of bullshit fear that the media had spread over ebola only with a disease that wasn't fatal or even particularly dangerous, but she still felt kind of creeped out standing really close to a whole bunch of people.

She wasn't alone. The normally crowded bus had several empty seats, and Carrie took one in a mix of gratitude and embarrassment. Clearly, more than a few people had decided to travel in a nice, germ-free car rather than risk mass transit. Starving college students didn't have that option, though, so Carrie hunkered down in her seat and angled her body away from her fellow riders as she opened up her tablet and began to check her feed.

The first thing she saw was a status update from Gena posted a couple of hours ago. "Why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning?" she posted, along with a picture of a grumpy-looking cat with a caption saying, 'THE ONLY PERSON ALLOWED TO TALK TO ME IS COFFEE'. Carrie let out a tiny chuckle as she clicked the 'Like' button.

The rest of her feed felt reassuringly normal, apart from Byron's tinfoil-hat link to an article claiming that the CDC had quarantined the entire state of Nebraska and was keeping it under wraps with a complete media blackout. She shared it with the comment, "Anyone from Nebraska want to reply to this to prove my crazy friend wrong?" Admittedly, she was going to pay for that later today after Chemistry, but she felt like someone had to be the voice of sanity.

Three stops from campus, Gena posted another status update. "Feel like crap," she said. "Going back to bed. #Hopeitsnothingserious"

Someone on the bus coughed. Carrie couldn't help herself; she flinched.

She spent the rest of the day anxiously checking her social media every chance she got. Gena didn't update, and Carrie's messages to her went unanswered. She'd managed to work herself into a pretty serious panic by the time she met Lacey for a study date over lunch, and it didn't help matters even a little that Lacey was wearing a paper mask over her nose and mouth when she came into the cafeteria.

"Overreact much?" Carrie asked, a little more sarcastically than she'd meant to.

Lacey frowned. Well, she narrowed her eyebrows a little and the shape of her jawline changed. "You don't take pre-med classes, Carrie. If you did, maybe you'd-"

Carrie rolled her eyes, knowing that she was venting a whole bunch of displaced stress right onto her friend and study partner but unable to stop herself. "Oh, I forgot, two years of pre-med has made you the medical expert, right? I don't know why the CDC doesn't just hire you now, since you clearly know more than them about the right precautions to take."

Lacey glared at her furiously. After a moment, she pulled down the mask to reveal a mouth set into a hard, narrow line. "I'm not wearing this because I'm a med student," she hissed, looking around to see if anyone had noticed Carrie's outburst. "I'm wearing this because I'm over at Davidge Hall all the time for my classes and I'm seeing a lot of the doctors who work there wearing them. The staff at the Institute for Human Virology? They all have these on. All the time now, not just when they're doing active research. I don't know what they know that I don't, but I can make some guesses."

"Sorry," Carrie said contritely, as Lacey wolfed down her food. "I'm just kind of stressed right now. I didn't mean to take it out on you."

"It's okay," Lacey said, pulling the mask back over her face. "I was pretty rude too. It's all kind of effed up right now, you know?"

Carrie forced a shrug. "Eh," she said. "We'll know things get really bad when the Republicans stop running attack ads claiming the Democrats don't have a 'mono plan'." It was a feeble joke, but they both laughed.

Carrie finally got home around six to see that Gena had finally posted an update. "Think I might stay home tomorrow, too," it said. "Just to see if I feel any better. Not sure I'd get much out of classes anyway-my brain feels like warm oatmeal."

Carrie left a "Get well soon!" comment, and went on to check her notifications. She looked for comments on her Nebraska post, and was oddly disquieted that there were none. The thought hung with her for the rest of the night.

*****

By day sixteen, the media blackout had failed. Carrie got back from her weekend shift at the grocery store-all the cashiers were wearing masks now, and about half the customers as well-and flipped on CNN just in time to see a headline crawl along the bottom of the screen that read, 'Nebraska Infection Rate at 90%'.

The talking heads were discussing whether the CDC was taking the whole thing seriously enough. "A 'blanket ban on non-essential travel' sounds good," one of them said, "but banning travel three weeks after the first symptoms were reported is pretty much just closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. If you want to get this thing under control, I think-"

Carrie muted the TV and called Gena. The phone rang long enough to start up a train of paranoid worry-what if the symptoms were more serious than she thought, what if the quarantine had extended to Kansas, what if what if what-but Gena finally picked up. "'Lo?" she said, in the muzzy tones of someone who had just woken up from a deep sleep.

"Hi, Gena," Carrie said. "Just me again. Wanted to check up on you."

"Oh, hi, Carrie," Gena said through the phone, her voice slightly slurred with exhaustion. "No change. Slept about sixteen hours yesterday. Fever's still hovering around 100. Throat's not so bad, though."

Carrie saw another headline scrolling across the bottom of the screen out of the corner of her eye, 'CDC Refusing to Recommend Anti-Virals for Kissing Disease'. "That's something, at least," she said. "You've still got groceries?"

"For another four days," Gena replied. "My roommate's probably going to be mad when she finds out I'm eating her food."

Carrie snorted. "Your roommate ditched you last Sunday, kiddo. Probably drenched herself in Purell and ran for the hills." She logged into her Twitter account while she talked, and began scrolling through her feed. Unsurprisingly, '#KissingDisease' was the number one trending topic on Twitter. "Even if the food was still good when she got back, she probably wouldn't want to touch it in case it had germs."

"You're probably right," Gena said, in a tone that suggested that she didn't have the energy to argue even if Carrie was telling her the sky was pink. "Anyhow, I'm just waiting to get better. That's all you can really do, right?"

"Huh?" Carrie was momentarily distracted by another trending topic, '#Carrier'. "Oh, um, yeah. That's what they're saying on the news. You get yourself plenty of rest, eat healthy, and don't operate any heavy machinery or anything. Okay?"

"Okay," Gena said, her sleepy voice warm with affection. "Talk to you tomorrow?"

"You bet," Carrie said, before finally disconnecting the call. She un-muted CNN while scrolling through a few of the '#Carrier' tweets. letting the bloviating of the pundits wash over her while she read:

Being a #carrier is like winning the lottery, it makes some people into assholes.

Visited Nebraska three weeks ago, feeling fine-#Carrier?

My boyfriend thinks he's a #carrier, keeps telling me to make him a sandwich. #doesntworkthatway

Public service: Stay away from social media. If you don't listen to me, you'll listen to them. #Carrier #KissingDisease

@Bobby_Reyez It's not just guys-I've seen #carrier women doing it too.

Anyone know what the #carrier odds are? I'm hearing 10%, but I don't know if I trust the source.

I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier I love my #carrier

I kissed a girl, and I liked it...four weeks later... #KissingDisease #carrier

That one had a photo attached, of a woman down on her knees playing with the photographer's dick. She didn't look too into it, though; she looked like she was struggling to stay awake. Carrie rolled her eyes-why did some guys always think the world needed to see their cock? She closed Twitter and went to unpack her groceries. She'd stocked up a little on canned goods, just in case of...well, just in case, she told herself, deciding that finishing that sentence automatically made her sound paranoid.

After she finished, Carrie did a search for "carrier", "carrier mono" and "carrier kissing disease", but most of the results were just more Twitter pages. She did find a forum where people were talking about a rumor that some of the people who had the disease were asymptomatic, but there was a lot of argument over whether they were really asymptomatic or just still in the incubation period and everyone was a self-proclaimed expert and there were a lot of all-caps posts, so she just mentally filed it all away as Weird Shit until she could find a reliable source. She switched away from CNN to Netflix, pushing the whole mess out of her head until she went to bed.

*****

Day twenty-two was mostly about trying to call Gena. Carrie rang her cell phone four times waiting for the bus, which was twenty-seven minutes late, and got no answer. She looked at her news feed three times between calls, stabbing at the touchscreen with freezing fingers. Gena was updating her status, but she wasn't picking up her phone.

Carrie snarled under her breath as the phone went to voicemail the fourth time. She checked Gena's status again. It was the same as fifteen minutes ago, a topless picture of Gena with the sentence, "Gonna be seeing a whole lot more of me from now on!" She didn't look like she was excited to be showing her tits to everyone on her social media, though. She looked dazed and exhausted, like she'd just tried running a marathon and had given up around mile sixteen.

The bus finally showed up, and Carrie filed on along with a group of six or seven other masked passengers. The bus driver wore a mask, too. He wasn't the regular driver. Carrie found an empty seat with no real difficulty, and went back to checking Gena's news feed.

She scrolled back, trying to see if she could find some kind of explanation for Gena's posts. There was nothing else from this morning, but late last night there was a picture of her kissing some white woman Carrie didn't recognize. Carrie blushed a little-it didn't exactly look like a 'friendly' kiss, either. Gena had her eyes closed, and one of her arms was halfway up the woman's shirt. Carrie was so embarrassed she almost scrolled past it (when had Gena gone lezzie?) but she stopped when she saw the caption. "Guess who made a huge mistake last night? Me, that's who!"

Carrie scrunched her face in confusion. Okay, so Gena had apparently gotten tired of being cooped up in her house like an invalid, and she must have gone out drinking and wound up macking with another girl. Not smart, especially for someone with a communicable disease-shit, did the other girl even know Gena had mono? But it was an understandable thing that that people sometimes did. (And then tried very hard to pretend never happened because it would make things really weird around her study partner otherwise. Carrie was suddenly very relieved that her little experiment with Lacey hadn't wound up on Facebook.)

But that still didn't explain this morning. Carrie scrolled back a little further, hoping to find something that would at least explain why her best friend had decided to have a night on the town despite being sick with the most famous contagious disease in America, but all she found was an update that said, "Finally out of food. Got to get my butt out of bed and go grocery shopping, I guess."

Grimacing in frustration, Carrie rang Gena's phone again. Still no response. She spent the rest of the bus ride cursing the travel ban, her decision to go to school halfway across the country from her childhood friend, her friend's decision to go to school halfway across the country from her, their collective decision to ever leave International Falls, and of course the tiny packages of genetic material that had decided to hitch a ride in everybody's fucking saliva.