“You mean, like a cocoon?”
Guy nods. “It’s a monarch butterfly. It’s alive.”
A river of students passes on either side of us, heading for their third-hour classes. I almost lose myself in Guy’s blue eyes. I look away.
“You’re giving me a bug?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Nobody’s ever given me a bug before.”
It doesn’t take long for Mrs. Graham to call a high-level Saturday morning conference. Buttface, Graham, and my parents are all at the school trying to decide what to do about me, the Evil Bloodsucking Witch Bitch of Seward High. They actually invited me to come, but I declined to participate in my own destruction. I didn’t think I could stand to watch my mother wring the skin right off of her hands while my dad sits there with his jaw clamped and his forehead vein pulsing thump thump thump.
I’m ostensibly (love that word) staying home to work on my French grammar. For example, I have written the following highly grammatical sentences:
Français me fait mal.
Je vais aller au mall.
In case you don’t read French, that means: “French makes me sick. I’m going to the mall.”
Our city is not a monster metropolis like New York or Los Angeles, but it’s big enough to have three high schools and a dozen movie theaters and two colleges and Crosstown Center, an indoor mall with forty-seven shops. The mall isn’t exactly Rodeo Drive, but I decide to make a fashion statement anyway.
I put on my makeup. Lots of black around the eyes because I’m in a black mood. I go with the purple lipstick and I add a spot of red to the tips of my black nails. They want weird, I’ll give ’em weird. I look out the window. Leaves are blowing from the trees—it’s one of those cloudy fall days that can get cold in a hurry. I opt for a turtleneck (black, of course), my biker jacket with the chain epaulets, and a leather cap that makes me look a little like a goth Marlon Brando before he got old and fat. My boots would really complete the look, but it’s a long walk to the mall, so I compromise with a pair of purple high-top sneakers. I consider sunglasses, but since I’ve done such an awesome job with the eyeliner and mascara I decide to let my eye-balls hang naked.
Before I step outside, I plug into my CD player and I stuff some granola bars and candy into my pockets and I test my blood sugar. The machine sucks in the droplet of blood, thinks about it, then tells me I’m alive, with a slightly elevated blood glucose of 147 mg/dl. Good enough. I’ll need the extra glucose for the walk.
Crosstown Center is almost three miles from our house. It’s a long walk, but better than sitting around waiting for my parents to come home with a new plan for turning me into somebody I’m not.
I decide to walk the railroad tracks instead of taking Cooley Drive. The tracks are only three blocks from home, and they go right past the mall. Also, I won’t run the risk of my parents driving by and seeing me.
I used to play out by the tracks when I was little. Mark Murphy and I would make little houses out of cardboard and mud and set them up on the rails and populate them with tiny stick figures, then we would wait for a train to come by. I guess that was kind of a strange thing to do, but we were just little kids.
One time—I must’ve been about eight—I was out by the tracks by myself. I remember the smooth metal of the rail, warm from the sun, pressing against my cheek. Maybe I was playing at being an Indian, listening for the sounds of a coming train. I became very sleepy. I curled up on the tracks and drifted.
Sometimes an insulin reaction will sneak up on me like that. The next thing I remember is my mother shrieking, pulling me off the tracks.
“What’s the matter with you?” she kept asking.
Well, gee, Mom, I have diabetes and I’m, like, eight years old. Gimme a break!
I understand why she was so upset. If I ever breed (which I definitely do not plan to do) I wouldn’t want to find my kid asleep on a railroad track. But I hope I’d be cooler about stuff like that.
So for most of my childhood I was forbidden to go anywhere near the tracks, and mostly I didn’t, but I’m not a little kid anymore and it really is the fastest way to get to Crosstown Center.
I walk between the rails, my sneakers hitting every other tie, the wind gusting, pushing me from behind.
Crosstown Center is crowded because of the big sale they always have between the back-to-school sale and the Thanksgiving sale. This year they’re calling it Octoberfest. I don’t know why they’d name a clothing sale after a German beer-drinking festival, but I guess any excuse will do for a sale. All the stores have tables out front piled high with whatever they most want to get rid of: a lot of ugly sweaters and skirts and shoes and stuff that even Mark Murphy wouldn’t be caught dead in. There’s some cool stuff, too, but only in midget and monster sizes.
I run into Fiona Cassaday and Marquissa Smith-Valasco sitting by the fountain in the central courtyard. Fiona makes me think of a fairy. She is thin and delicate-looking, with pale, translucent skin and hair the color of blood-tinged water. Her eyes are of a blue so pale that they look almost white, her hands are long and thin. She looks as if she’s been drained by a very thirsty vampire.
“Hey, Luce.” Fiona is wearing a leather bomber jacket over a cotton dress with orange and purple stripes like a nightmare candy cane. Her thin legs are crossed, and her feet are encased in clunky-looking red boots. She is smoking a cigarette, which you are not supposed to do in the mall.
Fiona and I have only one thing in common. We are both très weird.
“Somebody’s going to bust you,” I say, pointing at the cigarette.
Fiona smiles with her small teeth, all about the same size. “I know,” she says. She looks off to the right.
I follow her glance and see the security guard standing near the information kiosk.
“That’s Steve Monson, Jimmy Monson’s older brother.” Fiona has a way of stressing certain words. It’s like she’s shooting them at you. “He’s a student at Harker.”
Harker College is one of the two colleges in the city.
The guard, Steve Monson, is broad-shouldered and erect. His uniform actually looks good on him, which is amazing because the Crosstown Center security guard uniform, with its two-tone pockets, matching epaulets, and short sleeves, is the depth of dork fashion.
“I’m waiting for him to make me put it out,” Fiona says. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”
“She’s in femme fatale mode,” says Marquissa. Marquissa always looks as if she is about to collapse from terminal boredom. Her eyelids are huge and her thick lips never quite close. She has black hair down to her waist, so black it is like a hole in reality. I would kill for hair that black.
“Shut up,” says Fiona, laughing. Fiona is always in femme fatale mode. Fiona has chased guys since the day she was born. She’s caught a few, too.
Marquissa turns to me, “Speaking of femme fatale, I saw you talking to Dylan.”
“Dylan?” I wrinkle my brow, as if I’m trying to remember. “Oh yeah, he’s in my French class.”
“He’s hot,” Marquissa says.
I want to hit her, but I just glare. Marquissa is wearing a black leather trenchcoat. I think she must have stolen it, because those things go for a lot of money. I wish I had one. Marquissa thinks she is this deep dark goth, like she can make flowers wilt by glaring at them. But I knew her before she got her frowny black-leather attitude, back before she changed her name from Mary to Marquissa. She is so into the goth thing she even wears fishnet on her arms sometimes, which is kind of like a preacher wearing a yellow smiley-face button.
Let me be perfectly clear about one thing: I am not goth. I am Lucy Sweetblood Szabo, and just because I like to dress black and have an unhealthy interest in blood-sucking demons doesn’t mean I am some goth fashion junkie who listens to Sisters of Mercy and sleeps with peroxide-soaked sponges to make her face whiter, and has so many buckles, chains, and piercings that she jingles when she walks. Well, maybe I jingle a littl
e. But I’m just me, and anybody who goths me is in big trouble.
“So what are you doing?” Fiona asks me.
“Nothing. Just getting the hell out of the house.”
“Christ, tell me about it. My mom’s been on the warpath lately.”
“My parents are over at the school having a meeting with Graham.”
“Graham? Mrs. Graham? What did you do?”
“I wrote this paper about vampires.”
“Vampires? Was it about Buffy? Graham hates TV.”
“No, it was about real vampires. It was kind of bloody.”
“Yuck.” Fiona frowns at her cigarette, shoots a look at Steve Monson, gets nothing back, drops the butt into the fountain.
“Anyway, it was mostly true stuff,” I say.
“What was?” She is glaring at Steve Monson, who is watching a pair of older girls walking into the Gap.
“The vampire stuff. So I don’t see what they’re so upset about.”
“Vampires aren’t real,” Fiona says. “Maybe they think you’ve gone nuts.”
Marquissa is watching us talk, her heavily lidded eyes almost closed.
I’m not sure I want to get into the whole vampire thing with Fiona. She’s the type who might just spread it all over school and make me out to be even more of a freak than I am.
“They already think I’m nuts.” Now I’m talking like Fiona.
Fiona lights another cigarette.
Marquissa says, “Yes they are.”
Fiona blows smoke. “Yes who are what?”
“Vampires. They’re real.”
“Yeah, right. I suppose you know one?”
“I’ve met a few,” Marquissa says.
Fiona and I look at her.
“These guys I know from Harker are into it. They read every book there is about vampires and watch movies and dress up and do rituals and stuff.”
“That doesn’t make them vampires.”
“They drink blood.”
“Real blood?” Fiona asks.
“That’s what they say,” Marquissa says.
“They aren’t real vampires,” I say. “They’re just role-playing.”
“How do you know?”
“If they were real you’d never know it. You’d wake up one morning with your throat ripped out.”
Fiona looks like she’s about to barf. “You guys are disgusting.”
Marquissa smiles sleepily.
9
Low
The clouds are heavy and low as I walk between the tracks. I am staring down. My shoes are purple flashes against the dark brown of railroad ties; the wind is against me, cutting up under my jacket, sucking heat and moisture from my body. I am thinking about what Marquissa said about her so-called vampire friends.
According to Marquissa, these “vampires” get together to talk about vampire books and watch movies. Some of them dress up and even wear fangs. And they drink blood.
“You ever taste it?” I asked.
“Yuck!” she said, scrunching up her face.
“It’s probably not really blood. I bet they just drink red wine or something, and they tell you it’s blood because they don’t want you to have any.”
“They say it’s blood.”
I laughed, and Marquissa got all peeved. That was when Steve Monson finally came over and made Fiona put out the cigarette. He was all business and treated us like a bunch of kids. After that we went up to the food court, except I couldn’t eat anything because I hadn’t brought any insulin with me. I had to sit and drink Diet Coke and watch Fiona and Marquissa wolf down slices of pizza.
Now I’m starving, and still a mile from home. Sometimes it sucks being Undead.
I like my purple shoes. I do not have many nonblack articles of clothing. Maybe I should buy some other purple things. Purple underwear, maybe.
I listen to the swish swish swish of my arms swinging, leather on leather, and the scuff scuff scuff of rubber soles hitting railroad ties.
My head feels large. The wind fills my ears. My legs are like puppet limbs, loose-hinged and numb as wood. I am having some trouble staying centered on the tracks. I wish they were railings, waist high, something to hang on to.
I am moving very slowly now, as if time is coming to a stop. Something is very wrong. An internal voice says to me, “Eat something.”
I step off the tracks and walk a few yards to a patch of low grass, moving as if through water; the air is thick and hard to breathe.
“Eat,” says the voice.
I dig in my pockets and come out with a granola bar. I would rather have a slice of pizza. I sit down on the grass, staring at the granola bar. When I blink, the wrapper flashes like a strobe light.
“Eat,” says the voice.
I tear the end off the wrapper and put one end of the bar in my mouth and bite and chew. It is dry, like sawdust. I chew and swallow. A box of cranberry juice would be nice. Bite, chew, swallow. Am I sitting on the railroad tracks? No, I can see the tracks, far away, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. The edges of my vision are dark as charcoal. My mind stops. I stare thoughtlessly at a stalk of dry goldenrod quivering in the wind. Yellow leaves tumble by, but my eyes are frozen. Time passes. After a few eons my mind begins to work again. I have the empty granola bar wrapper in my hand. I must have eaten the whole thing. That is good. Words form on the movie screen in my head, explanatory subtitles appear:
LUCY HAVING ANOTHER INSULIN REACTION. LUCY DIGESTING GRANOLA BAR.
CARBOHYDRATES ARE CONVERTED BY LIVER TO GLUCOSE. BLOOD SUGAR RISES.
I cross my arms; I hug myself. My guts feel disconnected. That was a bad one. I could have passed out. I almost did. I feel stupid. I am shivering. I should have eaten the granola bar before leaving the mall, but I was so busy feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t have any pizza that I forgot about the calories I’d need for the walk home.
Being a proto-vampire means constantly balancing food and insulin and exercise. Too many cookies and the blood sugar soars, a little too much insulin and it drops, producing an insulin reaction. Exercise also affects blood sugar. If I exercise without eating, I risk having a reaction.
Every insulin reaction is different. Usually they are no big deal. I feel kind of weird, I drink a glass of juice, and everything goes back to normal. But some of them are almost like a religious experience, complete with hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, and disturbing physical sensations.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, but the sky is lower and darker now and the wind has picked up. My head is pounding. Insulin reactions often give me a headache. I’m trembling from the cold. I stand up. I’m still a little dizzy, but I start walking, one step at a time.
There is a special feeling that comes when you are cold and hungry and it is dark, and you see the shape of your house and lights in the windows, and then you are home. You open the door and the warm, moist smell of cooking hits you. You peel off your jacket and the heat floods in through your pores and you are safe.
When I walk into the house I’m not thinking about being late for dinner or about Mrs. Graham or any of my other troubles. I just feel good to be safe and warm and home.
That lasts for about three seconds.
“Sweetie? Is that you, Honey?”
“It’s me.”
She appears in the kitchen doorway, twisting a dish towel in her hands.
“Your father is out looking for you. We were worried.”
If she’s so worried, why doesn’t she give me a hug? Instead, we face off: the evil sugar-bitch daughter and the whiny hand-wringing mother.
“Well, I’m home,” I say.
“Your father is very upset.”
Now I’m not so hungry anymore. I head for the stairs.
“Sweetie?”
I ignore the whine and take the steps two at a time. When I close the door to my room I feel safe. I flop back on my bed and stare up at Rubber Bat and, above him, the Seven Sisters. They are dark maroon now
, but I remember when they were scarlet and fresh. That was months ago. I’d been sitting on my bed testing my blood sugar, but when I lanced my finger I must’ve gone too deep because a jet of blood shot into the air like Old Faithful, leaving seven bright, wet, red droplets suspended from the textured ceiling. I have named them the seven sisters of the Pleiades: Halcyone, Taygete, Asterope, Celæno, Electra, Maia, and Merope. I was really into Greek mythology for about five minutes once.
I wonder where my father is. He knows nothing about me, so he is probably driving aimlessly, all serious and fatherly. My head is still pounding. Should I risk a trip to the bathroom to get an aspirin? I decide against it. They’ll probably leave me alone for a while if I stay in my room. If I pretend to be doing homework. I sit up and go to my desk and reach to turn on my computer but my hand swipes air. For a moment I am confused—am I having another insulin reaction?
Slowly, I sit down. This is no insulin reaction. This is far, far worse.
I stare at the empty space where my computer used to be.
10
BLAH BLAH BLAH
Shouting doesn’t work. Neither does sulking or refusing to talk. But I try it for a day anyway. The next night at supper, after 24 hours of Lucy Locklip, I offer them a deal.
“Deal?” My father’s eyebrows jump so high I’m looking for his eyelids to rip, and his mouth is squirming—I don’t know if it’s a snarl or a suppressed laugh. “What sort of deal, Sport?”
“You give me my computer back and I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
He laughs. I stare back at him stone-faced.
My mother says, “Sweetie—”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Honey—”
“Or Honey or Sugar. Or Sport.” I shoot a look at my father. “My name is Lucy.”
“Young lady”—he is less amused now—“I don’t think you understand just how much trouble you’re in.”
“What? Because I wrote a highly historically accurate essay? Because I’m having one bad semester at school? Because I was a few minutes late for dinner one night?”
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