Now Is Not the Time to Panic(11)

“There,” he finally said. “That’s it.”

“It’s done?” I asked, not quite sure of myself, of us.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But maybe.”

“We made it,” I said, like I couldn’t quite believe it, even though it was just this little piece of paper.

“But nobody will know,” he reminded me. “Just you and me.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“But we have to do something to make it ours,” he said. He reached into his zippered bag of art supplies and got an X-Acto blade, which made me stiffen a little, shift my body away from his, hovering over the blade.

“Blood,” he said, because of course he did. What else did we have, two stupid teenagers, but the blood inside of us?

“Blood?” I replied. Like I said, I wasn’t big on being touched, especially not by sharp objects.

“On the page,” he said. “It’s symbolic, right? Is it a metaphor? Wait, what’s a metaphor?”

“Not blood,” I answered, though what did I know?

“It feels right,” he admitted, rolling the blade between his fingers.

“Okay, then,” I said, deciding to trust him. And Zeke pressed the blade against the tip of his finger, and I stared at the way the skin resisted it. I felt dizzy. Finally, the blade pushed through the skin, and he made this little gasp, and then there was nothing. Just a second or two or nothing, and then, like it was being conjured, like a magic trick, this little bubble of blood rose to the surface. He set the blade down and squeezed his finger until the blood started to drip down his finger.

“Now you,” he said. I hesitated. “It doesn’t hurt,” he told me, and I believed him.

I took the blade, held it up to my left middle finger, and pressed the blade into the skin. But my hand slipped a little, or maybe I got scared at the last second, because I dragged the blade down the length of my finger, opening it up, and blood came so fast that I felt like I was going to pass out.

“Oh, shit!” Zeke cried out, and I said, “I think I fucked it up,” but he grabbed the edge of his shirt and wrapped it around my finger, forgetting about his own wound. There wasn’t a lot of blood, not as much as it seemed at first, but it was enough that we got scared. We were still kids, afraid of getting into trouble. I was bleeding, but I didn’t know what to do next.

“On the paper,” he said, “like, drip it on the paper?” I could tell he didn’t know what he was doing, but I took my hand away from his grip and I shook my hand over the paper, like I was trying to dry it in the open air, and the blood went in all directions, little flecks of it on my face. Zeke really had to squeeze his finger to get anything, but eventually he got some on the paper, too. When it felt like I’d done enough, I put my finger in my mouth, that taste of iron on my tongue, and then I wrapped it up inside my shirt.

The blood, flecks and flecks of it, looked like stars in the sky, strange constellations, symbols and meanings. It looked beautiful, like we’d made a universe.

“We have to let it dry,” he said, like all of this was perfectly normal, “and then we can make copies.”

So we just sat there on the floor of the dusty, cramped garage, surrounded by things nobody wanted. I needed to get a bandage for my finger, but I didn’t want to move. And Zeke asked if he could kiss me again.

“My mouth tastes like blood,” I admitted.

“It’s okay,” he told me. So I let him kiss me. And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this moment, my finger bleeding, this boy’s beautiful and messed-up mouth on mine, a work of art between us. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine.

Once our mouths started hurting, we went back inside the house and got some bandages from the bathroom to fix me up as best we could. It probably needed stitches, but the cut was so exact that it felt like, with a little pressure, the skin would re-form, like nothing had happened. Zeke didn’t need anything, his blood already dried up, but he still put a little bandage on his finger. I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I’d be the one with a scar.

Then we went back into the garage and placed our work of art on the copy machine. We closed the lid and then, hesitating for a second, we both pushed the button at the same time. The machine whirred, rumbled, and I thought that maybe all that would come out would be this curling black smoke, but no, it was just our picture, copied. Now we had two. It was already a little less special now, but maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe it doubled in power. Something had happened, that was all that mattered. We observed the copy, not quite the original, everything just a little blurry at the edges, a little more dreamlike. Nothing could be as perfect as the one we had made together, just the two of us. But it was okay. We just needed more of them.

“Ten copies?” Zeke said, and the machine hummed, time passed, and there were ten more copies.

“Maybe, like, ten more?” I offered, and Zeke nodded.

Ten more, and we felt the weight of the copies. It didn’t seem like enough.

“Fifty more?” he asked.

“A hundred, I think,” I replied.

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

“We can always make more, I guess,” I said, because, really, truly, I wanted a million of them now.