Sweetblood (9781439108741)

by Hautman, Pete

  I say, “Who knows? Maybe the cure for diabetes is to drink the blood of normal people. An old Transylvanian cure?”

  Fish’s eyebrows do another contortion, then he forces out a laugh: HA HA HA.

  “Do you want a prescription for that?” he asks, trying to join me in the joke. I can see that he is uncomfortable. That makes me mad, so I just stare back at him without smiling. He looks down at my chart for a few seconds, then changes the subject.

  “What was the paper you wrote that got you in so much trouble?”

  “I just wrote out my theory. And added some background information. You know—stuff about Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory. Kind of nasty stuff. But mostly I just described how this diabetic girl turns into a vampire and eats her neighbors’ stew and then gets burned to death by some angry villagers.”

  Fish nods. “Sounds gruesome. I take it your teacher didn’t like your theory?”

  “Well, she called my parents… and you know how they are. They already think I’m some sort of bad seed, what with my diabetes and being a teenager and all.”

  “You really think that?”

  “I think they don’t know what to make of me.”

  “Okay, you wrote a paper that didn’t go over so well. How come you’re having so much trouble in your other classes?”

  “Ennui,” I say.

  “On wee?”

  “Oui.”

  Fish laughs. It’s not that funny, but I laugh too. It’s been a while.

  I say, “Look, school’s just really tedious right now. I got straight As for, like, three years in a row. I don’t see why everybody freaks out if I slack off for one semester. What’s the big deal? School is boring.”

  “You know, it’s not such an awful thing to be bored.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re old.”

  “I wasn’t always. Look at it this way. School is boring no matter how you cut it, right?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Would it be any more boring if you did the work?”

  “It might not be more boring, but it would be more work.”

  Fish says nothing, but his look accuses me. I feel pressure building up behind my eyeballs.

  “I just don’t want to study all the time. I’m sick of it. It’s too hard, and it’s not fair.”

  “Why is it not fair?” He seems genuinely puzzled.

  “My parents took away my computer. Plus, I have to deal with insulin reactions, and my blood sugars going crazy every time I get my period, and all the rest of it. My parents don’t get it at all. My mom’s on this huge guilt trip because I got diabetes and my dad, all he can think about when he looks at me is how come I’m not a boy. You know how come I don’t have any brothers or sisters? I’ll tell you—my mom actually told me this—she said the reason they quit having kids was because they didn’t want to risk bringing another diabetic child into the world. Can you imagine her saying that to me? That’s my mom.”

  My eyes are stinging. Hot wet streaks run down my face. I’m sure my cheeks are black with makeup.

  Fish is staring at me, his face a cautious blank. He probably wishes he was on the golf course or the moon or anyplace else in the universe, but he is stuck in this examination room with a crazy crying teenage girl vampire. I allow myself a loud snuffle, then I shut off the faucet.

  “I just want them to leave me alone,” I say.

  “Like Greta Garbo,” says Fish.

  “Who?”

  “Greta Garbo, the famous movie star. When she gave up acting back in the 1940s, she told a reporter, ‘I want to be left alone.’”

  “Did she get what she wanted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Fish says he will talk to my parents. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I trust Fish, but not 100 percent. Maybe he is going to tell them to lock me up.

  He sends me to the lab for tests. The lab vampire—she calls herself a phlebotomist—sucks out a few tubes of blood, covers the single fang mark with a bandage, and sends me away. It’s a few minutes after one when I leave the clinic, time to get back to school for English, but I really don’t want to see Mrs. Graham. Instead, I walk the ten blocks to Harker Village, an area near the college with lots of shops and restaurants. As usual, I stop at Antoinette’s Body Art to look at the tattoo designs in the window. Antoinette is sitting outside her door, smoking a cigar. She sees me coming and gives me a little wave.

  “Hey, girl,” she says. Antoinette is about fifty years old, I think, with short gray hair, huge breasts, huge belly, huge everything. She’s been a tattoo artist for twenty years, and she knows everything about everybody. Today she is wearing her favorite outfit: jeans and a black leather vest with dozens of pockets. She has about fifty tattoos on her thick arms and shoulders. Half of them are small black crosses, all the same size. “Still shopping?” she asks.

  I look at the hundreds of tattoo designs displayed in the front window—everything from bloody swords to pink roses to shattered skulls to Bugs Bunny. At one time or another I’ve considered each and every one of them. I’ve imagined a fiery dragon wrapped around my left arm, a butterfly on my shoulder.

  “Yeah. I’ve heard they don’t wash off.”

  “Not without one hell of a lot of scrubbing,” she says with a grin. Antoinette and I have had this conversation dozens of times. She finds me amusing.

  “Maybe I’ll get an armlet. A chain design wrapped around my arm. You know—to symbolize my enslavement.”

  “When did you become a slave?”

  “When I was born?”

  “Really! You are one pissed-off chick.”

  “I’m not pissed-off. Angry.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s different then. What are you angry about?”

  “Everything.”

  Antoinette puffs on her cigar and gives me a squinty-eyed look through the smoke.

  “I used to be like that,” she says. She holds out her left arm and points at a tattoo, a flaming skull. “That’s how I feel when I’m angry. You want one like that?”

  “Uh, not today, thanks.”

  “Yeah? Well, you decide what you want, then come back and see me.” She flicks her cigar into the gutter. “In the meantime, lighten up, kid. Don’t get stuck on yourself. Life is change. Have some fun.”

  The Sacred Bean is just down the block from Antoinette’s. I decide to stop in for a coffee. Who knows? Maybe Guy will stop by. I order a triple cappuccino and sit at the back corner table and brood—something I do well. (I am a world-class brooder; I am the Tiger Woods of brooding.) I don’t expect the caffeine to stop the brooding, but it might make me brood faster. I stare across the room, out the glass front door at the fire-red leaves of a maple tree, and try to figure out what is going on with me.

  I used to like school.

  My parents didn’t used to bother me so much.

  I used to know how to have fun.

  Life didn’t used to suck.

  Just after school started, I made these complaints to Buttface the counselor. She told me it was normal to feel that way. She said it’s part of growing up. Big help there. Now, a few weeks later, I still feel the same way, only now she wants me to see a shrink.

  I might be nuts, but at least I’m consistent.

  The clock on the wall says 3:05. School’s out. I’m grounded. I’m supposed to be on my way home.

  A couple of kids I recognize come in and order coffees and take them over by the windows. Maple leaves float down past the glass, flakes of frozen fire. I watch the front door, my cappuccino reduced to a glob of barely warm sludge in the bottom of my cup. I wonder if Guy will show up. Of course, he has no idea that I’m here. I told him I was grounded, that I couldn’t meet him. But now here I am, at the Bean, waiting for him.

  13

  Night Creature

  I don’t get home until almost five, but my mother is only moderately perturbed. I go straight to my room. My computer has not magically reappeared, but the chrysalis has changed color. It
is slightly bluer, like the color of spruce needles. I see faint shadows beneath its surface, dark, parallel lines. I watch it, trying to imagine the consciousness inside. I think how it would feel to bind myself into a cocoon, to metamorphose, to become a Lucy… plus. I might grow wings, or the hard, chitinous shell of a beetle, or the powerful stinger of a wasp. I once read a story about a man who woke up and found he had turned into a giant cockroach. I would prefer to change into something not quite so creepy-crawly.

  I should check my blood sugar, I think. Sometimes when I have weird thoughts—like turning into a bug—it means my glucose is out of whack. Maybe that triple cappuccino kicked it up into the 400s. Or the long walk home brought it down into the thirties. Where it is now, nobody knows. I write down a number on a scrap of paper: 112. I want my blood sugar to be 112. A nice, normal, nondiabetic number. A number that I won’t have to bring down with an insulin shot or raise by stuffing food in my face.

  I take out my blood glucose meter and stare at its chipped, worn plastic surfaces. This meter has been like a detached part of my body for years. It has analyzed gallons of my sweet, rich blood. Every time I feed it a warm red droplet, it judges me mercilessly. I’ve been good or I’ve been bad. Perfect or flawed. Virtuous or wicked. Saintly or sinful. Black or white. The meter will only deliver hard, cold numbers. It won’t say, “You’re a little bit high this afternoon, Luce, but not too bad considering what you’ve been through. I understand completely. Besides, I could be wrong.”

  Meters are not like that. I decide not to test. I don’t need another hole in my fingertip. Besides, maybe my blood sugar is 112. Why waste a test?

  I am furious at Guy. I know it’s stupid—I told him I couldn’t meet him—but I’m mad at him anyway for not showing up at the Bean. Things are happening in my head, angry little explosions leaving vapor trails of thought. Three times I reach to turn on my computer, but it’s never there. I put a Concrete Blonde disc in my Discman and my headphones in my ears and lie back on my bed and crank the volume high enough to obliterate thought. I am swallowed by Johnette Napolitano’s husky, shredded voice.

  I am awakened by headphones being yanked from my head and the harsh sound of my father’s voice shouting in my ear. My ears ringing from the headphones, I try to decode his shouted words.

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” He pulls me upright by my arm.

  “What are you DOING?” I yell. “Let GO of me!” I jerk my arm from his grasp and flop back onto the bed. My mother is behind him, doing her hand-wringing thing.

  “Sweetie…,” she says.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” my father growls.

  “I’m FINE. I just fell asleep. What do you WANT?”

  “You didn’t answer when I called you for dinner,” my mother says.

  “Or when we knocked,” my father adds.

  “We were afraid you… we thought maybe you weren’t feeling well, Honey.”

  “Going to ruin your ears with that!” My father thrusts his index finger at my Discman, the headphones still blasting.

  I turn off the CD player. We glare at each other like dogs trying to decide if they want to fight. I open my mouth to snarl something but catch myself just in time. If I lose it with them now, I might end up in some institution.

  “So… what’s for dinner?” I ask.

  Over dinner, I find out that Fish is just as bad as the rest of them. My parents tell me that he wants me to see a psychologist. Some guy named Carlson, a specialist in adolescent behavior. Dr. Carlson is going to “evaluate” me. Evaluate. That’s where they tell you if you have any value—or if you’re a worthless human being. My father tells me this as if he is giving me wonderful news. He has already made an appointment for me.

  “We’ll get this thing figured out in no time, Sport. Dr. Fisher says Dr. Carlson is one of the best.”

  My mother’s oven-roasted sliced potatoes, normally one of my favorites, taste like disks of greasy brown corrugated cardboard. I chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. When I can’t swallow any more, I excuse myself and return to my room.

  I stare up at Rubber Bat and the Seven Sisters and I listen to the murmur of my parents talking over the remains of dinner. My ears are very, very sharp. Like my grandmother used to say, I can hear a mouse walking on velvet. I can’t pick out the individual words, but I know they are talking about me. After a while the conversation lags. I hear the soft clatter of dishes going into the sink, the hiss of running water, the rattle and clack of the dishwasher being loaded. Washing dishes used to be my job, but a few weeks back I just quit doing it. It was really weird. I expected some sort of scene, but my mother never said a word; she just took over, as if all the times I’d done them meant nothing, as if I hadn’t really mattered.

  I imagine how she looks now with her hands plunged in the soapy water. Have I ever mentioned that my mother used to be beautiful? She keeps a photo on her vanity. In the photo she is twenty-four years old. She has long blond hair and she looks happy, as if life could not possibly be better. That was before she had me. She looks different now: brow semiscrunched, half smile, forced cheeriness, and that haunted, scared look in her eyes. I know what she’s scared of. She’s scared of her daughter, the wicked protovampire Lucinda. Wherever I go, whatever I am doing, I see her face accusing me. I see her hands washing my dishes. I want to say, This wasn’t my idea. I didn’t ask to be born.

  Finally there is a brief silence, then the sharper sound of electronic chatter from the den. My parents, intellectual giants, watch about four hours of TV every night. They will stare at it until it’s time to go to bed. I wait until they are completely hypnotized, then sneak downstairs and get my father’s cell phone out of his coat pocket. I creep back up to my room and call information. There are only three Redfields listed. I get the right one on the second try.

  “Hello?”

  I recognize Guy’s voice right away.

  “Where were you?” I say.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is the grounded vampire.”

  “Lucy?”

  “Where were you? I went to the Bean, but you weren’t there.”

  “I thought you were grounded.”

  “So?” I’m not going to make this easy for him. If he really likes me, he’ll have to learn to deal.

  “Sorry—I didn’t think you’d be there.”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know what I’m doing right now?”

  “Talking on the phone?”

  “I’m looking at that bug you gave me.”

  “Yeah? Is it doing anything?”

  “It’s just sort of hanging out. Where’d you get it?”

  “I have my sources. Hey, you want to go over to the Bean? They’re open till two. They have live music at night.”

  “Can’t,” I say. “I’m grounded.”

  Guy doesn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, then, in a tentative voice, he asks, “Does that mean that I should go to the Bean anyway, just in case you decide to go—even though you can’t go because you’re grounded? Or do you mean you really can’t go? Which is it?”

  “Yes,” I say. I hang up.

  I can be a real bitch sometimes.

  Twenty minutes later I feel bad. I call Guy to tell him I was just kidding, but a woman answers—his mother, I suppose—and tells me he went out. I hang up before she asks who I am. I flop back on my bed and imagine him sitting at the same table I was at, sipping cappuccino and watching the door. Serve him right. At the same time, I know that I’m being completely unfair. I lay there letting the thoughts swirl around in my head. After a while I go downstairs and return the phone to my dad’s coat pocket and wander into the den. The parents are zombied-out, watching a rerun of Little House on the Prairie, my mother’s favorite show.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Heads turn.

  “You think you could turn it down a little? I’m going to sleep.”

  Wordlessly, my father lifts the
remote and lowers the volume.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I go back to my room. Now that I’ve announced that I’m going to bed, they won’t look in on me.

  I put on my black denim shirt with the silver buttons. I touch up my eyeliner and layer on a fresh coat of lipstick and run a brush through my hair and add a few rings to my fingers and grab my black cotton trench coat and climb out the window and down the antenna post to the ground like the predatory creature of the night that I am. I head up the dark side of the street, the long tails of the trench coat flapping behind me.

  14

  Espresso Yourself

  The frowning barista has a bone in her nose. It looks like the short end of a wishbone from a Thanksgiving turkey, and it is stuck right through her left nostril like somebody stabbed her with it. The pointy end is hanging over her upper lip. I think it must be hard for her to talk. No wonder she is unhappy. I order a triple latte. While she hisses and foams, I look around.

  The Bean is different at night. Different crowd; not so Joe College. I see a lot of leather but very few books. I am looking for Guy, but there are too many black-leather-jacketed, black-haired guys. Cigarette smoke hangs in a layer about four feet off the floor. The room is lit by a dozen tiny halogen track lights scattered across the dark ceiling: an upside-down field of miniature searchlights cutting through nicotine fog. It’s hard to see across the room.

  The barista pushes my latte at me with a boney frown. I pay her. She gives me change. I say, “Thank you.” The barista says nothing. I wonder why she is so unhappy, and why she has chosen to stick an ugly old turkey bone in her nose. Maybe it is an act. Maybe she doesn’t know how to act, so she sticks a bone in her nostril and acts pissed-off. I’ve been there. Only without the bone.

  I add four packets of fake sugar to my latte, then go looking for a table where I can sit and act blasé. I find one near the small stage, where two tall, pale, stringy-haired, blue-lipsticked women are setting up. They look like sisters. One of them has a big stand-up bass, the other an oboe. I sit and sip. The blue lips are talking, but I can’t understand what they are saying. After a few moments of confusion, I realize that they are speaking another language, and suddenly I feel ultrahip and worldly sitting with my triple latte late at night surrounded by black leather and cigarette smoke and women speaking a strange tongue. So what if Guy doesn’t show? I am my own cool self. I can sit here and be a part of this scene even though I’m only in high school and I don’t know anybody and I can’t imagine what these two blue-lipped women are planning to do with a bass and an oboe.