Free Bleeder by Shelby Smoak Page B

if you get a cold . . . or worse? What then?”
     
    “I just think I’m better off without AZT. That’s no way to live.”
     
    “But medicine has always saved you. Just look at your factor and what it’s done.” We reach the car and dip inside and fasten our belts and begin to drive off.
     
    “You know I love you, Son, and I just want you to be well. That’s all I ever want. I’m not going to cry anymore to you about this, but I really don’t agree with it. I wish you’d reconsider.”
     
    “Mom, I just can’t live like that. That’s not living.”
     
    “But I’m worried.”
     
    “And I’m worried, too.”
     
    We exit the parking deck into a clap of thunder and a dark sky falling with blue rain. I steer past the flooded hog lots and soaked meadows with the wipers squeaking along the windshield.
     
    I am lost in the thought of my life hanging in the balance; only hope swaddles me, for there is nothing other than AZT to save me.
     

THE SPLIT
     
     
    S EPTEMBER 1992 . J UNIOR YEAR . A NOTHER HEAT WAVE HAS LEFT THE COAST , dragging its humidity across the southern sands; now the temperature peaks in the high eighties instead of the nineties. I swim in the Atlantic where the water is cool enough to enjoy and not yet cold enough to prohibit entering it. I let the waves buoy me and allow the tide to tell me where to go.
     
    Last night Ana had called and said that she had found a ride to Wilmington for the weekend, and I suddenly felt a greater distance between us than our geography, for I told her to stay in Greensboro. I was busy; friends were coming to visit. We had had our summer together, and now I wanted more time for myself. I had explained this to her as we lay together on her parents’ couch at the end of summer, but I could tell that my feelings were not hers. She sobbed. She bleated that she missed me. And I tried to explain that I only wished to spend more time alone; that it had nothing to do with her, or our relationship; that I felt as if my time was a grain of sand sifting through a giant sieve; that I needed to be with me. But she did not understand then. And that is how we left it. Until last night. And now she’s upset.
     
    A roll of water buoys me. My feet lift from the sea floor. I drift along with the current: as aimless and unguided as the ocean sand that is pushed to shore and then pulled out again with the ebbing tide.
     
    William, visiting for the weekend, rises from his beach towel, strokes out to meet me, and stretches his body flat against the undulating water. He kicks into a coming wave. We swim. A brunette girl sunning herself on a float paddles nearby, and William asks me if I know her from school.
     
    “No,” I say.
     
    “Well, I wish you did.”
     
    “Me, too. She’s pretty.”
     
    “But you’ll know some girls at this keg party tonight, right?”
     
    “Probably. At least a few from my classes.”
     
    “And Ana? What about her? She coming?”
     
    “No. Not tonight.”
     
    “Really?” William paddles on his back. “I’m surprised. I bet you miss her right now. I bet you think about her all the time.”
     
    “I don’t.”
     
    “Ah . . . come on. You’re a romantic. You can admit it. You believe all that stuff you read.” William swims in a circle.
     
    “Most of what I read isn’t all that happy and romantic. It’s sad and full of desolation. Fitzgerald, for example. Besides, I think Ana and I are breaking up.”
     
    William pauses his backstroke, treads water. “Breaking up?”
     
    “Well, yeah. I told her I needed time for myself . . . Space.”
     
    “Ahhh. That’s one thing you should never tell a girl if you wanna get her pants off.”
     
    “Ha-ha. I just think I need to focus more on myself, my studies. It was getting too serious, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Mostly it just boils down to the fact that my feelings are not the same as hers. Not anymore.”
     
    “Does she know?”
     
    “Well . . . I told her