Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20180823132725/@comment-35911608-20180823190606

DrBobSmith wrote: It almost works, in a delusions of self reference kind of way.

Flu epidemics happen. Some guy cutting class doesn't cause one, except in his mind. If he is crazy, Mom would probably hint of it somehow and he would feel it too. The girl taken to the clinic had already been sick for a week. The protagonist wasn't the first to get ill.

Or is the illness a literary metaphor? Laziness? Drug abuse? It's a story of mass hysteria. The disease doesn't actually exist. It's a placebo effect taken to the extreme.