Sweetblood (9781439108741)

by Hautman, Pete

  Sweetblood

  Also by Pete Hautman

  Hole in the Sky

  Stone Cold

  Mr. Was

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuter.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Pete Murray Hautman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster.

  Book design by Ann Sullivan

  The text for this book is set in Century Schoolbook.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hautman, Pete, 1952–

  Sweetblood / Pete Hautman.

  p. cm.

  Summary: After a lifetime of being a model student, sixteen-year-old Lucy Szabo is suddenly in trouble at school, at home, with the “protovampires” she has met online and in person, and most of all with her uncontrolled diabetes.

  ISBN 0-689-85048-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6898-5048-6

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0874-1

  [1. Diabetes—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H2887 Sw 2003

  [Fic]—dc21 2002011179

  For Mark and Amy

  I would like to thank Alice Beard for her support and encouragement when I began writing Sweetblood a quarter of a century ago; Jennifer Flannery, David Gale, and Ellia Bisker for their understanding of, enthusiasm for, and commitment to the YA field; and Mary Logue for too many things to tally. I must also acknowledge the three pillars of modern vampire fiction: Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, and Joss Whedon. The Undead would not be walking without them.

  CONTENTS

  1. Blood

  2. Friendship

  3. Undead

  4. Sblood

  5. Blue Eyes

  6. The Sad Truth About Bloodsucking Demons

  7. Draco

  8. Femmes Fatale

  9. Low

  10. BLAH BLAH BLAH

  11. French Cuisine

  12. Poisson

  13. Night Creature

  14. Espresso Yourself

  15. Butterflies and Beer

  16. Wine Red

  17. Fuzz

  18. Bad Girl

  19. Shrink-Wrap

  20. Studying

  21. Adrift

  22. Angst

  23. Trick or Treat

  24. Bizarro

  25. Wine and Chocolate

  26. Snail

  27. Logic

  28. Me

  29. Blue Sky

  1

  Blood

  Blood is my friend. Without it my cells shrivel. Without it I die.

  At night, alone with myself, I hear it rushing through arteries and veins, platelets tumbling in a soup of plasma and glucose through slick, twisty tubes, lining up to enter narrow capillaries, delivering oxygen and fuel, seeking idle insulin. It is a low-pitched sound: wind passing through woodlands.

  I hear a higher pitched sound too: A demon dentist drilling, rising and falling but never stopping. It is the sound of my thoughts.

  Alone, at night, with myself, the low sound and the high sound become music. If I lie perfectly still and quiet the concert separates me from my body. Eyes closed, I float above myself, supported on a cloud of song.

  But these are my secrets, things I do not talk about. You don’t want people to think you’re crazy, not even your best friends.

  Even if you are crazy. Especially if you are.

  When I was six years old I found a dying bat, probably Myotis lucifugus. Or maybe it was Desmodus rotundus, the infamous vampire bat, on vacation from South America. Nobody knows for sure. I saw the bat flopping around on the grass. I didn’t know what it was, but being only six and fond of all small creatures, I picked it up. Its wings were velvety soft and it made squeaking, mewling protests. I put it in my pocket and took it home to show to my mother.

  She let out a shriek. That was ten years ago, but I can still hear her screech echoing in my skull. I dropped the bat—flop flop flop—on the kitchen floor and my mother grabbed her broom and WHACK WHACK WHACK. She swept it into the plastic dustpan and carried it outside and dropped it in the trash. Another pet story with a sad ending.

  That night when my father got home he heard the story of the bat. He did not scream like my mother but instead got very gruff and concerned and made me show him my hands. Scratches, scratches everywhere. Did it bite? He kept asking me did it bite. I was going NO NO NO, but my hands were scratched from picking raspberries at the Fremonts’, where I was not supposed to go, and he was holding my hands too hard and he was furious and my mother was whining and I was screaming and shrieking loudest of all, I’m sure.

  WHERE IS IT?

  The bat is in the trash, my mother tells him. He drops my scratched hands and runs outside, but the bat is gone. The trash has been picked up. My mother and I sob in the face of my father’s rage.

  I don’t remember much about the hospital. They say that rabies shots are painful, and that there are a lot of them. I don’t remember the shots. Maybe I have blocked the memories, or maybe they have dissolved into the memories of all the other shots I’ve had in my life. I’ve had a lot of shots. All I remember now is that the emergency room doctor was very calm and gentle, and I liked him.

  “Little girls aren’t supposed to play with sick bats,” he told me, smiling.

  “I’m not so little,” I said.

  I don’t know why I remember that and not the shots.

  Fish, my endocrinologist, tells me that the bat and the rabies shots had nothing to do with my diabetes. I am not so sure. How can you give a six-year-old girl rabies shots and not have it affect her? The way I see it (and I have done a lot of research in this area) the rabies vaccination trains the body’s immune system to attack. That’s what vaccines do. They don’t actually kill the bacteria or virus, they just activate the immune system. As soon as the supposed rabies virus starts to multiply, the immune system is ready and waiting and BAM. The virus never has a chance.

  But here’s the thing: That same immune system that kills rabies viruses kills other kinds of cells too. The cells that make insulin, for instance. Beta cells. I have been over this with Fish. He doubts that the rabies shots did anything bad to me. He says that my immune system destroyed my beta cells all on its own. Fish (real name: Harlan Fisher, M.D.) knows his stuff, but he still can’t tell me why, three months after the rabies shots, this little girl guzzled an entire half gallon of orange juice in just one afternoon.

  Blood is my enemy. It carries death to my cells.

  I still remember gulping orange juice right out of the carton, cold and sweet, pouring down my throat. Six years old, I could hardly lift the carton, but I was so desperately thirsty—gulp gulp gulp—I could’ve won a guzzling contest. Also, I could’ve won a peeing contest, because everything I drank went straight into the toilet.

  You’d think my mother would’ve noticed earlier, but it didn’t hit her how sick I was until I’d gone through about six cartons of juice in one week—and wet my bed twice. Then it was whoosh—off to the d
octor. Dr. Gingrass with the big mole on his giant nose. He’s the one who gave me my first shot of insulin. I stared numbly as he mixed the cloudy insulin with the clear, had me lift my shirt, and pinched up a bit of baby fat and slipped the needle in. It didn’t hurt a bit, but my mother was freaking, crying and asking the poor doctor how this could happen. Even then, I knew enough to be embarrassed by her, but it wasn’t until years later that I came to understand the fullness of what had happened to me. Insulin is more than just a treatment for the disease called diabetes mellitus. It is the thin strand that holds me to earth.

  Without it I die.

  2

  Friendship

  I’ve had three or four best friends in my life. They don’t last. We have a fight, or they just get sick of my weirdness, and all of a sudden we aren’t friends anymore. Or they go away. My previous best friend, Kathy Wasserman, moved away to St. Louis. That was a year ago. We e-mailed each other a few times, but it just wasn’t the same. I haven’t heard from her in months.

  Right now I don’t have a real best friend, but if I had to pick one it would be Mark Murphy, who lives down the block and across the street and who is one of the few people at school who doesn’t treat me like a freak. He calls me Skeeter. He has called me that since he moved into the neighborhood nine years ago. That was after the bat thing, after I got sick. I don’t know why he started calling me Skeeter. Nobody else ever did. Little kids are sensitive that way. Maybe he knew that one day I would turn into a bloodsucking fiend, a human mosquito.

  It is Sunday, day of rest for some people. I put on my black makeup and my purple lipstick and my black leather jacket and black leggings and my lace-up motorcycle boots and my sunglasses so dark I can hardly see through them and I go out to sit in the shade on the front steps to read Anne Rice and disturb the churchgoing neighbors by my mere existence. I am only pretending to read, though. Mostly I am imagining moving out of my parents’ house and into an apartment over by the college and hanging out in coffeehouses and taking writing classes and meeting people who don’t know anything at all about me. I don’t smoke, but when I imagine myself independent and on my own I always see myself smoking nonfilter cigarettes and drinking straight espresso from a small, cracked cup.

  I am thinking about this as Mark Murphy comes strolling by, dragging his size-thirteen Nikes, hands buried deep in his jeans pockets. He is wearing a faded orange Seward Stingers sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the name of a tractor company stitched on the front. Mark is not into fashion.

  “Hey, Skeeter,” he says, stopping on the sidewalk.

  I lower my book, giving my mouth an irritated twist to make him think he has interrupted a really good part.

  “What’re you reading?” he asks.

  I hold up the book. He comes closer so that he can see the cover: The Queen of the Damned.

  “What’s it about?” he asks.

  “Vampires.”

  “Vampires suck.” He laughs so that I will know he is making a joke.

  I try not to smile, but I can’t help it. Mark always knows how to make me laugh.

  I say, “Got a cigarette, Monkey Boy?” I gave him that nickname a few summers ago when he fell out of a tree and broke his arm. It was also to get back at him for always calling me Skeeter. Which, actually, I like.

  “Sorry. I didn’t think you smoked.”

  “I don’t, but I’m thinking of taking it up. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  “Told you not to ask me that.”

  “I mean why can’t I ask you that?”

  “You just did. Actually, since you insist on knowing every detail of my life, I’ll tell you. I think it would be fulfilling to have a habit. Something self-destructive to do on a daily basis.”

  “Why cigarettes? Why not just start smoking crack?”

  “Too expensive.”

  “How about heroin? You’re not scared of needles.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Hey, you going to that thing tonight?”

  “What thing?”

  “You know.”

  I stare at his face. When Mark was a little kid he had a broad, friendly face: brown eyes and freckles and a huge grin that made his teeth look small—a face that made old ladies want to pinch his cheeks. Then, a few years ago, he started growing like crazy and everything got out of whack. His face stretched out from top to bottom, his permanent teeth came in big and crowded, and his eyes got closer together. I can still see the little kid he used to be, but it takes some effort. He still has most of his freckles. I can also see another Mark—the good-looking man he will one day become.

  “You mean the block party,” I say.

  Mark nods.

  “I don’t think I do block parties,” I say.

  “Two words.” He holds up two fingers, the sign for peace—or victory. “Free food.”

  I laugh. Mark loves to eat more than anything.

  “Besides,” he says, “What else are you gonna do on a Sunday night?”

  “You mean besides eat burnt bratwurst and high-risk potato salad with a bunch of little kids and half-drunk parental types? Gee, I don’t know… maybe beat myself over the head with a baseball bat?”

  “Yeah, right. Well, I’m going.”

  “You have a good time.” I return my attention to Anne Rice.

  Mark stands there for a few seconds, then says, “You know, Lucy, I liked you a lot better before you got all punk.”

  “I’m not punk.”

  “Well, goth then.”

  “I’m not goth.”

  “Well, you’re something.” He lets that one hang for a beat, then shuffles off.

  My best friend.

  I experience mixed feelings, but I’m used to that. One of my feelings is regret that I might have hurt his feelings. I also feel irritation that he judged me, relief that he’s gone, disappointment that he has left, and delight that he actually thinks I’m something.

  On the wall next to my bed I have written some lines from a poem by Walt Whitman:

  Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then I contradict myself.

  (I am large, I contain multitudes)

  3

  Undead

  I am not cool. Dead people are cool.

  I am not dead. I am Undead.

  Had I been born a hundred years ago I would be very cool. I would be cold. Cold bones and shreds of gristle moldering deep beneath a crumbling headstone.

  People worry about race relations—blacks and whites and Asians and Aborigines and so forth—but I think that there are only two races that matter: the Living and the Undead. These races have been created by modern medicine, and with every year that passes, the numbers of the Undead grow. It is inevitable.

  My mother is among the Living. My father is Undead. He had an emergency appendectomy a few years ago. Saved by modern medicine, like me.

  The Chinese have a saying: If you save a man’s life, you are responsible for him. In other words, by saving someone’s life, you have inflicted that person’s continued existence upon the world. Whatever he does from then on—be it good or evil—it’s your responsibility. So who is responsible for me?

  I ask my mother what’s for dinner.

  “Dinner?” Her brow scrunches up as though I’ve asked her the atomic weight of cesium.

  “Yeah. You know. Food? Like we eat every night?”

  She says, “Honey, tonight’s the block party!” My mother always calls me Honey or Sweetie or Sugar. I think it’s a subconscious effort to undo my diabetes. It’s moments like these that make me wonder what cabbage leaf she found me under.

  “Oh. I guess I can make myself a cheese sandwich.”

  “Aren’t you feeling well, Sweetie?” She reaches out a hand as if to feel my forehead. I step back.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I know exactly what she’s going to say next, and she says it.

  “Do you need a snack?” My mother is deathly afraid of my insulin reactions. (Fish pref
ers to call them hypoglycemic episodes.)

  “No, I do not need a snack. If I needed a snack I would eat something. I just don’t feel like eating bratwurst for dinner.”

  “I’m bringing vegetarian beans, Honey. Your favorite.”

  “I have to write a paper,” I say.

  “Oh!” That one throws her.

  “I’ve got a fifteen-hundred-word essay due tomorrow.”

  “Oh! That sounds like quite a project. How many pages is that?”

  “A lot.” Actually, the paper was due a week ago, but I haven’t been paying much attention to due dates lately, which is probably why I’m flunking two classes. The school has been sending my parents letters, so it’s going to be hard for her to tell me I can’t skip the block party to do schoolwork.

  “I guess we could leave you some beans,” she says.

  I give her my most syrupy-sweet, lovey-dovey, up-yours smile. “Gee, thanks, Mom.”

  I have about six or seven insulin reactions every week. Mostly they are no big deal—I get shaky and start to sweat and I quick cram something sweet in my mouth and a few minutes later everything’s cool. But sometimes I get cranky and don’t know my blood sugar’s gone out of whack, and I throw a fit over, say, not being able to find a sock. I’m sort of unpredictable and nasty when my blood glucose gets low, which partly explains why my mother gets nervous around me.

  The other reason she gets nervous is because there have been a few times when I lose it completely. One time she came home and all of the kitchen cupboards had been emptied onto the floor and I was lying unconscious on top of a pile of breakfast cereals and crackers and canned tuna fish. She had to call 911. I woke up to find Fish bending over me looking straight into my eyeball with a flashlight.

  “Couldn’t decide what to eat?” he said.

  “Nothing looked good to me.”

  He laughed. Fish understands. He’s had diabetes since he was nineteen. He’s Undead too.

  A few weeks ago in art class we had to paint self-portraits. I painted a picture of a glowing blond girl with rosy cheeks and a huge toothy smile and big blank pale gray eyes.