Page 98 of So Thirsty

The tires squeal as we take another tight turn, and the grumbling becomes beastly.

“Is something wrong?” I ask Henry.

He gets up and goes behind the curtain at the front. I hear him and Elisa whispering, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

“Ilie,” Naomi says, “what’s going on?”

“Sounds like problem,” he says with a shrug. “It will be okay.”

“Has this happened before?” Naomi asks. She ducks her head under the curtain to look out the window. “We’re on a bridge.”

There’s a loud bang, and it reminds me of the gunshots, the woman with the bite taken out of her face shooting at us, and I think of what Henry said about how as you get older everything has context—only, what if the context is unwanted? What if the context is composed of experiences you want to scrub from your memory with steel wool?

Elisa pulls the camper over. I join Naomi under the curtain and see train tracks. A short row of brick buildings, of abandoned storefronts. A ghost town.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“When are we?” Naomi says. “It looks like 1915. Do we have the right to vote here?”

“You know something? Everyone says now is bad time, but now is much better,” Ilie says, getting up and opening the camper door. “There were worse times to be alive.”

Naomi turns to me. “Well, fuck.”

Everyone gets out of the camper. Across the tracks there’s a coaling tower with a worrying lean, and beyond that nothing but woods. Spiky, winter-bare trees piercing the backs of rolling hills.

Elisa and Henry stand in front of the camper, which is now smoking.

“Wonderful,” Tatiana says flatly, and I wonder why she didn’t go with Miri and Costel, or anywhere else. She lowers her voice to a whisper, and I think she says, “Not here. Not this place again.”

Ilie, who is typically brimming with happy-go-lucky enthusiasm, grows tense. He looks over his shoulder, pivots, looks, pivots, looks. His nervousness is severely unsettling.

“Is there…” Naomi starts, pawing at her throat, and suddenly I feel the pinch in my own throat sharpen. I’ve been thirsty for the last hour or so but have been too shy to ask for the blood that I know is in the cooler.

I imagine some do-gooder at a blood drive thinking they were saving innocent lives. I suppose in a way they were, by satiating our thirst. Still, I doubt this is what they had in mind.

Ilie scales the side of the camper and retrieves the cooler from the storage up top.

“We drink first,” Tatiana says, slipping her arm into the cooler and taking out a bag of blood. “The new ones won’t be able to stop once they start.”

Henry tosses her his spile, and she punctures the bag, then takes only a sip before passing it to Elisa, who also takes just one sip. Naomi pants beside me, shuffling from side to side, forward and backward. She can hardly contain herself. Her thirst.

It is difficult to be patient when it’s right there. When you can smell it.

Ilie takes two gulps, then Henry. He watches me while he drinks. Holds eye contact.

He passes it to me, and I want it—I want it badly—but Naomi’s practically whimpering, and the last time I drank first, things ended poorly.

So I hand the bag to Naomi. She falls to her knees as she sucks it dry.

“What did I tell you?” Tatiana says, flipping her hair over her shoulder like a high school mean girl.

Elisa, Ilie, and Henry begin speaking to one another in a language I don’t understand. Tatiana goes up to one of the storefronts, puts her face to the window. Naomi remains on the ground, clinging to the empty bag of blood. I turn toward the train tracks, which go on and on until they vanish into the night. I start to walk them, gravitating toward something, or to the nothingness. Toward the quiet. Away from the tension orbiting the smoking camper. Away from the cooler. Away from Naomi, the satisfaction of her bloodlust somehow amplifying the denial of mine.

I balance on one rail like I’m walking a tightrope. Focusing on not falling means I’m not focusing on my thirst. On how much I regret passing the bag to Naomi. On how my skin itches because it’s dry. Because I’m dry. My insides feel brittle.

The voices and the smell of smoke fade behind me. I keep walking. I hold my arms out to help me balance. I watch my feet.

The rustle of branches catches me off guard and I slip, stumble off the tracks.