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“It wasn’t my surgery. It was the first time I was in an operation theatre, I passed out. Cold. It was me and a couple other students, and we were just supposed to stand there and watch the surgery, right? But I just—pow! Down for the count.”
Donovan blinks at me. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
He lets out a small grunt. “You were just a kid.”
I shrug. “I don’t know. It made me wonder, you know?”
“Wonder what?”
“Whether or not I was cut out to be a doctor.”
Donovan looks towards the back of the bar and he tugs his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger, thinking.
“What was it?” he asks. “I mean…what got under your skin about it?”
I wrap my hands a little tighter around my pint glass. I know it’ll warm the beer underneath, but my palms ache for the coldness right now. “I don’t know. I guess…the thought of seeing someone in pain like that.”
“That’s a good thing,” Donovan decides. “It’s good to not want to see people in pain.”
Speaking of pain. Donovan’s dark eyes look heavy. Deep.
“Your turn,” I tell him to try to break him out of it.
He thinks about it, then continues the game: “I was once admitted to the psych ward overnight. I’m allergic to bee stings. I believe in ghosts.”
I blink at that. He lists all three of them off casually, like he’s reciting a grocery list. Maybe a little hopefully, I try: “Is the…psych ward one a lie?”
He picks a bar peanut out of the bowl and throws it at me. “What kind of doctor believes in ghosts?”
“I do,” I persist. “I believe in ghosts.”
“You’ve seen brain scans. When the brain’s dead, that’s it. Dead. Dark. Empty.”
“And I’ve seen people come back from inexplicable situations—are we not going to talk about the psych ward?”
Donovan shrugs. “It was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“I was seventeen. And an idiot. And my problems seemed like the biggest problems in the world.”
I try to think back to seventeen-year-old Donovan. He and I had drifted apart then—no, more than drifted. We’d started getting really relentless with him then. He’d started summer with a lip ring and I remember my then-friend Nick going up to him and asking him if it was for sucking cock.
It’d made me cringe even then. But did I stop it? No.
Makes me feel like swallowing the worm in the tequila now.
I ask the question that’s going to keep me up at night: “Was it…because of something I did?”
He laughs, but it sounds like a hiss. “The great Jason King. The sun around which everyone orbits.”
“I don’t mean it like that. I just mean…I was an asshole.”
He hums in agreement and puts his drink to his lips.
“Did you…do something?” I ask. “Did you hurt yourself?”
