by Adam Rex
“Bangor’s farther, kid,” said the moderator.
Doug sunk into his chair. “Let’s go,” he said to Jay. “Panels suck.”
“You don’t want to sit awhile? You look tired.”
Doug answered by rising and walking out the side door while a fan asked the panel about an obscure Superman versus Muhammad Ali comic from the seventies.
“Sorry you didn’t win,” said Jay when he’d caught up. “I think Bangor is farther, though.”
“I don’t care, I just wanted the ring to sell it. I didn’t really expect to win. Nobody ever wins anything.”
Twenty minutes later Jay won a new shirt for shouting, “Crisis on Infinite Earths!” a fraction of a second faster than seven other boys. It read, MY MOM AND DAD WENT TO THE NEGATIVE ZONE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. By twelve o’clock it was covered by thirty-one free buttons. “I’m having a really good time,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
Doug didn’t answer. Jay looked him in the face for maybe the first time in an hour, and turned pale.
“We should…” he said, “we should find you somewhere to sit down. And get something to eat.”
Doug nodded.
“What about a milkshake?” Jay asked when they found an empty table near the snack bar. “Or, like, a smoothie?”
“That sounds…like the worst thing in the world,” said Doug. “Seriously, if I…if I’d had an appetite for anything these past weeks, I’d have eaten it. I’d eat my own hand if it sounded good. I don’t want anything anymore.”
“You look a little better.”
“It helps to sit down. Away from everyone else.”
Jay flinched as someone at a far table shouted “‘UP QAGH!” and thumped his chest.
Doug and Jay turned to watch the largest of four Klingons pound the tabletop with his world-shattering fist, bouncing half-eaten French bread pizzas off paper plates made translucent by grease.
“Sooo,” said Doug, “why so many Klingons, do you think? I mean, there have been Star Trek comics and all, but they’re not popular or anything.”
“I think they just have the outfits all ready from the last Trekkie con,” said Jay. “So they’re coming here and they think, why not show colors?”
“My party wants your ketchup,” said a very short Klingon who was suddenly at Jay’s flinching shoulder.
“Oh,” said Jay. “Sure, you…We’re not using it.”
The short Klingon held the ketchup bottle aloft and turned to address his table.
“Qettlhup!”
“QETTLHUP!” the others answered in chorus.
The Klingon departed.
“I gotta go,” said Doug. “Can we go? I just want to lie down for a while. I thought here at the con I could take my mind off it, but—”
Jay’s face fell, and Doug’s gut twisted again. He understood how Jay felt—he didn’t want to have to leave either. This was where they belonged. These were their people. The San Diego Comic-Con was a mystical city that only appeared for a few days each year, like Brigadoon.
“There’s still three more days,” said Jay, brightening a little. “I’ve heard it’s best to buy old comics on Sunday. Maybe we can figure something out for you tonight. Find you some blood.”
“Gah!” moaned Doug. “That’s the frustrating part! It’s everywhere! It’s all I can smell! People full of it! And do you know how many characters I’ve seen today with blood in their names? There’s Bloodstorm, Bloodaxe, Bloodlust, Blood-hawk, Baron Blood, Baroness Blood, Bloodhound, the Blood Brothers…Even the superhero on that kid’s bag over there looks like a big drop of blood with a cape.”
Jay looked. Doug looked again. It was a big drop of blood with a cape. It said “Type O Hero!” on the side above the Red Cross logo. Jay jumped out of his seat.
“Excuse me,” he said to the kid. “What’s that bag about?”
“It’s full of free comics. If you give blood outside.”
“Outside?”
“At the bloodmobile.”
Bloodmobile, thought Doug. He could drive that around all day.
4
QUICK, ROBIN…TO THE BLOODMOBILE!
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to miss—a long white-and-red school bus parked on the broad sidewalk where the line had been that morning. It must have pulled up after the convention started.
“What are we going to do?” said Jay.
“We’re both going to—ow—we’re going to say we want to donate,” said Doug from under his poncho. “You’ll go first, and I’ll scope out the bus, try to figure out where they keep the blood. Then you create a diversion, and I make off with a jar or two.”
“They put it in jars?”
Doug adjusted his hood. “I don’t know. A jar or a tube or—It doesn’t matter.”
They stopped next to the bus, near the open donor entrance. There was no line here. In the shade, Doug could manage to lift his chin a little and see Jay’s troubled face.
“What kind of diversion?” said Jay. “What should I do?”
“I thought of the creating-a-diversion part,” Doug said. “Can’t you at least come up with your own diversion?”
Jay thought about it a moment with a Charlie Brown look on his face.
“I could…freak out,” he said. “I could pretend I don’t like needles.”
“There you go. Perfect. And can you still throw up at will like you could in sixth grade? That would be good.”
They stepped up and into the bus. A woman in Muppet-print scrubs came to meet them.
“Will you be donating today?” she said, then frowned. “Are you both eighteen?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can I see some ID?”
“WE DON’T HAVE ID,” said Jay, loudly. “’CAUSE WE’RE CANADIAN. WE DON’T USE ID…THERE. AND THAT’S WHY WE LOOK SO YOUNG. ’CAUSE WE’RE CANADIAN.”
Doug stiffened. Jay sounded crazy. Doug tried to look extra sane to even things out. The woman raised an eyebrow.
“And you’re not maybe just trying to donate to get the free bag of comics?”
“Oh, no, of course not,” said Doug. “Free comics? No, you don’t even have to give us those. We just want to help out.”
The woman’s face softened. “Well, all right, I guess. Who’s first?”
“He is,” said Doug.
“You can have a seat by the donor beds while I ask your friend some questions and check his vitals,” she said to Doug, then led Jay toward a private room the size of a closet.
“What part of Canada you from, honey?”
“THE LEFT PART,” said Jay.
Doug sat down in a plastic chair. There were two thin beds in the bloodmobile, and one of them was occupied. The boy had a needle and blood-filled tube snaking out of his arm and into a plastic bag attached to the bed. He was attended by another woman in scrubs and gloves.
“Whoop, you done already,” she told him. “You fast.”
“I’ve been drinking a lot of water,” the boy said.
Inside the private room, Doug could hear Jay having his blood pressure checked and his temperature taken. Then the woman in Muppet scrubs launched into a questionnaire. “How do you feel today?”
“…Okay.”
“Have you had a tattoo in the last twelve months?”
“No.”
“Have you spent a total of three months or more in the United Kingdom since 1985?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had sexual contact with another man, even once?”
“W-what? No.”
“Have you ever paid for sex or accepted money or drugs for sex, even once?”
“No. What is that?”
“Just a little rubbing alcohol, honey. I have to prick your finger to test your blood. Do you now use or have you ever used intravenous drugs?”
The other woman by the beds pinched off the boy’s tube, removed the needle, then pressed cotton to the wound and told him to hold it there with his arm straig
ht up.
A voice called out from the private room where Jay had gone.
“Kendra? Can you…Kendra, can you come here?”
“Just a sec,” said Kendra as she removed the full blood bag from the bed and placed it on a nearby counter, right next to another bag.
“Kendra!”
Here we go, thought Doug.
“All right, all right,” Kendra answered, and turned to the boy. “You just lie there a minute till I get back.”
She passed Doug and joined Jay and Muppet scrubs in the little room. “He’s a fainter, help me lift him,” said Muppet scrubs, and Doug had to admire Jay’s dedication to the role. If he’d only thrown himself into last spring’s My Fair Lady auditions like that, he could have played Henry Higgins for sure.
The door closed and Doug was alone with the blood and the boy with his arm in the air. He leaped from the chair to the counter, paused for a reverent moment over the plump red bags, considered biting into one right then and there. Instead, he tucked a bag under each arm and turned.
The boy on the bed studied him. “Hey…that’s my blood,” he said.
Doug hadn’t intended to hiss just then, couldn’t remember thinking it was a good idea, but then suddenly he was hissing, with an itch in his gum line that told him his fangs were bared.
“Shit,” said the boy.
Doug bolted for the door of the bloodmobile but found his way blocked by the two women and a drowsy-looking Jay. Again he showed his teeth.
“Don’t you hiss at me,” said Kendra. “What you doin’ with blood that don’t belong to you?”
Doug froze, then closed his mouth. He wondered briefly if anyone in the history of the world had ever been asked that question before. There didn’t seem to be a right answer. He hissed again, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“I aks you a question. You better put that blood down and stop your hissin’. And take those Dracula teeth out your mouth.”
Jay began inching toward the door. The other woman leaned into Kendra.
“He’s trying to steal the blood.”
“I know he is,” said Kendra.
“He thinks he’s a vampire maybe.”
“I’ve taken blood from a stormtrooper and a Superman and at least three cartoon characters today,” said Kendra. “He can think he’s whatever he want, long as he TURNS HIS ASSFERATU AROUND AND PUTS BACK THAT BLOOD.”
Jay made a run for it. He threw himself down the steps at the school bus door, and Doug thought, School bus.
“Okay,” he said, returning to the counter. “I’m just putting it back.”
Kendra nodded. Doug hesitated. The boy on the bed gaped at him.
Then Doug ran for the back of the bus, and his heart lifted when he saw it—the emergency exit. He didn’t know a student who hadn’t thought of using it at least once on the way to school, at a stoplight…maybe the stoplight right by the miniature golf place on Route 30.
“Oh no you don’t,” said Kendra, behind him.
Doug fumbled with the latch on the door, trying not to lose his armpit grip on the fat red tubers that were getting slick with sweat. He could feel heavy footsteps through the floor behind him, but then the door swung free—and he fell, like a turd out of the ass of the bus, to freedom.
5
AMERICAN INDIAN
FOR THE THIRD TIME since the plane landed Sejal fished the curling photograph out of her backpack and studied it. She walked as she looked at her host family, posed and smiling before a softly blotchy blue backdrop. Everyone wore a different kind of sweater. The father was tall with large-framed glasses and a tawny sweater vest the color of chinaberries. The mother’s wide frame was seated below him, pink skinned and in a pink-on-pink cardigan and sweater ensemble—so round and bright that Sejal’s father had taken to calling her “gum ball woman” when Sejal’s mother needed cheering. The photo family’s oldest daughter, who was now away at college, wore a lavender sweater. Sejal panicked briefly as she realized she could not remember the girl’s name. She went to a college out of state, and wasn’t expected to be around much during Sejal’s stay, so her name hadn’t been important enough to stick. At least she remembered Catherine’s—the other daughter, the daughter who was Sejal’s own age, wore a black-and-white striped sweater two sizes too large for her. The tips of her fingers looked like tiny pink tongues, barely emerging from the gaping mouth of her sleeve to taste the cotton candy fuzz of her mother’s shoulder. Her face was pale, no makeup. Her dark blond hair was long in front and shaved on the sides in a style Sejal had never seen before.
“She does not want to be there,” Sejal’s father had said, with what would prove to be his characteristic insight. “Look at her hand. I don’t think she even touches her mother’s shoulder.”
“Felu, stop,” her mother said then. “You want to turn Sejal against them before they even have a chance.”
“Did I arrange this photo?” he protested. “The evidence is all there. I’m not the one who killed this poor girl and stuffed her and posed her in this clearly unrepresentative manner. Look at her.”
Mother laughed. Sejal looked. Catherine’s tight smile seemed suddenly like rigor mortis compared to her family’s sunny grins.
Now, in the airport, Sejal walked out past security and looked up from the same photo, expecting at least three of its four subjects to be standing there smiling and half smiling, perhaps with the softly blotchy blue backdrop somehow behind them, and Catherine posed awkwardly like she’d been placed in the wrong exhibit. A crow among canaries.
There were families here, but none of them the right family. There was a strangely madeup teenage girl who appeared to have already found the passenger she was meeting, and a group of blond girls in matching sorority sweatshirts holding a handmade sign that read WELCOME BACK, CASSIE!
Sejal stood still as fellow passengers streamed past her, pressed too close, their swinging arms and hot breath fanning a guttering panic in her chest. She had been traveling for eighteen hours and she felt worn and thin. What now? Would they be waiting in the baggage claim instead? But her host father, Mr. Brown, had been so insistent. Weirdly, overcautiously insistent. In his email, and in all caps, he’d assured her that they would BE WAITING JUST OUTSIDE SECURITY, IN A-WEST TERMINAL, RIGHT NEXT TO THE CASH MACHINE NEXT TO THE VIDEO SCREENS THAT SAY “ARRIVALS,” and that they would LOOK LIKE THE PEOPLE IN THE PHOTO. There were two people standing by the cash machine, but they were only the teenager and a female passenger from Sejal’s flight. Sejal approached.
Both girls turned. One was a fellow Indian, the other a girl with dangerous-looking bottle-black hair and thick eyeliner. Blue lips. Pale skin. Black everything else.
“Oh, thank goodness,” said the Indian girl in Hindi. “Do you speak English? This very odd Amrikan girl will not leave me alone—do you know how to tell her that I don’t want any pamphlets or whatever it is she’s selling?”
Sejal turned to the American girl. “Are you…Catherine?” she asked.
Catherine glanced at the other passenger in confusion, then back to Sejal.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Please don’t tell my parents I did that,” said Catherine as they walked to baggage claim. “It took so long to get them to let me pick you up myself. I had to promise to rake leaves.”
Sejal smiled, pleased to be worth bargaining for.
“I did not know you at first either,” she said, looking down at the photo in her hands. “You look different than your picture.”
“Oh Jesus. Don’t look at that.” She snatched it from Sejal and ripped it in half. “I thought I’d gotten all of these.”
Catherine threw the pieces of family to the floor, then stopped.
“Sorry,” she said.
She took two steps back, picked up the pieces, and presented them to Sejal.
“Sorry, that was yours.”
Sejal took the two halves and reconnected them in her hand.
“It is fine.”
“No, I’m acting stupid. You’re going to think I’m stupid.”
“I am not. I think you are…interesting. I think you have interesting clothes.”
Way to go, thought Sejal. Well said. She’s going to think I’m insulting her. But Sejal did find her clothes interesting. They looked like she felt. She thought with some embarrassment about the skirt and sweater outfit she was wearing now, as though she’d meant to audition for a spot in the Brown family portrait.
Catherine watched her face as they mounted the escalator. Sejal tried to look as earnest as possible, and after a moment Catherine smiled.
“Well, I like your…sweater,” she said. “Really yellow.”
They held each other’s gaze for another moment, then laughed.
“Thank you, Catherine.”
“Ooh. Call me Cat. My parents won’t, but…I was hoping you would.”
“Of course.”
They found the baggage carousel that corresponded with Sejal’s flight and staked their claim to a small gap between other passengers. For reasons she didn’t entirely understand, Sejal did not look forward to seeing her luggage. She had already claimed and rechecked it twice, the last time being in New York’s JFK airport only a few hours ago, and each time she had seen her big pink bag it had seemed less like a thing that belonged to her, more like something that should have stayed in Kolkata with the mess she’d left behind. She considered grabbing another bag, one of the nondescript black ones that just now thumped onto the conveyor, and taking her chances with someone else’s affairs.
“India seems so cool,” said Cat.
“Truly?”
“Sure. I guess, right? At least it’s not here. I don’t know why you wanted to come here.”
Sejal had not often thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.
