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was it. Getting in the tub, turning the water off—that was all a blank.
    I hadn’t stripped, since I still wore the tennis skirt and T-shirt I’d put on—how many days ago? Good lord. There was no way I still had a job.
    Standing was difficult, but I managed to prop myself against the wall. As I stood, water sloshed over the edge of the tub. I truly didn’t know how I’d gotten into the tub given the state I was in, or how I’d avoided drowning myself in the full tub while comatose.
    I stepped out and stripped. I was still pretty drained, and wearing a bunch of wet clothes wasn’t helping. As I turned to leave the bathroom, I caught my profile in the mirror. “Ack!”
    Frozen in front of the mirror, an emaciated version of my former self stared back. Where I’d thought my face gaunt before, it was clear it had merely been sharply defined. This was gaunt. The hollows under my cheeks had deepened. My face was all eyes, cheekbones, nose, and chin, with no flesh to round it out. It was grotesque. I was grotesque.
    Because the sight had startled me, it took a moment for me to see that my lips were not just chapped and cracked. I had two very distinct cuts on my bottom lip, both equal distances from the corner of my mouth. My breath quickened and I stepped closer to the mirror—to the stranger in the mirror.
    I opened my mouth…
    Relief welled up inside me and escaped as a single, choked laugh. No fangs. No oddly sharp teeth. Just my teeth. That, at least, hadn’t changed.
    I turned away from the image in the mirror and marched to the kitchen. Time to do a little digging and some eating. Because I could hardly deny that starvation was just around the corner. That—and I was hungry enough to eat cardboard.
    I grabbed my laptop on the way. Online research was definitely my next step.
    Laptop open on the kitchen table, I reached for my first experiment. Orange juice. I’d tried it and puked it before—but had it been the orange juice or the peanut butter or the bread that had triggered my puking fit? That was the question.
    I gulped down some OJ, then belatedly realized I should have measured it. Measuring cup in hand, it occurred to me that I should also be timing this little gastro-experiment. I set the timer to fifteen minutes, because I was pretty sure my adverse reaction had asserted itself within that time frame. Which sparked my next brilliant idea: a handy metal bowl. Portable and dishwasher safe—the perfect repository should one of my experiments fail.
    While I waited for the contents to settle—or not—I pulled up what I could find on the constituent components of human blood. And what supported good blood health.
    And my stomach kept reminding me— I’m hungry, wench. Feed me .
    So I didn’t quite make it to fifteen minutes. At five, I decided OJ by itself had qualified as a winner, and I finished off the carton. I set the timer for another five minutes—because that was apparently my max tolerance for intense hunger while standing in a kitchen not quite devoid of food.
    I dug around in the fridge and found squat, so I shifted my attention to the cupboard. Dried apricots, maybe. Almonds sounded delish. Coffee beans. Yum. I started a kettle of boiling water.
    The timer dinged my five-minute reprieve, and I stuffed an apricot in my mouth. Now was as good a time as any for the odd bits in my fridge to go, so I pulled out the squishy tomato and chucked it in the bin. Immediately thereafter, with an accuracy I wish I could claim as intentional, I threw up in that same bin.
    I suspected the apricot—but I couldn’t be sure. That was when I discovered the flaw in my less-than-well-prepared plan. Was it the OJ and a delayed reaction? Or the apricot and an immediate one? Was it a combination of both?
    The singing of my kettle interrupted my self-flagellation. I dithered for a spare minute—then decided that I might as well give coffee a whirl.
    Thirty minutes later, I hugged the bag of coffee beans close