TBT #93: Blood Loss

Wendy stands on milkcrates when her phone starts to ring. She’s reaching up to get to the top shelf of the supply closet, looking for extra duotangs. The cell phone vibrates against her leg and startles her: her hand snaps to her side, her weight shifts back, she almost falls. But then she catches herself, digging her hand against the jagged metal edges of the supply shelf and pulling herself forward. She sighs deeply, grimacing in pain, and then laughs to herself, as you do when you narrowly avoid serious injury. She answers the phone quickly, now out of breath. It’s a voice she has not heard before.

Richard was Wendy’s first boyfriend. She dated guys before him, and even called some of them ‘boyfriend’, but that was high school and, for people like Rich and Wendy, high school doesn’t count. She was a red-haired girl with thin straight hair and freckles that stood out to her more than they did anyone else; he was a short guy with a buzzcut and glasses with a loud nasal voice that never seemed to stop. He was popular from the start.

The man on the voice is Don. He went to Wendy’s school. He knew them both. He speaks in somber tones, his voice dipping harshly between sentences. Wendy has trouble hearing him, though she’s not sure if it’s the voice or something else. She’s thinking of Richard now, and she hasn’t done that in years. Standing alone in the supply closet, she reaches her hand up to take her head in her hands. She smears blood on her cheek. She hadn’t even realized she was bleeding.

Back when she thought a lot about her relationship with Richard, Wendy used to compare it to a song. It was a good song, except for the intro and outro, which were overlong, belaboured and overwrought. Wendy hated Richard when she met him. He embodied everything she thought was fake: he always smiled, pretended to be interested in the most boring stories, would tolerate doing things he absolutely despised just to make a friend (or potential friend) happy. She looked at him and thought he was a hollow man, shunning real connection with people in favour of artificial acquaintances. And that’s how it started: with Wendy in her room, sketching angels and horses, listening to soft music, trying to ignore Richard’s booming voice out in the dorm hallway, rambling for hours about nothing, wasting his life.

She looks at the floor in horror. She’s bled across the tile pattern. Little red drops marking her path. She holds her hand in front of her face, staring at the gash running down the side of her hand where she grabbed the edge of the cabinet, as Donald — who was tall, lanky, weird and quiet — tells her how difficult it was to track her down, how most everyone she had known at school had lost touch with her. Wendy murmurs in agreement or apology and scans the supply shelf for something to stop the bleeding.

Neither of them remembered when things changed. Through fate or circumstance, Wendy and Richard developed into the same circle of friends, and began to talk. He didn’t seem fake to her. When he talked about her drawings or expressed an interest in reading those Strangers in Paradise books she kept lined up on her shelf neatly, it felt real. And then one night they kissed, somehow, in a dark room with a TV turned to static and the humming sound of an ice machine in the hall. Wendy didn’t hate Richard anymore. This was the good part of the song.

“We all knew it was coming,” Donald says, “but that didn’t make it any easier.” Fuck, Wendy thinks, staring at the empty first-aid shelf and then glancing back at her bloodied skin and the red pool on the floor near her feet. Desperate, she tears a package of paper open. It’s akward and difficult to do with only her left-hand. She shoves the white paper against her wound roughly as there is silence on the other end of the line. “Wendy,” Donald asks, “are you okay?”

Wendy did not believe in big romance. She never thought she’d have the kind of relationship where someone came into her life and swept her off her feet. She always thought it would be hard and trying and filled with effort and, with Richard, it often was, but in their best moments it was the kind of relationship she didn’t believe she could ever have. It was big. It swept her off her feet. He held her hand in the park, he leaned into her at stop lights, he played with her hair and told her she was pretty in the mornings and evenings when she felt so gross. He danced with her. They ran home together in the rain kicking through puddles. It was like it would never stop.

The blood stains the pages a deep crimson colour, showing no signs of slowing down. “Yeah, Don,” Wendy answers, still focused more on the bleeding than this man from her past. She buys herself some time: “I just don’t know what to say, is all.” She grabs more fresh white paper, letting the stained and folded sheets fall to the floor. They look like crumpled Rorschach tests spread across the supply room. One looks like a butterfly, one looks like a storm cloud, one looks like a young couple, most of them look like nothing.

Wendy loved Richard more than anything right up until the moment when she started to hate him. There was no grand gesture on either of their parts. There was no catalyst or impetus, no real event or action. Richard would spend weeks trying to explain it, trying to justify why he felt he needed to leave, why he couldn’t just continue dating Wendy forever. But it wasn’t about explanations for her. She just just saw this man, who she thought she knew, who she thought was real, changing and moving and leaving. And she wondered, then, if she had ever known him at all.

She’s wasting paper. She’s killing trees. What sort of example was this to set for her students. Donald’s still talking, telling her he’s sorry he couldn’t get in touch with her before the funeral. She sighs and leans heavily against the supply room wall, putting as much pressure as she can on her cut, as Donald tells her that Richard always remembered her fondly. That he valued what they had together and where it brought him. Wendy wishes the bleeding would stop. Then her thoughts turn and she begins to wonder why it does not hurt.

He stood in front of the door to her apartment looking disheveled. He let his hair grow out. He wore contacts now. He was obviously drunk, leaning awkwardly against the door frame, letting his head move far too much with every word. “I’m not here because I want you back,” he said to her, as she stood there in her nightgown, hair piled up in pigtails. “I just hate that we don’t even know each other anymore. I mean, shit, Wen, for three fucking years you knew me better than anyone. You were the most important part of your life. And now? Gone. And we can’t get that back.”

“His mother took it badly, of course — it’s always a shame when a parent outlives their child,” Donald talks. Wendy looks again at her hand and decides she needs real bandages. “Look, Donald,” she cuts him off abruptly. “I need to go. Thank you for calling me. Thank you for letting me know.” She hangs up before he can tell her that they should try and get together for lunch sometime.

“I’ve changed,” she said to Richard in her doorway. “You’ve changed. We don’t know each other at all anymore. Why should we try to make a friendship out of this?” Richard wasn’t making eye contact, his gaze fixed on the apartment behind her. She looked over her shoulder as if there might be something there. “You should just go. We both have our own lives now.”

She thinks only briefly about Richard, leaving the supply closet and heading to the principal’s office in search of first aid. As she hurries down the hallway, she runs into the janitor who stares open-jawed at the flesh wound on her hand and the trail of blood she’s leaving down the hall. He looks at her with deep concern in his eyes — he’s an elderly man with a moustache and olive skin, a near-perfect face for concern — but Wendy just smiles and continues on. “It’s okay,” she chirps. “It doesn’t hurt. I don’t care.”

Wendy saw Richard infrequently after that. He gave up on trying to be her friend. She’d see him in crowds around the city when they both still lived there. And then she moved, and she had no idea what became of him until today, when she found out he was dead.

The secretary in the principal’s office looks very concerned. The principal even comes out and looks at her carefully, worried that he may be out a teacher for the day. Throughout the examination and as the office secretary rolls biege athletic bandage around her hand, Wendy wears a soft smile, and tells everyone that it does not hurt.

Wendy liked it best when her and Richard would wake up together. She never thought she’d be able to tolerate sharing her bedroom with someone until she met him.

Wendy’s bleeding stops soon after the bandage is applied. She starts to walk back to her classroom before realizing what she left behind. She walks back to the supply closet, her heels clopping on the floor, following her own red trail. Once there she stands on the milk crates again, more carefully this time, and retrives what she came for in the first place. The janitor pulls into the room with a mop and bucket as she’s about to leave. He gives her that same look of concern.

Wendy smiles and tells him it was nothing, waving her hand in his face.