The FDA does not regulate or approve most dietary supplements and performance enhancers, such as creatine, mass gainers, fat burners, or other related products. The modern supplement market is a con man’s paradise, a wild west of commercial malpractice rife with vendors likened to the “snake oil” salesmen of the Old West, who duped townsfolk into purchasing bogus remedies for exorbitant prices.

Those who take supplements should tread carefully when choosing one.

The end of my junior year in high school was growing closer, and the grade was abuzz with college chatter. Possessing an attitude cycling between celebration and envy, I had seen my two co-captains accepted early into MIT and Cornell on rowing tickets. With my dismal grades, my options were limited to community college or trade school without an athletic recruiting ticket. I would do anything to get faster.

Anything.

I stood six foot three inches tall, and bore long, skinny, apelike arms that measured four inches longer than nature asked. Sundays were my rowing team’s off days, the days without exercise when we should be resting our bodies and allowing our exhausted muscles to recuperate. But I wasn’t prepared to waste time sitting around.

I wanted it. I wanted it, bad.

I was willing to do anything to get recruited.

One Sunday in September shortly after the start of my senior year, I saw the boy at the gym for the first time.

He clumsily loped over to the bench press rack, curiously examining the strange structure. His arm span exceeded his height by an obscene amount, resulting in an orangutan-like gait. From his posture and teenage demeanor, I estimated his age to be roughly if not exactly mine.

A bright purple tank top hung from his scrawny frame, and a long, deep red scar sat to the left side of his face. He walked to the bench press rack, and began to press the bar.

Bench bars weigh 45 pounds, a miniscule amount in the eyes of a seasoned gym-goer. His first repetition came easily—the bar bounced from his chest and leapt back towards the ceiling. The second repetition was less direct—the bar struggled to crawl upwards, only accelerating once the arms had passed most of the motion. The third repetition barely made it. His chest muscles heaved and twitched, battling the unbreakable pull of gravity. On the fourth repetition, his exhausted lungs were praying for air, filling the gym with dying animal-like strained respirations. By the time he had lowered the bar to his chest for the fifth repetition, he was unable to return the bar to the rack. With an immense grunt that seemed to absorb the rest of his body’s life forces, he dumped the bar backwards over his head. The bar barely cleared his forehead, impacting the ground with a deafening crash.

As he sat up, he struggled to lift the bar back into the rack. His noisy workout was drawing unwelcome glances from treadmill runners and dumbbell pressers alike.

I chuckled to myself, and pretended not to notice his ridiculous, pathetic antics. At least I was stronger than somebody here, I thought.

In an ironic answer to my silent scorn, I didn’t do much better. The dumbbells refused to move at my arm’s command, the twenty-pound weights overpowering all forces that my arms could exert. As the lactic acid began to flow through my biceps, I returned the weights to their respective indentations and walked back to the forty-five pound bench press bar.

The first few repetitions on the bench went admirably, as they always did. It was the fourth repetition and onward that always had the tendency to bite me in the backside. Thankfully, I had asked another man to spot me before beginning. As he looked over curiously to the weight I would be attempting, I tried not to notice his steadily rolling eyes. He couldn’t conceal a smile when I grunted for his help on the eighth repetition, my pectoral muscles dying in pain and screaming in protest.

I left the gym that day with an air of exasperation, all the motivation and energy drained from my weak figure. I had been going to the gym for four months now, and I had not seen any improvement regardless of how hard I pushed myself. I had scoured the Internet for advice and tips on muscle building, strength training, fat loss, weight lifting, and supplementation… but yet somehow, not one reliable source of the tens of millions seemed to answer my plight.

The next two weeks passed like every other. My coach was constantly and consistently disappointed with the negative progress most of the team seemed to be making. No matter what the practice or how intense the workout, we slipped farther and farther behind. We were getting weaker and slower, not stronger and faster. Each practice projected a grimmer and less optimistic image of the future spring racing season. Coach’s motivational speeches about inevitable success over the racing season began to slowly fade into hypothetical theory as opposed to solid probability.

I resolved to get back to the gym that Sunday.

As I walked in on Sunday, I observed a familiar figure. He walked with an orangutan-like gait, although it was less pronounced and obvious as the last time I had seen it. He wore the identical purple sleeveless tank top as I had seen him wearing last time. He turned towards me as he loaded the bench press bar, and he indeed had the same deep red scar on the left side of his face. I stared in awe, struggling to process what I was seeing. I closed my eyes and opened them again, to cancel any possibility of a hallucination or illusion.

The same scrawny weakling that I had laughed at and scorned just three weeks earlier was now built like a bodybuilder.

He slid his massive, striated figure beneath the bench press bar, now loaded with two forty-five pound plates on either side. The immense weight amounted to two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Just a month earlier, I had seen the same guy fail to complete five repetitions with a fifth of the weight. Now, he seemed to have both the strength to pull off 225 pounds and the audacity to do it without a spotter.

His dense hands wrapped around the bar and lifted it from the supports as the weight plates clattered and shook around it. To my disbelief, he began to churn out some of the fastest and nastiest repetitions I had ever seen with an animalistic fury. Each repetition could not have taken more than two seconds to complete. He completed eleven solid repetitions, only struggling on the final one. He let his arms drift backwards as they reached the apex, and the weight crashed upon the supports with an earth-shaking thud.

As he stretched his chest muscles around his massive figure, he seemed to notice me staring. I’ve never been particularly skilled at being secretive, whether the matter was checking out a pretty girl in public or admiring an unbelievably strong guy at the gym. To my embarrassment, he flicked his head upwards in my direction, both acknowledging my presence and the fact that he realized I was staring at him throughout the duration of his workout.

With a smile, he reached to his left side and held up a purple protein shaker bottle. The label on the bottle read ENGORGE, in enormous white lettering. He nodded towards me, and looked away.

With one long, effortless gulp, he drained the purple bottle’s contents and set it back upon the ground.

While he thoughtlessly danced around the gym maneuvering obscene amounts of weight in every conceivable motion, I had in fact slipped to a weaker state than before. While during the last trip I had failed to curl four repetitions of twenty-pound weights, I now failed to even move the same dumbbell from its resting state beside my body. I played with my loose, pathetic bicep muscle as I stared at my disgruntled face in the mirror. On the other side of the gym, the kid was curling a 135-pound barbell with ease.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I knew I had to take it. Whatever that guy had done—and I knew it was in fact the same kid—had absurdly boosted his physical capacity. If I could get my hands on some of that stuff, I would get stronger and faster. That, and only that, would lead to getting recruited.

The following day after practice concluded, I walked into the supplement store. The walls lay stacked high with supplements of all kinds—fat burners, mass gainers, strength boosters… it was as if the solution to every bodily problem known to mankind lay in the confines of this shop. As a small sliver of skepticism began to work its way into my mind, it was shattered by the familiar shade of purple glowing from the back of the store.

In the far back corner, I was pleased to see the identical solution the guy had been taking. A white label reading ENGORGE ran across the front. I paid eighty dollars in cash, and carried the keg out to my car.

The supplement came in a keg so large it strained the zippers of my backpack. I had to sneak it into my house, as my parents refused to let me take any form of supplement. They felt that an excess of protein or creatine would damage my body’s internal workings, or give me some bizarre form of alien cancer. Their unfounded, uninformed opinions had been slowing me down, and skirting their idiotic mindsets was the only way I would ever get faster.

I reached my bedroom, locked the door, and unzipped my backpack. I unscrewed the lid of the powder keg, and looked inside. Engorge was a purplish powder, with granules of larger, darker purple pellets scattered throughout. The supplement came with a free shaker bottle, affixed to the rear of the keg. It was the exact same bottle I had seen the other kid taking, with ENGORGE in huge white letters running perpendicular to the lid.

Perfect.

That night, as I filled the shaker bottle with water and added the Engorge powder, I decided to look into some of the risks of taking a workout supplement. The Engorge fizzed in the bottle, gradually dissipating and dissolving into a purple solution. The larger purple clusters dissolved at a slower rate, floating in a half-buoyant state before joining the homogenous mixture. The powder didn’t dissolve like sugar did—it took its time, almost playing with the water as the two substances became one.

According to hundreds of sites on the Internet, the most intimidating barriers to taking a supplement seemed to be kidney stones. Several reliable sources stated than an excess of protein/creatine and a shortage of water would result in the formation of kidney stones in the user. Apart from that, the other risks seemed to be limited to the fact that the FDA didn’t test or inspect the supplements.

That wouldn’t matter. After all, it wasn’t like this powder could harm me.

Two weeks after my first dosage of Engorge, I looked in the mirror. I was met with a pleasant surprise.

I also couldn’t believe what had happened to my body.

My deltoids and pectorals had grown, presenting a mature, masculine, intimidating upper body figure. Down my chest, my rectus abdominus muscles were beginning to divide into six sections. Body fat was clearly lowering in saturation, and it was showing. My face looked angular and confident, with the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles presenting themselves as a sternly defined neck. My arms looked and felt wider and stronger, with the biceps and triceps straining the seams of my T-shirt sleeves.

That Monday was the best day my life will likely ever experience. I was the center of attention. Although I never caught anyone staring, I could feel the chatter of infatuated teenage girls and jealous jocks admiring my new physique.

I was no longer the kid who was walked over. I was an alpha, one who commanded, told, and ordered. Nobody would question my authority. My team was a wolf pack, and I was the alpha male. At practice that day, my teammates and coach looked at me with a new kind of respect. I was previously their captain—now I was their leader. Those who messed around at practice ceased their antics and focused. Those who incessantly corrected now kept their opinion to themselves as they watched the team, waiting for me instead to do the correcting and lecturing.

Over the next several weeks, rowing practices began to get easier, not by way of my coach, who still burned us with grueling and punishing workouts, but by way of my body, that seemed to be adapting and evolving to meet the every need of my team. To my pleasant disbelief, my schoolwork itself began to become easier.

Problems that had previously required calculators to solve could now be solved in my head. Homework grew more fun and easier to complete. I received perfect scores on two English writing assignments from a teacher who had never before given me a grade above 88%. My life was spinning upwards, out of control in the best possible direction. The amazing effects the Engorge was having on my body were evidently spreading to my mind as well.

That Sunday, I ran back to the gym before breakfast. I had been drinking Engorge every day since I had initially bought it at the supplement store. The container under my bed at home was a third empty.

I entered the weight room, and slowly walked up to the squat rack. Prior to the start of my supplementation routine, my personal one-repetition maximum was a measly 135 pounds.

I loaded four 45-pound plates to each side of the bar, for an incredible total of 405 pounds. I stopped to reconsider. I hadn’t even noticed I was loading up this much weight… I had only intended to put one 45-pound plate on each side. My fleeting moment of reconsideration evaporated as the rush of motivation overtook it.

As I stepped under the bar, I realized that I would be completing this weight without a spotter. Should I take a misstep, the weight could easily crush me beneath it. The only question would be which members of my life would be the maddest—my coach, who was already struggling with an understaffed team, or my parents, who would have to deal with the medical and perhaps funeral bills.

I didn’t care.

To my disbelief, the barbell raised effortlessly from the rack. As I stepped backwards and began my descent towards the ground, the plates bumped and crashed against one another. My quadriceps muscles rose from their resting states like a striated mountain range, flexing to their truest and fullest form.

As I hit the lowest point of my repetition and began the squat, I was amazed at how light it felt. Slowly but surely, the weight that weighed more than three times my body mass hoisted itself upwards to the rack. I hit the apex, but wasn’t tired yet. I smashed out four more repetitions before lowering the bar back down to the supports.

I racked the weight, and sat on the floor, dizzy with excitement. I was stronger than I ever imagined I would be. Less than two months earlier, I was the weakest kid on the team, and one of the weakest in the school. Now, I could squat the combined weight of three people.

I was getting there.

The next week passed slowly. Coach had announced to the team on Monday that we would be completing a 2K test, or a 2000-meter time trial, on Friday. The 2K is such a painful and exhausting test that most rowers dread its occurrence, and remember “2K days” as some of the worst practices they have experienced. Over the course of the week, the team grew skittish, diseagerly waiting for the day where they would put everything on the line.

As I opened the door to the erg room on Friday, a burning acid of anticipation began to fill my arteries. This was unusual. The usual foreshadowing and dread that traditionally preceded every 2K was absent, exiled from my body. I couldn’t wait to do the test. I couldn’t wait to show the world who I was.

The ergs were set up parallel to one another, perpendicular to the wall. The monitors on the ergs stood at attention, awaiting the input of the rowers. Like the labyrinth of the Minotaur, the erg room sat ready and waiting for its next crop of helpless teenage prey.

Nobody but me seemed to know that this time, Perseus was entering with the sacrificial victims.

I stripped down to racing gear, and pulled my water bottle from my backpack. I sat upon the erg, and pressed the buttons on the monitor in sequence to set up the test. The monitor’s display lit up to read 2000M.

The erg room slowed to a halt, every team member adjusting their posture to prepare for the race. We sat upright, poised to strike at coach’s command. Our coach stood before us, his face set in stone. It wasn’t clear whether he expected satisfaction or disaster.

“All hands are down…”

The last of the chatter ceased. The mist of uninterrupted focus was almost visible, hovering over the team. Like carbon monoxide, the vapor of pure focus is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, but very much present.

“Sit Ready…”

“Attention…”

The team sat up an inch taller, and reached their arms half an inch further from their bodies.

“ROW!!!!!”

The team exploded in a whirlwind of energy. Four of my strongest teammates burned off the line, flying at a demonic pace. That pace, I knew was unsustainable. Although an insane speed would seem easy to pull off for the first minute, the creeping lactic acid burn would quickly and easily render those fools wrong. The ideal pace—the one I hoped to hold—was one that felt challenging yet maintainable.

I had been surprised by the initial ease of the drive speed. From the first stroke, the erg’s handle seemed to effortlessly flow through the machine towards me. The resistance I knew so well from the erg machine seemed to have dissipated into nothingness.

As I approached the 1500-meter mark, I began to see some of my more ambitious yet foolish teammates reconsidering their dedication. This maneuver was known as the, “Fly and Die,” or where one starts their test at an unsustainable pace and is unable to hold it. Their splits began to climb higher, their speed deadening and ceasing in aggression. Their motions became less sharp and more lethargic, their catches less intense and more lackadaisical.

Our faces began to redden, our muscles hardened, fatigued and ached, and our respirations heaved as we barreled down the racecourse. The 1250-meter mark passed. Only twenty-five more strokes to halfway.

As we passed the 1000-meter mark, the pain in my legs grew nearly unbearable. We had passed halfway. More and more of my teammates began to back down, loosening the power at which they pulled. Two of them ceased rowing entirely, staring to the heavens as they feebly struggled to catch their breath. My coach’s face contorted, settling to an expression of anger and disappointment. This was increasingly failing to resemble a successful practice.

It would take a miracle to save it.

As I passed the 750-meter mark, I flipped into overdrive, shifting up to a clearly unsustainable, breakneck pace. My rate and speed climbed higher and higher, as my coach watched in awe. I was pulling speeds never before seen out of me or any of my teammates. I was flying at a blistering rate of fifty strokes a minute, an insane upward aberration from the typical rating of thirty-three. Twenty-five strokes to 500 left.

And when I passed the 500-meter mark, only one word resonated through my mind.

Go.

I exploded with a ferocity that startled me. I hurtled down the virtual racecourse at unbelievable speed, the numbers on the monitor whizzing by. The finish line drew closer and closer as I poured more and more force into the erg handle with every stroke. As I crossed the finish line at zero meters to go, I pulled the hardest stroke of my life.

The links gave way as the connecting chain snapped with a metallic crack. The chain instantly slipped back into the machine, back to its resting position. Metal links skittered backwards across the floor as I sat with the destroyed handle clutched in my hands.

The fatigue and pain that normally spread across the team following a 2K-test piece was all but absent. Eyes wide, mouth agape, my fellow rowers stared at the loose handle, the chain hanging helplessly from the wooden shaft. My coach silently stared at the loose erg handle, his face an amazed permutation of awe and shock.

The reality only sank in once I had reactivated the erg machine’s computer and retrieved the system memory. My teammates crowded around my erg machine, jostling each other aside to witness a miracle.

The numbers spoke louder than my coach ever could. My test time had dropped fifty seconds, from a 7:02 to a 6:12. A seven minute 2K is a laughable number for a rower of my experience, a score that a high school sophomore might pull.

On the other hand, coaches of competitive teams scour the books for rowers pulling a 6:12. Assuming decent grades, a number like that has the pulling power to earn anyone a spot almost anywhere they apply. My mind buckled with the fact that I had completed two full years’ worth of work in a mere two months.

The rest of fall crawled by as the biting cold of winter overtook it. Some of my teammates had started to drink Engorge, after hard pressing me about the supplement I took. Some chose to supplement with the powdered, drinkable form as I did, while others preferred the pills and tablets. Over the dreary winter months, the team gradually progressed to speeds previously thought unimaginable. Even the smallest, scrawniest guys on the team were now annihilating every piece, dragging their scores lower and lower to the brink of insanity. At this point, everyone on the team had begun to supplement with Engorge. Some were only a few weeks into their supplementation; others had started on the day I had destroyed the 2K test.

From what I had read on the Internet, members of dozens of other teams across all disciplines at my school had begun to boost their performance with Engorge as well, and for good reason. Football players, lacrosse players, sprinters, weight lifters, and rowers alike had all begun to take advantage of the incredible upper hand that the supplement granted its users. The NCAA held several public debates over whether or not to include the supplement on its Banned Substances list due to its bizarre competitive advantages, but the claims were quickly shut down. I guess people just liked what they were seeing: after all, the MLB Home Run Derby was a whole lot more fun when everyone was on steroids.

The normally endless and torturous winter effortlessly flew by and plunged into the reassuring, liberating warmth of spring. Soon, we would launch our boats onto the river and be freed from the concrete dungeon of the erg room.

On a warm afternoon in late March, I received my acceptance letter from Dartmouth.

Patrick,
Congratulations! On behalf of the faculty and staff of Dartmouth College, it is with great pleasure that I inform you of your admission to Dartmouth as a member of the Class of 2019…

I couldn’t contain myself. To see my parents smile full, genuine smiles towards me was one of the best sights my underdeveloped adolescent eyes had seen. My parents, who had once pushed me towards unreasonable levels and watched me with disappointment as I was unable to fulfill them, were now genuinely proud of me. My life’s dreams were slowly blooming to reality.

Without warning, the indescribable relief and happiness of the acceptance day quickly turned sour from the inside.

Three nights after the acceptance letter arrived, my stomach began to churn in a sickening rhythm as I lay in bed. My arms twitched incessantly, and my legs exploded in painful cramps that lasted for minutes on end. My back and shoulder muscles felt as if they were being torn apart by some invisible demon. The cramps in my legs seemed to last for eternity. I could only bite my cheeks and helplessly wait for them to subside. I slept for only a few minutes that night, the tears streaming down my face as I tried to battle the pain.

I decided halfway through that miserable night to stop taking Engorge. Although it had boosted me to levels of previously unimaginable athletic performance, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the supplement was doing something horrible to me.

The following morning, I dumped the remnants of the keg down the toilet. As the final kernels of Engorge disappeared into the underworld, I looked down at my sculpted body, bidding a torn goodbye to the supplement that had done so much for me. I tossed the container itself into the recycling bin the night before garbage day.

The first few days after stopping the supplementation were unremarkable. I pulled the same, powerful splits I had been pulling over the season. From 500-meter sprints to 5,000 meter steady power hauls, the strength and endurance that Engorge had bestowed upon me were still every much present.

One week after I stopped taking Engorge, the first big slip hit me like a train. During an aggressively paced short interval workout, I felt as if my ergometer was crawling through molasses. The effortless drive speed I had remembered had long faded away into a stubborn, ornery mess that resisted my every effort at moving it. My coach looked at me quizzically, evidently confused as to why I was unable to row like I was capable of. From here, I never knew it would only grow worse.

A month passed as I slowly but definitively began to revert back to the scrawny, weak athlete I had once been. My coach watched as my erg times slipped slowly downwards, converging on where they had been before I had started supplementing.

Every night, I felt more muscles give way to fat, the powerful muscle mass slowly disintegrating to flabby, useless garbage. Every night I removed my shirt to step into the shower, my stomach had put on more weight. The solid abdominal muscle of months prior had long fallen victim to folds of belly fat, effortlessly undoing all the grueling training I had put into it. I felt disgusting- insufficient. I shuddered at the thought of the next 2K test. My legs felt weaker, smaller. I could easily feel my bones through my soft and weak quadriceps muscles as they slipped into fatty mush. Just walking became a challenge—the stairs that I had once so effortlessly sprinted up to class were now a formidable barrier that put my cardiovascular endurance to the test.

I began to wear large, black shirts to conceal my building weight. Although only slightly noticeable to quick glances from other students, my unwanted weight gain could not have been more obvious to my teammates, my coach, or my parents.

Over the course of that month, all of the teammates who had followed my reckless example and taken Engorge began to message me.

The first one was Young. A tall, lean sophomore rower, he had wanted to go fast as badly as I had. A member of the debate team, he frequently missed practices and wanted to make up for missed time via the new supplement. He was one of the first teammates to start supplementing with Engorge, and messaged me on a Friday night after practice.

iMessage, Fri April 26

Sam Young 8:01 PM: dude, last night I had cramps
     8:01 PM: really bad leg cramps, lasted all night couldn’t sleep
     8:02 PM: u know what happened? How about u

Me, 8:04 PM: No idea maybe diet? idk try eating something different

Sam Young 8:07 PM: it’s not diet, I’m sure about that
     8:09 PM: please dude can you help me out? You started taking the supplement first

Me, 8:11 PM: I don’t know what’s going wrong. I honestly have no idea

That was a lie. With Young’s message, I knew that our symptoms were directly linked to Engorge. What had at first been my unfounded suspicion was now concrete, proven fact.

I lied because I didn’t want to take responsibility. I was the first one to take Engorge on the team, and felt directly liable for the rest of my team following suit.

Although I felt some comfort in knowing that my incident was not isolated, I began to concern for my teammates’ well being. If something were happening to me, it was happening to all my teammates as well.

The next one who messaged me was Dudley. An MIT recruit and my co-captain, he had been one of the last ones to start supplementing. From the start, Dudley had doubts about the effectiveness of Engorge and its possible side effects. The team had teased him every day about it, likening his paranoid mindset to that of an overprotective mother. He had eventually caved, buying the pills of Engorge and sneaking them into his body by cover of nightfall. His parents searched his room randomly for drugs and alcohol on an almost regular basis—he concealed the Engorge container inside his locker at school, removing one tablet a day.

iMessage, Sun April 28

Michael Dudley 6:52 PM: This supplement is doing weird things…
     6:52 PM: I had the worst cramp of my life last night, it just
wouldn’t go away.
     6:53 PM: I got no sleep at all
     6:54 PM: What is this stuff made of, anyways?
     6:54 PM: The ingredients are completely unspecific and don’t mention any precise ingredients or chemical compounds.
     6:56 PM: I have no idea how this is legal to sell in America with all this secrecy and all

Me 6:59 PM: some of the other guys have been saying the same thing, I dont know

Michael Dudley 6:57 PM: What have you gotten me into?
     7:08 PM: I need an answer…
     7:14 PM: Engorge doesn’t even have a website, I tried looking it up.
     7:15 PM: Is this even a real company?

Dudley didn’t talk to me for the rest of that week. I knew he suspected something, not necessarily of me, but of Engorge itself. After every practice, he watched with apprehension as the other guys popped the pills or drained bottles of the supplement.

Over the course of that week, I received messages from every one of the other rowers that had been taking Engorge. Every one. And they complained of the exact same things. They complained of stomach trouble, strange twitching in their muscles, and painful, sporadic, ripping leg cramps that erupted as they tried to sleep.

Most had stopped taking Engorge, and several had begun to put on noticeable amounts of weight just the day after they had stopped the supplementation. In my case, the effects of Engorge had run on fumes for a weak before dropping off. Their power seemed to have been depleted almost instantly.

Exactly two months from the date of my incredible 2K personal record, my team tested once again. The 2K tests were horrific, with most stopping their piece midway, doubled over in pain and exhausted defeat. By this point, all the guys who had taken Engorge had ceased their supplementation, and the team was once again dismally slow. Not one rower from my team set a personal record that day. As we left practice, I caught several angry, betrayed glares from the teammates I knew as my friends, the guys I would trust with my life any day of the week.

On that day, I not only missed my personal record by over a minute, but also missed my prior personal best of 7:02 by twelve seconds. I was slower than I was when I had started this whole crazy ride.

All the work that the incredible supplement had done to my body, and all the work I had put into it had vanished into history.

Gone.

What would the Dartmouth coaches say when I showed up to their practices, pathetically struggling to keep up with the rest of the recruited team? Would I lose my scholarship? Have my admission rescinded?

I forcibly ran those thoughts out of my mind as I drove home that night. I dropped my backpack on the floor of my room, and walked downstairs.

The television was on. This was unusual, especially for dinnertime. The kitchen counter lay cluttered with half-chopped vegetables, opened cans, and cooking utensils. The stove ran one burner, a pot of onions and celery frying atop it. My mother, clad in an apron and oven mitts, was standing in the living room.

In the living room, the news was blaring. My father sat on the couch, his eyes transfixed to the screen. My mother’s mouth hung agape. I had not seen my parents this scared since the 9/11 attacks.

As I walked towards the television, I saw exactly why.

A BREAKING NEWS tickertape ran across the bottom of the screen, with the heavily bolded caption, “HAZARDOUS SUPPLEMENT COMPANY SHUT DOWN”

The camera feed panned to an attractive, blond woman with a forced look of feigned concern on her face.

“The FDA has seized and shut down imports of the Chinese nutritional supplement company Engorge due to drastic and previously unrecorded side effects…”

My heart dropped a beat. Engorge… That’s the formula I was taking….

“…The most notable and deadly being an accelerated rate of aging. And we’re not talking about getting those wrinkles just a few years earlier. Symptoms brought about by Engorge accelerate the aging process by eighty to ninety times, even more advanced rates observed in some cases. Unknown ingredients contained in Engorge degrade the telomeres, or chromosome caps covering the ends of DNA, at an alarming rate, spiking the aging rate and bringing about drastic symptoms of advanced age up to seventy years early.”

The camera feed switched to a horde of reporters, firing off their cameras in a rapid salvo of flashes. Two uniformed police officers were leading a middle-aged Asian man to the door of a police car. One officer opened the door as the other pushed the man’s head down, guiding his figure into the suspect compartment.

“A string of cases across America has prompted the FBI to arrest the CEO of the China-based company, Qui-Ping Zhang, on hazardous material trafficking charges. The accelerated aging effects of Engorge have been directly linked to over thirty chemicals, lethal over long-term, randomly scattered throughout the powder and pill forms of the popular supplement. Zhang has claimed he was unaware of these ingredients, and Engorge is not responsible for the adverse effects it had on its users.”

I held my breath, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe, and didn’t want to believe, what I was hearing.

“Evidence has also shown that the aging effect does not stop, and may even accelerate following the cessation of the supplement.”

The video feed switched from the anchors to the inside of a hospital room.

“Cases such as this, documented in McLean, Virginia, show the accelerated aging effects of the Engorge supplement.”

An old man stared blankly into the camera, a thin strand of saliva hanging from the right corner of his motionless mouth. He looked as if he were ninety years old, or older. The surroundings and backdrop had the appearance of a nursing home or hospice care setting. A constant, shrill, electronic beep emanated from the electrocardiogram mounted upon the life support device by his bedside. The heart rate seemed to be dropping, the body’s life forces slowly draining. He looked quizzically at the camera, and slowly turned his head to the people surrounding his bed.

Several family members and friends, all wearing somber, sunken faces, surrounded him. Two appeared beside themselves—the camera panned over to show a middle-aged man and woman with their heads buried in their hands, occasionally looking up at their expiring relative. The room and the behavior of the people on it resembled a funeral. Somehow, this man’s facial contours looked strangely familiar… yet I couldn’t place a finger on it. But when the camera zoomed in, my fate was instantly and irreversibly sealed.

To the left side of the dying man’s face lay a deep, red scar.

IT WAS THE KID FROM THE GYM.

Within minutes, my phone exploded from my pocket with calls and text messages. My teammates frantically called for help, as if I were the one who could help them. I was trapped, as they were trapped. The phone rang incessantly for minutes on end, the signals of my friends shoving each other aside to reach me. Across the miles of expanse between our houses, I could almost hear their cries. I removed my phone from my pocket, and let it fall to the floor. The phone continued to ring and vibrate, its deathly hymn skittering across the hardwood.

I walked slowly past my frantic parents. Neither of them spoke as the light behind their eyes sank lower and lower, the corners of their mouths following suit. I think they knew just as well as I did.

I entered the bathroom, and turned towards the mirror. I stared into it, my mouth agape, my face filled with horror.

This can’t be happening.

At the young age of seventeen, I saw something unusual growing on my face.

I saw a wrinkle, sagging from the side of my mouth.