Rarely, but only just often enough to notice, a smaller, different van will come to the donation centre with just one passenger. Age varies, but they are always pre-pubescent – a recipient past the age of puberty usually functions well enough with a mature donor.
Carers are not needed for these kinds of donors. They are instead told a carefully rehearsed story by their guardians: "We just noticed something wrong on your last medical examination. We're going to send you to hospital to find out what's wrong." They are then taken to the centre that needs them, and killed but left alive. It was discovered that without the years of maturity and self-preparation for the donations, child donors would simply go into shock after the first donation. They are thus turned into what is called a beating-heart corpse when it happens to a legal human, and laid out in a special room. Every centre has one of these rooms.
This story was related to me by a nurse, who I met during my first year as a carer. I walked into the nurses' break room by mistake, and we both saw the van drive up out of a second-story window. She didn't realize what I was when she told me the story. She mistook me for a trainee nurse, because she didn't think that a carer would ever be in the nurses' break room, even by mistake. I doubt I would have heard a thing about it otherwise. Anyway, she told me that this room is always room 150, no matter how the centre is laid out, and thus child donors are called "one-fifties" when they are mentioned at all. "No one likes to talk about a lot of what we do," she said to me, "but not even we talk about the one-fifties." I saw the nurse once more when I was at that centre again a week later, and she realized I was a carer then. She was the one who told me that the donor I had been caring for had completed. On the first donation. He was my earliest and my worst failure.
I told Tommy the story about the child donors once. He said it made sense.
"You remember when we used to hear stories about the children who were naughty and disappeared? That's probably what really happened to them. The guardians just thought it could double as a good way to scare us." We had once agreed – this must have been at the Cottages, because I think I remember Ruth being there too - that the stories about the children had probably, somehow or other, originated with the guardians themselves.
"They're simply too useful for them not to have come up with them," one of us finally pronounced, and that was simply taken as fact between us from then on.
I used to always look for room 150 whenever I visited a new centre, to sort of reinforce the nurse's story in my head – if there is a room 150, then the story must still be true. Since I've come to Sandhill, I've taken to sitting outside the room – here it's in a little forgotten hallway, where the only other rooms appear to be supply closets of unknown use. No one else ever comes here, and since they've had me on chair rest since my second donation, I like to just wheel myself down and stay. Sometimes I bring a book or a sketchpad or the walkman my carer bought for me when he found I wanted to listen to my tape in more places, but a lot of times I just sit and stare at the door. I suppose in retrospect suppose you could say I've been waiting.
I saw what I was waiting for today. It had just been a waiting day, and I'd fallen asleep – they've put me on some sort of new drug, to acclimate my blood for my next donation, and I'm still finding out what it does to me. I woke up when a nurse moved me out of the way, to allow for a child being brought in on a gurney. He was awake, which surprised me, as I thought he'd be drugged, and he said to a doctor "I'm not sick as that lady, am I?" Some part of me wanted to say "You're not sick at all now, but you'll be worse than me in an hour's time." Another part of me wanted to say "I'm sure you'll get better soon."