Bleeder Read Free Page B

with half-hearted enthusiasm. “Everything’s going to work out. You’ll see.”
     
    She plasters me with kisses and holds back her tears while we huggood-bye. Dad stoically hugs me—wrapping his arms around my slender frame and then, with those same long thin arms, he sweeps my family away, and they are gone. I am alone, away from home, with my HIV.
     
    Immediately, I busy myself with unpacking. I fold my clothes in the drawers, store the snacks in the cupboard space, connect the wires for my stereo, and organize my books into milk crates—then I begin to hide my secrets: the 30cc syringes, the twenty-five gauge needles, my elastic tourniquet, my factor, and my AZT. I place my factor supplies underneath my bed and cover them with a towel. My clotting factor, however, must be refrigerated, so I wedge this behind a six-pack of Cokes, and although it can be seen, I have no other choice. I can only hope my roommate won’t ask too many questions. Yet the AZT is a problem. Its discovery would ruin me. I can’t keep this in the bathroom as I did at home, for I share my college bath with ten boys, any of whom could open my drawer and see the AZT bottle there, revealing immediately everything I seek to hide. I consider cloaking it underneath the bed along with the factor supplies, but the daily regime of dragging these pills out, morning and evening, would soon grow old. I rove my eyes around the room. The closet? No. Too accessible. The desk? No, though the pencil drawer has some promise. I squeeze the AZT bottle in my hands, its plastic unyielding in my tight clutch as I cast my eyes about the room for a safe hiding place. I spy my dresser, and I shove the AZT deep into a sock, it seeming safe for now.
     
    With my things unpacked and my secrets safely hidden, I rest beside the window at my desk and arrange my reference books—dictionary, thesaurus, word menu, guide to birds in America—before settling my view on the campus yard that is now wreathed in the soft pink of an evening sunset. Tall slash pines yawn into the dusk whose horizon begins to halo with the last thin rim of daylight. Then a last ribbon of sun catches through my window and hangs in a frail quiver before the dome of night is upon me.
     
     
    Before the first week of classes ends, I develop a knee bleed, another thing I must hide. “Bleed” is a hemophiliac’s jargon for what doctors call a hemathrosis: the accumulation of blood in the joint. The tissue underneath my right kneecap has grown soft and spongy and the skin gives and turns pink when Ipress my finger to it. If students saw my swollen knee, questions would be asked, and if I answered them honestly, said I had hemophilia, well . . . connections to HIV and AIDS might be made, and I can’t have that, so I must nurse myself in solitude.
     
    Bleeds also hurt and, when in the knees, make walking difficult.
     
    I buttress myself against the wall and various pieces of furniture as I limp gently to my door, lock it for privacy, then hobble to the refrigerator and remove my factor. Before infusing, it must come to room temperature, a process that takes about half an hour. Once, in a hurry and not letting it warm up, I infused with it fresh from the fridge, and soon I felt my heart turn into a block of ice, the freeze cooling up my vein and into the right atrium, right ventricle, left ventricle, left atrium then out, finally acclimating as it spread to my limbs and diffused with my blood. Now I know to let it warm first.
     
    After this, I retrieve the supplies hidden underneath my bed and draw up the clear medicine into a sterile syringe and position myself under a strong light to search for a vein. Minus the sterile needles, germ-free syringes, gauze pads, and alcohol swabs, as I pump my fist and search for a vein, I feel like a junkie. Like an addict’s veins, my own have become bruised and callused from constant dependence. Scarred and unreliable, they hide from my needle; collapse from