I felt fine the next day at school, until Daisy and I were on our way to the bank. I was driving, and Daisy was talking about how her most recent fic had sort of gone viral in the Star Wars fan-fiction world and how she had tons of kudos on it and how she’d had to stay up all night to finish this paper on The Scarlet Letter and how she could maybe finally get some sleep now that she was “retiring” from Chuck E. Cheese’s, and I felt fine. I felt like a perfectly normal person, who was not cohabitating with a demon that forced me to think thoughts I hated thinking, and I was just feeling, like, I’ve been better this week. Maybe the medicine is working, when from nowhere the thought appeared: The medicine has made you complacent, and you forgot to change the Band-Aid this morning.
I was pretty sure I had actually changed the Band-Aid right after waking up, just before I brushed my teeth, but the thought was insistent. I don’t think you changed it. I think this is last night’s Band-Aid. Well, it’s not last night’s Band-Aid because I definitely changed it at lunch. Did you, though? I think so. You THINK so? I’m pretty sure. And the wound is open. Which was true. It hadn’t yet scabbed over. And you left the same Band-Aid on for—God—probably thirty-seven hours by now, just letting it fester inside that warm, moist old Band-Aid. I glanced down at the Band-Aid. It looked new. You didn’t. I think I did. Are you sure? No, but that’s actually progress if I’m not checking it every five minutes. Yeah, progress toward an infection. I’ll do it at the bank. It’s probably already too late. That’s ridiculous. Once the infection is in your bloodstream—Stop that makes no sense it’s not even red or swollen. You know it doesn’t have to be—Please just stop I will change it at the bank—YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT.
“Did I go to the bathroom before lunch?” I asked Daisy quietly.
“Dunno,” she said. “Um, you sat down after us, so I guess?”
“But I didn’t say anything about it?”
“No, you didn’t say, ‘Greetings, lunch tablemates. I have just returned from the bathroom.’”
Felt the tension between the urge to pull over and change the Band-Aid and the certainty of Daisy thinking me crazy. Told myself I was fine, this was a malfunction in my brain, that thoughts were just thoughts, but when I glanced at the Band-Aid again I saw the pad was stained. I could see the stain. Blood. Or pus. Something.
I pulled into an optometrist’s parking lot, took off the Band-Aid, and looked at the wound. It was red at the edges. The Band-Aid had dried blood on it. Like it hadn’t been changed in some time.
“Holmesy, I’m sure you went to the bathroom. You always go to the bathroom.”
“Doesn’t matter now; it’s infected,” I said.
“No, it’s not.”
“You see this red?” I pointed at the inflamed skin on either side of the wound. “That’s infection. That’s a big problem.” I rarely let anyone see my finger without the Band-Aid, but I wanted Daisy to understand. This was not like the other times. This was not irrational worry, because dried blood was unusual, even for when the callus was cracked open. It meant the Band-Aid had been on for way too long. This was not normal. Then again, didn’t it always feel different? No, this felt different from the other differents. There was visible evidence of infection.
“It looks like your finger has looked every single time you’ve ever worried about it.”
I squeezed some hand sanitizer onto the cut, felt a deep, stinging burn, unwrapped a new Band-Aid, and wrapped it around my finger. I sat there for a while, embarrassed, wishing I were alone, but also terrified. Couldn’t get the redness and the swelling out of my mind, my skin responding to the invasion of parasitic bacteria. Hated myself. Hated this.
“Hey,” Daisy said. She put a hand on my knee. “Don’t let Aza be cruel to Holmesy, okay?”
This was different. The sting of the hand sanitizer was gone now, which meant the bacteria were back to breeding, spreading through my finger into the bloodstream. Why did I ever crack open the callus anyway? Why couldn’t I just leave it alone? Why did I have to give myself a constant, gaping open wound on, of all places, my finger? The hands are the dirtiest parts of the body. Why couldn’t I pinch my earlobe or my belly or my ankle? I’d probably killed myself with sepsis because of some stupid childhood ritual that didn’t even prove what I wanted it to prove, because what I wanted to know was unknowable, because there was no way to be sure about anything.
It’ll feel better if you reapply the hand sanitizer. Just a couple more times. It was 3:12. We had to get to the bank. I took off the Band-Aid, applied hand sanitizer, reapplied a Band-Aid. It was 3:13. Daisy said, “Do you want me to drive?” I shook my head. Started Harold up. Put him in reverse. Then back in park.
Took off the Band-Aid, applied more hand sanitizer. It stung less this time. Maybe that means they’re mostly dead. Or maybe it means they’re in too deep already, that they’ve gotten through the skin into the blood. Just look at it one more time. Does it look like the swelling is getting better? It’s only been eight minutes too soon to tell. Stop. It was 3:15. “Holmesy,” she said. “We need to go. I can drive.”
I shook my head again, put the car into reverse, and this time succeeded in getting moving. “I wish I understood it,” she told me as I drove. “Like, does it help to be reassuring or is it better to worry with you? Is there anything that makes it better?”
“It’s infected,” I whispered. “And I did it to myself. Like I always do. Opened the callus up and now it’s infected.” I was that fish, infected with a parasite, swimming close to the surface, trying to get myself eaten.
—
When we finally got to the bank, I stood in the back while Daisy introduced herself to a teller, and then we were escorted to a glassed-off private office in the back, where a thin woman in a black suit placed our cash into a machine that shuffled through the bills, counting them. We filled out a bunch of forms and then had brand-new bank accounts, complete with debit cards that would arrive in seven to ten days. The woman gave us five temporary checks to use until our real ones arrived, encouraged us not to make any major purchases for at least six months “while you learn to live with this windfall,” and then started talking about the places we could put the money—college savings accounts or mutual funds or bonds or stocks—and I was trying to pay attention to her, but the problem was I wasn’t really in the bank. I was inside my head, the torrent of thoughts screaming that I had sealed my fate by not changing the Band-Aid for over a day, that it was too late, and now I could feel the heat and soreness in my fingertip, and you know it’s real once you can physically feel it, because the senses can’t lie. Or can they? I thought, It’s happening, the it too terrifying and vast to name with anything but a pronoun.
—
Driving to Daisy’s apartment complex, I kept forgetting why I was stopped at a stoplight, and then I’d let off Harold’s brake only to look up and notice, oh, right. The light is red.
You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever—like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: “The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.” I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn’t make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does. So I know I should’ve been a brilliant detective or whatever, but in actuality I was one of the least observant people I’d ever met. I was aware of absolutely nothing outside myself on the drive to Daisy’s apartment building and then to my house.
I went to the bathroom when I got home and examined the cut. The swelling seemed down. Maybe. Maybe the light in the bathroom just wasn’t strong enough for me to see clearly. I cleaned it with soap and water, patted it dry, applied hand sanitizer, and then rebandaged my finger. I also took my regular medication, and then a few minutes later an oblong white pill I’d been told to use when panicky.
I let the pill melt on my tongue into a vague sweetness and waited for it to kick in. I felt certain something was going to kill me, and of course I was right: Something is going to kill you, someday, and you can’t know if this is the day.