Back in high school—what was her name? Alisha? Ashley? —all the guys on the track team—at least those of us who ran the long relay—we used to call her the Queen of Nosebleeds. I’m pretty sure everyone on the team fucked her at least twice. She really liked to party, and—back then—she really loved cocaine. Wasn’t a cheerleader or athlete. Not in band or theatre either. Just a party-girl.

Of course, I’m sure Ashley, I think her name was Ashley, had her own issues. Mom gone, an older sister as beautiful and bulimic as her who also liked to party, and a short, soft-spoken dad with a mustache and quite little eyes rumored to be both too strict and too lenient. I never met him, but he went to my mom’s church, I think. I definitely met her older sister—I think she’s the one named Alisha—at a party, walking around with a plastic bottle of vodka in one hand and a bottle of Tabasco sauce in the other. She kept taking long pulls on the vodka, then chasing it with the Tabasco sauce. I remember her looking at me as a group of us sat on the roof smoking grass and her saying with a lilting melody—and through a wide happy-seeming grin— “Wanna take a hot shot?”

One night, after my senior year of high school, I snorted a couple lines of cocaine with the Queen of Nosebleeds in Chuck Cheek’s bathroom. It was the standard sort of party—Chuck’s parents were away, down in Florida. The Queen of Nosebleeds grabbed my shorts as we stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and when I yanked her jeans to the floor and pressed myself into her from behind, she asked me to pull her hair. So, what did I do? I pulled her hair—not too hard—but from the roots, and until her face was parallel to mine. Only, as she leaned into the sink counter, I looked up into the bathroom mirror and could see blood trickling down her right nostril. It streamed down her lips. Pooled in her cleft chin. Spread like cracks in broken glass down her neck in bright red streaks. And there was a funny rumbling in her throat too—something near a purr—what I took at the time as a sign of pleasure. Now though—when I think about it—I can’t help but be reminded of the noise electrical devices at the hospital make when on the verge of overheating.

The funny thing is: That night, after seeing her reflection, I couldn’t look at us together in the mirror. I didn’t want to see me inside her like that—with her lips and neck streaked red with all that blood.

Of course, the other guys on the track team used to say she was a terrible lay, if reliable, but me—I thought she was pretty okay. But what did I, or any of us know? I was 18, and her—what? 17 at most?

I thought of this queen of bygone era after waking this morning to the taste of blood on my own lips. I went to the bathroom, flicked on the light over the sink, and saw my own nose was bleeding—what I learned, in medical school, to call epistaxis. The Queen of Nosebleeds died a year after I left for college, and while riding passenger in Pickle’s pickup. Pickle didn’t run track, but he’d ran a red light, and his truck got broadsided on the passenger-side by an 18-wheeler. Sam Black—whose dad was a cop—said the two of them had been shooting up right before Pickle drove into incoming traffic. Sam’s dad told him the Queen of Nosebleeds still had the elastic tied around her arm, and fresh vials and syringes lay scattered in what remained of the truck’s floorboard.

Staring into the mirror this morning, I saw most of the blood on my own face had already crusted over or congealed—so what was I supposed to do but clean it off with water and a Kleenex, then toss the Kleenex in the toilet? Hours later, before my shift work at the hospital began, my nose was fine. Probably just this recent cold front.

Still, I’ve felt sort of down all day.

You see, I wasn’t very nice to her.