Could You Spare My Blood?

[Maraoone]

He'd always wanted to be wrong, really.

Every time Mattie flinched at the glance of another classmate, every time he squirmed at their undivided attention, it was out of fear of what they could do to him. People were scary. Infinitely complex, unpredictable, an ever-shifting mess of emotions and motivations at the core of it all. He could try to have the same conversation in his mind with them again and again and sometimes, they'd never give the same answers twice. Most interactions in the real world went by without note, of course, but there were always those that ended on a kinda sour note. A joke he forgot to reply to, a confession he let pass by unnoticed, a too-loud laugh, some misstep on his end that he knew would leave the other person thinking less of him.

It was a shame too because, when he'd first realized what his gift was, age seven, it was because he'd been taking an exam under Ms. Robinson, addition, and, he'd stayed up all the way to ten in the evening watching Spongebob, so he'd forgotten to ask his dad for help practicing, and now he was sat at his desk knowing shit-all. So, he sat there, strongly regretting his choices in life, wishing he could just go back in time and ask his classmate beforehand what the answers were. And he did. And, for a few blissful days, he thought he had all the answers. All the answers to all the tests in the world. To anything, really.

Of course, then the teachers found out and placed him in his little exam room by himself and stuff, but that didn't matter too much. As long as you gave Mattie a minute or so to himself, he could give you the answer to anything, at any time.

And then he handed a phone to Dad one day and Dad started crying and fighting with Mom every day, and he was never, ever able to find an answer as to how to fix it. He'd think and think and think for ages, and sometimes a thing would work, but he'd try that thing again next flashback, and it wouldn't work.

And, that was how it went from then on. He could give you the answer to any quiz, any test, any bar-trivia little factoid, but when it came to things that actually mattered? When it came to finding a boyfriend, girlfriend, any friend? When it came to being there for Dad in the days, weeks, months after the divorce? He never knew shit.

It was so, so easy to fuck things up. So if he never tried at all, then he would never fuck anything up. Simple as.

But, there had always been some tiny part of him that had hoped for something better. He'd wanted to be wrong about people being scary. Like, maybe it was easy to find a companion in life, maybe there was some little trick, some TED talk he hadn't watched that'd make all of it as easy as breathing air. Maybe his classmates weren't so bad, after all.

So anyways, Cyrus was dead, and Mattie was alone now.

((Mattie Wilkinson continues from What Remains of Cyrus Vähi))

The last remnants of yesterday's dinner sluiced from his lips. He stood hunched over some anonymous patch of dirt, maybe the exhaustion from sprinting wringing his guts dry, maybe the inexplicable nausea that had gripped him since the announcement doing that. Who knew?

He wished he'd brought Andrew with him.

It had only occurred to him to bring him along when he was around a hundred meters or so from the group. He'd looked back, and saw the tall boy just hanging around the scene that had developed, and he'd really wanted to shout at him to come with, just run back and drag him away from it all. But, the thought of running back there felt roughly akin to the idea of running back into a burning building.

There was this bit of irrational anger that had welled up in him, thinking about that moment. How those two guys wandered up to them and started hashing it out right then and there like it was any of their fucking business.

And, at the same time, while they were getting into it, the two guys, Cyrus lay there in the background of it all, killed and resurrected and killed again. Someone among them had thrown him over the fence. Someone among them had burned off the squirrel boy's eye. And, with Cyrus, no one had been around to tell him to stop fighting, no one had been around to tell them it didn't have to be like this, and now it was like this. He'd stepped into the whole thing with Cecilia and the tiger boy because he didn't want anything bad to happen, but also because, maybe, some part of him had thought that there was no way it would. And so there was no risk. But now Cyrus was dead, now all of these petty little squabbles they had, they all had these life-or-death stakes, this petty squabble happening in front of him then about Moose and Mercy and Lincoln and whoever the fuck, now that had life-and-death stakes. And he was stuck in the middle of it.

It didn't have to be like this, but it was. It was such a low bar to pass, the common human standard of, like, not letting things get to this point, of not giving in to the terrorists this quickly, not fucking killing your classmates, and yet they'd all collectively failed to meet it. It kinda felt like failing a group project, he noted with a wry smile, between one dry heave and the next.

And, all this time, Cecilia was running away from it all, and no one aside from Mattie had an idea of what was up with her, why she was the way she was. Cecilia was running away, and these two guys were fighting away, and there was this overriding feeling of you're about to die here, and so he had run.

And that was how he ended up here, in the middle of these flatlands, alone, facing another cold, cold night beneath the open sky.

His diaphragm contracted under the last heave, and then that was that.

There were some sticks in his hand, dried sagebrush, that had left tiny little dents in the flesh of his palm. They were supposed to be his contribution on the little tinder-gathering quest the tiger boy had led them on, a couple hours earlier. He hoped he was okay. He hoped Andrew was okay. He hoped they'd made it out.

He looked back at where he'd come from, at what laid in front of him. Desert all the same. There was a building somewhere in the distance, but he felt the same about it now as he did then. People were there, people were scary. Best not to take any chances.

He made his way to another bush, distant from the pile of vomit, and set up his sleeping bag before settling in for the night. He wanted to do more, make more progress in finding Cecilia, in figuring out a way out of here, but the sprint had drained everything out of him. He didn't have it in him to think anymore, for today.

So, he snuggled himself in. He thought of his dad, and he thought of Cecilia, before he slept.

((Mattie Wilkinson continues in Inertia))