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Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 93 around Travis' basement smoking dope. Kell had a rare blood disorder similar to anemia, only more extreme. The symptoms were dizziness, nausea, acute lethargy, and hypersensitivity to natural sunlight. The condition required he regularly ingest small quantities of type B-positive human blood. There was nothing supernatural about it, nothing creepy. Kell had to cope in severe secrecy with this medical condition. He lived in constant fear of being misunderstood. Lindsay was his "host," meaning she supplied him with fresh blood twice a week. He'd go over to her house and she'd take fifteen intravenous centiliters of blood in a hypodermic needle and they'd play Scrabble while Kell drank it. "Are you guys okay?" Kell had asked after confessing in Travis' basement. "Do you think I'm a freak?" They'd all looked at each other unable to react until finally Feste had said, "Yeah, you're definitely some kind of mutant freak. And that kicks ass!" * At Dawn they Sleep Blind Nate-given name Nathaniel-apparently had an autoerotic asphyxiation fetish because when Anthony and Kell followed the line that started in the basement and went up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the hall, and stopped outside the guestroom, they had to untie Blind Nate from the closet where he hung by his neck from his belt. Nate had gone blind seven years ago, just as his mother had predicted he would, due to chronic masturbation. "There's something wrong with my eyes," he kept saying after he'd been cut down, but Anthony told him to put his pants on and get out. |