Gushers I met Leo in the fourth grade in a karate class at the local youth center. He kicked me in the face with a wild carousel-like roundhouse that split my lip and I gushed blood that would never come out of my brand new karate whites. “I get why they call them gushers now,” he said as he watched me red-handed, blood collecting carefully in the cup of my palms like I was trying to keep something alive in there. I was pretty sure somehow that he was talking about the candy. I remember being shocked, a little, that he didn’t try to help me or anything, that the teacher was the one who ran to the bathroom to grab a wad of toilet paper and stuff it up against my lip. But he did sit with me in the lobby while I held it there until my parents came, describing what he saw in the bloodstains on my shirt like we were lying in the grass together staring at shapes in the clouds. The next week I showed him the stitches I’d had to get and he high fived me, like it was something incredibly cool we had done together, which I guess in a way it was. Hanna Bahedry
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