It started with the cravings.

It was funny, actually. I suddenly had the urge to consume immense amounts of dairy. Cheeses I previously couldn’t stand the smell of I ate like I was starving. And yogurt was a delicacy.

Then came the protein cravings.

I ate so much meat that my family went vegetarian out of worry. I replaced those meats with nuts and beans. If it had protein, I was eating it.

Everyone figured it was just a weird thing for a growth spurt.

I suppose it was a kind of growth spurt, but it wasn’t because I was getting taller.

I was in school when the first incident happened. I was in the middle of a math exam that I was failing miserably.

I leaned back to crack my back, because being curled over a paper is less than comfortable.

The next thing I know I’m on the floor with the sound of my classmates screaming and the concerned face of my teacher hovering over me.

They took me to the hospital. I was tested over and over again.

Nothing showed up. No tumors, no brain issues, nothing. I was perfectly healthy. I was so healthy they were confused. Everyone has some bump or scratch or something, but I was perfectly fine.

The second time it happened, I was asleep.

I fell out of bed, screaming. I hurt. Like the worst muscle spasm you ever had, but it was concentrated to the entire length of your spine.

But the sounds were somehow the worst part.

Pop, pop, pop. My vertebrae jolting then locking then jolting out of place again. I was aware of my spinal cord, felt it being stretched and stretched.

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This time I didn’t seize. I was awake for all 15 minutes of that absolute hell.

When I went to the doctors this time, something new appeared on the X-rays. My spine had managed to twist itself in a way that meant I shouldn’t be alive. But I was. And aside from that and the trauma of that quarter hour of pain, my body was a perfect specimen of health.

My parents consented to the hospital to keep me under observation. Nothing happened for a week, and then it happened again. This time it was longer and it hurt more. It felt like someone was pulling my spine apart. I could hear it cracking and shifting. They had to knock me out to keep me from writhing, but I still remember feeling the pain even while I was asleep.

When I came to, I was looking at confused doctors and my horrified parents, all staring at a screen from my latest scans. They had taken images from the day before the incident, as they did everyday. There hadn’t been any change.

The pictures from afterwards, however, were drastically different.

My spine looked like it had been redesigned. New vertebrae had formed in my spine, along with tiny bones that leached into my ribs, looking like support beams. But the big thing were the two new sets of bones that appeared between my shoulder blades and my spine. Two bones locked into a joint on either side, with slim filaments of cartilage sprouting from them.

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They started to grow steadily after that. No more spasms, no more sudden bouts of pain. Now it was a constant, dull agony.

As the days went by, the scans showed the masses were starting to get bigger. In turn, the skin on my back started to bruise, then pale when they pressed up against my skin, making my skin go taut and painfully itchy.

They told me not to scratch it, that I would just inflame everything, as if my back being inflamed was the worst of my problems when I had two “masses” ready to burst out of my body.

At one point, the itching annoyed the doctors enough to handcuff me. They didn’t want me to contaminate their experiment.

I don’t think they realized how desperate I was.

I went into a bathroom and dragged my back against an edge, until I was bleeding everywhere. I didn’t care, I just needed the itching to stop.

They were banging on the doors, demanding I unlock it for them, then calling security to break it down.

Too late.

My skin and muscle finally gave way and the new bones and sinew attached to the masses fell out of me in an ungraceful mess of blood and other bodily stuff.

They found me on the floor crying with the two lumps of meat and bone splayed out behind me, attached to my back.