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“It’s cold,” the boy with the scar says, and Dave knows he is the one.
The boy cradles a blood bag between his hands, an unspoken prayer to the pound of flesh. He says it’s cold like it’s unexpected, like he wasn’t standing in front of icy silver doors, where rows of blood bags knelt quietly, sacrifices forgiven. He shouldn’t have been so handsome—no, not the boy with the scar on his chest, because his glasses are thick and his teeth protrude. But he smiles at Dave with his protruding teeth and his eyes shine even from the sallow fluorescent lights, and he’s likable, he’s so damned likable and Dave resents him for winning him over in two words, one minute, and a lost lifetime.
“See you got an O type there. Good hunting, mix that thing with Kool Aid and a slice of lemon for some class, sip with index on curvature and double pinkies up. Makes a great margarita,” Dave mumbles, and tries to hate him.
The boy with the scar wrinkles his nose and slides the blood bag gingerly back into the nest, disgusted and amused. Dave picks up the abandoned bag, and he thinks, it’s cold, before he sorts the bag back into order.
“Do you actually know what you’re doing? They all look the same to me,” the boy asks, eyebrow raised. Where he pinches a bag’s clear corner, the blood drains and flees, sinking like a glutton to the other side.
“I can tell the difference,” Dave starts, but the end collapses from his mouth, “Seventh sense, not even shitting you, lost the goddamn superpower lottery. I always know the person by their blood.”
“Seriously? You can tell the difference between all these bags of blood?” the boy asks, but Dave means what he says.
“Yeah. Between all these Dracula’s wet dreams in here,” and he sloshes a bag up and down inappropriately. He means what he says, but he can’t say what he means, that secret trapped inside his heart, unspoken words trapped within his sinews. He’s pop culture references, jagged edges without a point, battles without war, and a lingering sweetness struggling like a candlelit wick, because his brother is dead and he is left with bundles of blood, rows and columns to calculate a human is nothing but chemicals, and when they were cut, they would all bleed.
“Okay. Okay,” the boy repeats, and he grabs onto a bag with a careless flick of his wrist, juggling a bag of sacrifice and life and death. “Then, you have to tell me everything about this person. If you don’t, you’ll lose, and you’ll be a big loser.”
“Sure.” He bounces the bag up and down in his hand, and thinks, it’s cold.
“Oh, wait, is that yours? Did you—donate, or something? That’d be cheating, because of course you’d know yourself.” The boy hovers out his hand, but Dave can only shrug.
“I donated once,” he says, “But a long time ago.”
““Okay. Yeah, You can start,” the boy says, stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“Let’s get this show on the road.” Dave closes his eyes, and feels the blood, what ran through a human body, trickling down veins and pumping through the heart, before he finally says, “Girl.”
“That’s like easy mode for babies. Come on! Who is she like… right here?” The boy places a hand over his own chest, a gentle movement where his fingers spread like roots to cover his secret protectively. Dave rolls his eyes behind his shades, but the blood bank is quiet, with white walls and clear windows where the snow fluttered down the banks, a soft blanket over the rooftops. It had been snowing for days, a constant downpour, where the muted people of the town stared up at the sky with words melted from their lips, and a boy with the scar seeks refuge from icy roads in a cold blood bank, where Dave has been waiting without knowing.
“She’s young,” he says, “Spends too much time in her own head. Tentacle fetish, reads more books than living her life, she’s the adult who can’t have Trix. Headstrong, skull made of Teflon, but there’s no point of being brainy, because nobody gets what she says. All her little gray brain cells are chump change here.”
“Wow,” the boy says. “That’s so wrong.”
For the second time since he saw the boy, Dave is taken aback. His fingers hold onto the edge of the plastic bag for another second, but the boy is already tugging the blood away, making it too warm between his hot hands.
“You’re right that she’s a girl,” the boy says, “But she’s not some tragic figure, come on. Let’s see… she’s probably smart! Way smart, she’s gonna go a lot of places. And she’ll break the rules and she’s probably super cool. And responsible. She’s probably really funny, too. I think I’d like her, and you’d like her, too.”
“Optimistic,” and he can’t hate John. He thought he would hate him, but John’s words wrangle around his neck, his frigid joints warmed, and already, he can picture a lovely girl with dark lips and eyes, and he can imagine liking her with the shreds of his heart.
“You’re the one being all pessimistic,” the boy says, grinning. “My name is John.” The moment he says it, Dave thinks, of course. He feels like he’s known the boy’s name for years, but the melancholy has sunken too deep into his bones, so he shrugs, and sorts through the blood bags between the alphabet soup of letters.
“Dave.”
“Dave, the blood guy. I’m surprised,” John says, “that you can even tell the difference between all these. It’s all just… blood.”
“They’re not the same.”
“But it’s all red!” John picks up three more bags from the cooler, loading into his arm, careless because his brother did not die, “We’re all the same, really. When we get cut, we bleed. That’s from a Shakespeare movie.”
“These letters aren’t grades, dimwit. Everybody’s different, you can’t go mixing Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms, or you’ll go cuckoo for pot.”
“It looks the same,” John repeats, and his forehead wrinkles as he comprehends bags of sunken flesh and brittle bones, blood of the living neatly siphoned away in plastic bags next to blood of the dead. Dave loses his breath in half a mumble because they do look the same, and something in him crushes because of that, because John has ruined him in ten minutes, a handful of sentences, and a lost lifetime.
He thinks: this bag of blood belongs to a man who gave blood because he tries to do good and fails and picks his nose at night and dreams about calling his mother and every winter, he tries to save a snowball for the summer, and he always fails. He thinks: this bag of blood belongs to a boy who sold lemonade during the summer when he lived in a suburban drain, but he’s fallen through the spiderweb cracks of the sidewalk and he never knows his next meal but he wants to be remembered when he dies. He thinks: this bag of blood belongs to a woman who wakes up in the morning to stare at herself in the mirror, disintegrating herself into floating body parts, all flawed, before she eats toast and drinks orange juice and touches herself when she thinks nobody is watching. He thinks: they’re different, he knows they’re all different, because the blood burbling under his flesh poured into the drain and his brother died with cement under his legs and it’s different, but in those tiny bags, they look the same.
“They’re different,” he says, louder, but John has another bag in his hand.
“Who’s this?”
“A girl,” Dave says, before he can stop himself, but once he’s started, he can’t stop. “Gets herself into trouble, wades knee deep in shitty problems, oyster diving for pearls of crappy predicaments. She sleeps too much, a regular victim of narcolepsy, except she misses out everything that makes her real, she’s more like a character on your favorite sitcom, got her own Tiger from the Brady Bunch.”
“Wrong,” John says, and he can stop himself, but he’s smiling and doesn’t care, “You’re wrong again.”
“I’m not wrong, shithead.”
“You’re so wrong, dumbbell. Look, you’re right about the girl, a-gain,” John says, “but you’re wrong about almost everything else. Maybe she sleeps a lot, but she dreams a lot, too! She’s got a great imagination, and she’s super headstrong and adventurous and really cool, a lot cooler than you. She’s probably loads of fun, and she’d be my good platonic friend and maybe you would think about dating her, one day.”
“No,” Dave says, but he sees her in his mind already, the sleeping thin girl waking up in John’s words, her eyes a blossoming green, her smile wide and contagious, hair cascading down her back like ink.
“You wouldn’t date her?” John asks, slightly.
Dave almost answers, closing the refrigerated door, but he catches a glimpse of John’s eyes turning towards the blank ceiling. He thinks: John might like him. In the fifteen minutes, couplets of sentences, and a lost lifetime, he’s managed to trick John into liking him. John wouldn’t know if he likes Dave, too obtuse in his happy dreamy smiles, but Dave has a secret and John has a secret, and he has to be cruel to be kind.
“I wouldn’t date her,” he says with a slight emphasis, and the implication drifts through the frosty air. John’s cheeks warm a rosy red, spreading blotchy from his ears from where the cold has weaved a chalky web over his skin. John doesn’t know he likes him, he doesn’t know, but Dave knows, and Dave’s brother died a long time ago.
“Well,” John says, “It’s no use marrying a bag of blood, anyway. I wouldn’t go to your wedding. It’s better to marry a person of blood. Does your magic trick of reading blood—work on people, too?”
“Yeah. It does.”
“Can you read me?” John adopts a pleading expression, putting soft bellied puppies to shame, and Dave thinks about the things he could say. John stepped into the blood bank with snow dusting his hair and a stark silhouette drenching the muffled carpet, and he walked with long strides but carefully, carefully, an eternal balance to even his clumsiest steps, as if something inside of him always threatened to break. Dave thinks about his secret, and he kisses him.
He’s gentle, but John is all rough ends and broken bits, and something spills on the table and something breaks between them because John kisses back, fingers threading through messy hair, and Dave slips his hand underneath the half-tucked shirt to feel the warm skin, the exhale and inhale pressing stark against the ribcage, treading light circles over vulnerable flesh, limbs tangled together, fingertips running over where bone has fractured and mended and knit, running his finger to the sternum to feel the light puckered skin, thrumming echoing inside his head, rocketing from his ears, and he traces along the scar on John’s chest and bites down hard on his bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood, and their secrets are out.
John stares at him, glasses crooked and blood running down his lip. His eyes are wide, and the blood is small, but Dave watches the small splotch tremble. The color is dark and already staining, a crimson dusk resonating inside himself, and he can taste John’s blood in his mouth, already seeping into the ridges of his teeth and down the back of his throat, tongue curling from the thickness.
“I don’t understand,” John says brokenly, but he does understand.
“It was a long time ago,” Dave says. “My brother got into an accident, and he needed blood. But I wasn’t a match. Adoption will do that to you. But I was close, shit. I was so close, it was just a little bit off—it was close. Not that it mattered. Fuck, it doesn’t matter, didn’t matter in the end, he got blood and he died. It doesn’t matter.” His voice, ragged, and the blood bank shrank in his swirling vision. A single letter. That was all it took to make him a failure, to make the very blood pounding within his arteries the traitor to himself. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter. His brother lying on white sheets, clothes still stained in cement gravel, didn’t matter.
“But you donated your blood, anyway.” John sounds like he’s drowning, small and insignificant in the salty ocean barraging against his teeth, and Dave rests his head on his shoulder because he can’t hate him.
“I wanted to see,” he mumbles into the stiff collar. “I didn’t do it to save anyone, or to get a free meal. I just wanted to see.” He didn’t know what he wanted to see. All he could remember were the beams of the rafters above, the skeleton of the building looming above him, blood dripping into a small plastic bag, an informal affair to drain away his life, and he remembers the craving need collapsing his insides.
“I was gone for a few seconds, or something,” John murmurs. “During my heart surgery.”
Dave traces his fingers down the surgical scar again, because his secret was in his blood, and John’s secret was his broken heart underneath the scar.
“Are you disappointed?” John asks. “That I got your blood?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If it mattered, would you be disappointed?”
Dave doesn’t know what he was trying to find in his blood. He doesn’t know why his hand splays out like a perfect fit underneath John’s wrinkled shirt, and he doesn’t know why he feels like he understands, when he doesn’t. But he knows John can fix him, because he smiles because his blood pieced together his heart, and he knows it was his blood because John walks like something has broken inside of him, and Dave can see how to fix it, with soft walks in the snow and holding hands and promises on couches and he didn’t think he’d like the boy with the scar who once had his blood, but the white walls are cold and the snow falling outside is cold and the blood is cold.
“Are you cold?” he asks.
“No,” John says, but his fingers curl softly into his palm. He’s shivering, slightly, and Dave gently wraps his arms around him. But this time, he doesn’t open the scar to show the secret. He nestles his head into the crook of his neck, and breathes in the smell of gentler spring days, and thinks about the blood underneath John’s skin, the flush of his cheeks and ears, the way his heart skitters and jumps against his fingers, and he thinks he might be able to forgive himself for his own blood, because something inside him cannot hate the boy with the scar.
“You smell,” John mumbles, and Dave kisses him again to shut him up, and thinks, it’s warm.