He wasn’t competing with me, either. He didn’t mind when I was better than him, and he seemed to love it when I was better than the other guys.

I just always had this feeling that he was rooting for me.

But I still needed him to hurry up and jam that needle in my vein.

“Just get it over with,” I said.

“Sticks are not my strong suit,” he said.

“Don’t overthink it,” I said.

He looked up then, trying to read me. Then he unwrapped a needle, pressed it to the vein he’d chosen, pushed it in—and spurted blood all over both of us and the room.

“Oh, shit,” he said, taking in the sight of all the blood—then he wavered in his chair for a second before he collapsed and hit the floor.

“Rookie?” I said, peering down at him with the needle still in my arm.

People often come to just after fainting, because with a simple vasovagal attack, all that’s wrong is not enough oxygen’s getting to the brain. This happens all the time at weddings, for some reason. There’s a whole subcategory of videos on YouTube with people melting to the floor at weddings. But as soon as you’re down flat, the blood equalizes, and you’re back up pretty fast.

Sometimes, it takes a few minutes longer.

I pulled out the needle and cleaned up the mess, and then, when he still wasn’t up yet, I knelt down beside him. I meant to rouse him right away, but the opportunity to just gaze at him for a second was too appealing to skip. What was it about that face of his? Why did it have such an effect on me? I’d spent so much time trying to figure that out, but I still didn’t know for sure.

It had to be subjective. He wasn’t perfect. I tried to catalog his flaws. He had slight bags under his eyes—but of course it just gave him a sweet, puppy-dog look. He had an incisor that was darker than his other teeth. And he had funny earlobes, now that I thought about it. A little too plump for the rest of him. There. He wasn’t perfect. Just as flawed as the rest of us.

He should be nothing special at all.

But he just was.

My best guess was something about his eyes—how smiley and kind looking they were. I remember reading an article years ago about a study done on the shape of people’s eyes that found people with smiley eyes wound up happier overall. Statistically.

Maybe that was it.

I could have stared at him all day. But of course I didn’t. He had a lot more needles to stick me with before we were done.

I reached out to wake him. I meant to push on his shoulder, but my hand decided to cup his jaw instead. At the touch, his eyes blinked open and I yanked my hand away.

“What happened?” he asked, frowning and starting to sit up.

“You fainted. Take it slow.” I helped back him up to the chair.

“That’s embarrassing.”

I sat back in my chair. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“Thank you.”

“You should practice on an orange,” I said. “It’s about the same surface tension as skin.”

“It’s not the skin I have trouble with,” he said.

“Not a big fan of blood, huh?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“You’ll get used to it. After a year, blood will seem as harmless as fruit punch.”

“That’s a disturbing thought.”

“You’re just going to need to do a lot of blood draws. You need to do so many, it becomes like brushing your teeth.”

“Hard to imagine, but okay.”

“You can get your sea legs with me, and then we’ll sic you on the rest of the crew.”

“Thanks, Cassie.”

I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him—or anyone at the station—say my first name. I didn’t even realize he knew it. Everybody just called me Hanwell.

I held my breath for a second, then forced myself to let it out. Then I held my arm out to him. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go again.”

“Now?” he asked.

“Right now,” I said, giving a don’t try to fight it nod. “Make it happen, buddy. That blood’s not going to draw itself.”

Fifteen

THE ROOKIE SAW some dark stuff with us that first month. We got a call for a grandpa who’d choked on a piece of steak (fatality), a tree fallen on a house (no one home), and a kid with his head stuck between the steps of a playground slide (close call). We got called to the scene of an abused woman who’d finally had enough and went after her husband with a shotgun (mutilation—not pretty).

It wasn’t long before the rookie had acquired what we called “the stare of life,” that shell-shocked look new firefighters get before they’ve figured out how to manage, compartmentalize, and deal with all the horrific tragedy.

Not that you ever entirely figure it out. It’s a learning curve.

You eventually get to the point where it doesn’t bother you. As much. You put it on a different screen in your mind that’s separate from your real life somehow. But it takes a while, and in the meantime, all you can do is cope.

The more stressed the rookie got, the more we joked around with him. For his own good.

Case sent him looking for a left-handed screwdriver. Six-Pack filled his locker with packing peanuts. We hung his boxer briefs from the flagpole. One day, we set his bed on four empty soda cans and remade it so it would collapse when he got in that night. And nobody ever missed an opportunity to dump water on him.

After he delivered his first baby on the box, the guys said, “How was it?”

And the rookie, shaking his head in disbelief, said, “It was like watching an avocado getting squeezed through an apricot.”

That night, the guys hung a bag in his locker with a snorkel, dive mask, and flippers, labeled OB/GYN DELIVERY KIT.

To be fair, there were also some funny calls. The lady who called us for menstrual cramps and kept talking about her “groin-icologist.” The fierce little poodle that attacked the rookie’s bunker-pants leg and wouldn’t let go, even as he hopped around trying to fling it off.

Just about the only thing the rookie didn’t see in those first weeks was a fire.

Until the day of his—our—six-week-iversary at the station, when we got a call for a garage fire at an abandoned house at the edge of town.

It was a perfect first fire. We ran lights-and-sirens, and we were the first on scene. We got to use the hoses and even worked in a lesson for the rookie about how to read the colors of the smoke.

Afterward, doing demo in the smoldering remains, I heard the captain giving the rookie advice. “A fire’s like a living thing,” he explained. “You have to treat it like a worthy adversary. It eats and it moves, and it’s going to go on eating and moving until we stop it.”

I looked at the rookie’s face. He looked flushed, and exhausted, and awash with adrenaline.

I knew that feeling.

“Pretty great, huh?” I said, as we walked back to the engine when it was all over.

“What?”

I elbowed him. “Fighting a fire.”

We were passing a drain in the parking lot, and I hopped right over it before turning back and realizing that the rookie had stopped to bend over the drain and throw up.

After a minute, he stood back up, wiped his mouth, and kept walking toward me. “Yeah,” he said then. “Really great.”