“A fussy side?” I ask Layla, who shrugs, flipping open the cover.
“You’ll see. This game, it’s not . . . well, it’s like fun, but not funny. Get it?”
“Like my joke about all of us waiting for someone else to die?” I ask.
“That’s so dead–bang on,” Layla says. “You don’t even know.” She pulls up the local news station, scanning through recent articles. “Two dead on interstate crash this morning,” she reads aloud.
Brandy whips out her phone. “Where?”
Layla scrolls a little more. “Vinton County.”
I watch as Brandy pulls up a map on her phone, her eyebrows drawn together. “Probably too far away. Time?”
“Uh . . . six thirty-eight this morning.”
Brandy checks the clock and shakes her head. “No good, even if they were donors we’re past the four-hour beating-heart limit, and that’s not allowing for travel time.”
“Travel time?” I ask, though I’m pretty sure I know what she means.
“Yeah, for one of those poor bastard’s hearts to come to us,” Brandy says, nodding toward Layla’s screen. “Next.”
“This one looks promising,” Layla says. “Shooting in the suburbs, one dead, one in critical condition. Younger guys in their twenties.”
Brandy tilts the tablet toward her. “Does it say where the dead guy was shot?”
“Reynoldsburg.”
Brandy smacks Layla lightly in the back of the head. “No, like his body.”
“Uh . . . it just says gunshot wound.”
“Assume chest then,” Brandy shakes her head. “No good. Got the name of the guy who was in critical?”
“Lawson Harris.”
“Spell the first name,” Brandy directs Layla while she taps out a text.
“Who are you texting?” I ask her, but she shields her phone away from me.
“Friend of mine at the DMV,” she says. “He can tell me if this guy is an organ donor.”
I glance at Layla, who is scrolling for more fatalities. “Isn’t that kind of illegal?”
“Probably more than kind of,” Brandy says, tapping her phone when it buzzes in her hand. “Nope. Not an organ donor. Next.”
In my waistband, my own phone vibrates.
From Heath
Coming to see you today after school.
Oh boy.
I have a twinge of regret after I send the text because I need a favor from him.
Hey could you bring me my clarinet that’s at school? Cage 22 Combo 9-15-5. Don’t want to get rusty.
Sure.
“That your lover?” Layla asks.
“Ex-boyfriend,” I correct her.
“Where we at here?” Brandy nudges Layla with her fake foot, but Layla minimizes her news feed.
“I got nothing. Just the two on the highway and the guys who got shot.”
“Slow day,” Brandy says, tossing her phone aside. “So how screwed up are we?”
“Very,” I have to admit, but there’s a methodology at work here that appeals to me, an arrangement of facts and figures that my bored brain reaches for. I mentally scan the available information, looking for holes.
“If you don’t know their blood type, it doesn’t matter anyway,” I tell the girls. “We don’t know if the heart will be a match. And technically agreeing to be an organ donor at the DMV is an advance directive, but the family has to agree at time of death.”
“Facts, facts, facts,” Layla teases me, shoving my arm. “It’s just something silly to pass the time. Don’t make it all serious, or I’ll unplug your LVAD.”
“Actually . . .” My voice fades out while I ponder, and Layla leans in toward me.
“Uh-oh,” she says. “That’s the thinking face.”
“Which side?” Brandy asks.
I pull my phone back out of my waistband, tapping in some searches. “There’s a relationship between blood type and ethnic group, so if you know the race of the person in the news story we could probably take a decent stab at their blood type. I might even be able to find a distribution map of blood types in the area of the accident if I dig. Combine that with travel time from hospital to hospital, factoring out any major heart transplant facilities that are closer to the accident than we are . . . and yeah, we might actually be able to come up with a viable percentage on whether one of us gets the heart, as long as I know your blood types.”
I look up to see both of them staring at me, mouths open. “What?”
“She’s way more twisted than she looks,” Brandy says to Layla. “Or, how I imagine she looked before, you know”—she points to my scar—“that.”
“So are you going to tell me your blood type?” I ask, phone in hand.
“A positive,” Layla says.
“B positive,” Brandy says. “And I can’t tell you how many jokes I get.”
“Lucky,” I mutter under my breath, plugging in their types beside their names in my Notes app.
“Why, what’s yours?” Brandy asks.
“O neg,” I tell her, not looking up.
“O neg as in oh shit,” she says.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
There’s a tentative knock on Layla’s door and Josephine pokes her head in. “What are you guys up to?”
“Life and death situations,” Layla says. “Close the door behind you.”
We all scoot in even closer as Jo joins us on the bed.
“No knitting for you?” Brandy asks.
“Not sure I want to be around that many kids with sharp objects,” Jo says. “Plus Nadine is being a bitch today.”
“Just today?” Layla asks, then looks to me before asking her next question. I nod.
“So what’s your blood type, Jo? And don’t say Xanax.”
A ping goes off on Layla’s tablet, an alert of a fresh news story. Brandy gets to it first and flips it open, her face lighting up.
“Yes! Suicide by hanging. We can work with that.”
twenty-eight
Heath shows up about fifteen minutes before we’re supposed to start meditating, so any kind of zen I might have achieved is instantly screwed. I’m in the common room in an overstuffed chair, my legs hanging off one side. Layla sits on the couch next to me, reading another trashy romance that her mom brought her. I’m swiping through my notes and running averages on blood types in my head when he finds me.
“Hey,” he says, setting my clarinet case on the floor by the chair.
“Hey,” I say back, and sit up. I still have on the tank, since they keep the heat pumped pretty high in here for the comfort of everyone with poor circulation. I know my chest scar is bright and eye-catching, but I still hate that it’s the first place his eyes go.
“You, uh . . . you doing okay?” He points at it like I don’t know what he’s referencing.
“No, you idiot, she needs a heart transplant,” Layla says.
“Heath, meet Layla,” I say. “Layla, Heath.”
“Hi.” He nods at her, and she nods back.
“So what are your odds on getting one?” he asks, and while others might find it insensitive, it’s a huge relief for me.
This is Heath and me, facts and figures, streams of data. We rely on the concrete and let the impulsive evaporate, which explains a lot about why we were together so long, an investment of our time we weren’t willing to bail on yet.