Sweetblood (9781439108741)

by Hautman, Pete

  I want desperately to be at home, in bed, wrapped around my own pillow with my headphones on listening to Patti Smith or Johnette Napolitano, two women who know what it’s like to be as pissed-off as I am.

  “Please lie down….”

  “I’m fine, I told you.” I stand up. MacDougal looks frightened. I hate it when people are afraid of my diabetes. She thinks I’ll fall down in her office and she will be held responsible.

  I hear a siren.

  “No way I’m going to the hospital,” I say, starting for the door.

  Mrs. MacDougal grabs my wrist and gets in my face with her squinty eyes and tough-love voice. “Young lady, I want you to sit down right now. You’ve had a nasty fall, and you clearly do not have your diabetes under control. You are going to the hospital.”

  I jerk my arm away from her and push the door open and run down the hall.

  “Lucy!” MacDougal calls after me but I ignore her.

  Lockers like metal coffins line the empty hallway. If I keep moving my feet I will arrive at the front foyer. The glass doors will lead me out onto the street. The street will take me home. I am almost to the foyer when a rhinoceros appears before me. It is Gruber, the vice-principal, in his rhino-gray suit. He wears gray like I wear black. His arms are out, his legs bent, and his head is tucked down between his shoulders. Reliving his days as a high school football hero. Is he going to tackle me?

  “Hold on there, Ms. Szabo,” he says in his gravelly voice.

  I dodge to the left but he is too quick for me; his right arm wraps my waist. I strike out, hitting him with my fists.

  “Let me go you pervert!” I yell. He pins my arms to my sides. “Get your hands off me! Rape! Rape!” He scrunches up his face at my screaming but won’t let go. “I’ll sue! Help! Help!”

  The hallway is filling with people. I see Dylan. I see Fiona Cassaday.

  “Please calm down, Ms. Szabo,” says Gruber.

  I suck in a deep breath and shout, right in his stupid little ear, louder than I have ever shouted anything before.

  “LET GO OF ME!”

  Gruber shudders, but I am still his prisoner.

  Of course, when they get me to the hospital all they do is give me about a thousand dollars’ worth of tests I don’t need then send me home and tell me to monitor my blood glucose more closely. Like I couldn’t have figured that out…

  My mother’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel, and the windshield wipers are slapping back and forth, and the world is gray on gray.

  So I had an insulin reaction. She should be used to it by now.

  I’m never going to school again.

  Talk about embarrassing. The whole school watching me wrestle with Gruber, screaming hysterically. The paramedics hauling me off. I’m sure they all think I’ve been institutionalized, wrapped in a straitjacket, locked in a padded room, doped up on lithium and Prozac. Maybe electroshocked and lobotomized, too. Actually, I think I’d rather have a lobotomy than go back to school.

  My mother is talking. She talks a lot when she’s nervous. I tune in to see what she’s babbling about.

  “—Rita Steiner said her daughter is doing so well on her insulin pump….”

  I was afraid of this: Sandy Steiner’s mom has gotten hold of my mother and they are plotting to hook me up to a machine.

  “I’m not going bionic,” I say.

  She looks over at me. “Honey…?”

  Now she wants me to explain bionic. Forget about it. I slump deeper and stare out into the pouring rain.

  19

  Shrink-Wrap

  The shrink’s bookshelves are full of toys and games. He has dolls and trucks and toy guns and robot action figures and board games and puzzles and a lot of things I don’t recognize. I pick up something that looks like a Ping-Pong paddle with a hole in its center. I am looking at it when the door opens and Richard Carlson, M.D., steps in to the room.

  He looks just like you would think: average in every way. I can’t even tell how old he is. Somewhere between thirty and fifty. Sandy hair. Regular features. Average weight and height. He is wearing blue jeans to show me how casual and hip he is, and a tweed sport coat to show me he’s a dork. He is holding a notebook with a green leather cover and a big friendly smile that didn’t come with his face. I’m sure he practices it in front of a mirror.

  “Hi,” he says, extending his free hand. “I’m Dr. Rick.”

  He has a very soft, dry handshake.

  “Lucy Szabo.”

  He looks at the paddle in my left hand. “Do you know what that is?” he asks.

  “No.” I put the paddle back on the bookshelf.

  “Any guesses?” He is standing a little too close to me.

  I back off a step. “It’s a Ping-Pong paddle with a hole in it.”

  “And what do you suppose it’s for?”

  “Is this part of the evaluation?”

  Dr. Rick laughs, a little too loud. “Just a question.”

  I do not like this Dr. Rick. “Why don’t you tell me what it’s for?”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t we sit down?” He directs me toward the two leather easy chairs.

  “Which one is yours?” I ask.

  “Take your pick.”

  “Why? So you can analyze my choice?”

  “So that you’ll be more comfortable. Are you uncomfortable?” His eyes are lit up. I sense that making patients uncomfortable is what he does best. He enjoys it.

  I choose the chair that I think he prefers. I do not like this Dr. Rick. I am glad that there is a coffee table between us.

  “So, Lucy,” he says once we are settled. “I understand you’ve been having some problems at school.”

  “Actually, they’ve been having some problems with me.”

  He writes something in his green leather notebook. “Could you explain what you mean by that?”

  I figure I should just cut to the heart of it. “Look, it wasn’t my idea to come here. I’m getting some bad grades and I had an insulin reaction at school, I’ve got an English teacher with no sense of humor and a vice-principal who thinks he’s still a football star. Other than that, everything is fine. No problem. The only reason I’m here is to get the brain police off my case.”

  Dr. Rick looks a bit startled. I’ve scored a point.

  He says, “I hope you don’t view me as one of the brain police.”

  I say nothing. Let him work it out for himself.

  He clears his throat. “I think I understand something of why your teachers have been having trouble.”

  “What, I’m too surly and mouthy?”

  “Lucy, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you.”

  “Good. I hate bush beaters.”

  “You’re not a little kid anymore. You’re making choices that will stay with you for a long, long time—”

  BLAH BLAH BLAH.

  “—so let me put it to you as directly as I know how. What happens in this room today, and on any future visits, is far more important to you than it is to me. I get paid either way. Whether or not this is a waste of your time is strictly up to you.”

  “Good,” I say.

  He gives me a couple seconds of his superior look, then nods crisply, as if he’s won his point back. “All right then. You say your parents and teachers are having some problems with you. Is there anything you can do to help them?”

  “Help them what?”

  “With the difficulties they’re having with your behavior.”

  “It’s not my behavior that’s bothering them. It’s who I am.”

  “Everything they know about who you are is based on what you do.”

  This Dr. Rick has more moves than a spider monkey.

  “Nobody wants you to change who you are, Lucy—”

  “You’re wrong about that.”

  “—but maybe you can make some adjustments that would make it easier for them.”

  “I could become invisible.”

  He smiles with his mo
uth but not his eyes, then sets his notebook aside and sits forward, leaning his tweed elbows on his denim knees. In a way he reminds me of Wayne the butterfly man—except that Wayne, for all his weirdness, never made me feel like a subject. This Dr. Rick just wants to evaluate me. He wants to take me apart, like I’m a machine.

  “Anything on a more practical level?”

  I don’t say a word. I’m not opening any doors for this Dr. Rick.

  He opens his notebook. “Let me ask you something, Lucy,” he says as he makes a note. “What’s the best possible result that you can imagine coming out of our meeting here today?”

  I think for a moment. “I go home and you tell everybody that they should leave me alone.”

  He nods slowly. “All right. What’s the second best possible result?”

  “Giant asteroid crashes into Earth.”

  Dr. Rick sighs.

  I almost feel sorry for him.

  I refuse to talk to my mother about Dr. Rick.

  “I’m sure he’ll send you a complete report,” I tell her. I go upstairs to my computerless room and shut the door. The chrysalis is getting darker. I don’t know if it’s dying or hatching. I kick off my boots and crawl into bed with a book I picked up at the library. The book is called The Stranger, by Albert Camus. I picked it because I like the title and it is very short and the author is French. Was French. I think he’s dead. I’m on page two when I hear the doorbell ring. A few seconds later my mother calls my name.

  I take a deep breath and shout, “WHAT?”

  “Someone is here to see you,” she shouts back.

  “WHO?”

  She doesn’t answer. This can’t be good. I untangle myself from the sheets and pull on my boots. One should never greet a mystery guest bootlessly. I hear voices from the kitchen. I head in that direction and find my mother pouring a glass of orange juice for Mark Murphy.

  “Hey, Lucy,” Mark says.

  “Hey.”

  “Mark stopped by to see how you’re feeling,” my mother says. She likes Mark, a major strike against him.

  “I’m feeling fine.”

  “Well then…” My mother is all twitchy. “I’ll just… ah… I’ll be downstairs. Folding laundry.” She heads down the stairs.

  Mark says, “I haven’t seen you at school lately. You okay?”

  My god, he actually cares. “Yeah, I’m okay. I mean, I’m not great, but I’m not sick or anything. I just needed to take some time off after… you know.”

  “After Gruber tackled you?” He’s holding in a smile.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you might take him. He’s got a black eye.”

  “Really?”

  “You nailed him.” Mark is grinning now.

  I grin right back at him. It feels weird the way it stretches my face. When was the last time I laughed? “I might come back to school just to see that.”

  Mark gets his serious look, the one that makes him older and more handsome. “So… you aren’t officially suspended or anything?”

  “No. They think I was having an insulin reaction. Temporary insanity.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “I had the insulin reaction earlier, in chemistry, by the time I ran into Gruber I was okay. I just wanted to get out of there. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it was kind of embarrassing, passing out in class. I don’t know what I said. I might have said anything. I don’t remember.”

  “I heard you just stood up and fell down.”

  “That’s not so bad, then. Also, they wanted to send me to the hospital and I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t sick.”

  “Remember last time you were hospitalized?”

  I think back. “That was a long time ago. I had a really bad insulin reaction.”

  “We were eight.”

  “We were playing some kind of game.”

  “Sleeping Beauty.”

  “I was in my princess phase.”

  “Yeah. We were in Little’s Woods looking for dwarves or something, and all of a sudden you just curled up on the leaves and went to sleep. I couldn’t wake you up.” He is looking away, seeing into the past.

  “So you went and got help.”

  Mark’s face is flushed. I can’t tell if he is embarrassed or angry or about to cry, and I can’t understand why he would be any of those things.

  “Not—I never told you this. I didn’t go for help right away. I just watched you sleep. You were Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Really?” I remember Little’s Woods, a two-acre patch of trees between the creek and the railroad tracks. A few years ago it was cut down to make room for another housing development, but when we were kids, Mark and I used it as our own private wilderness area. I imagine him watching me as I lay unconscious on the forest floor.

  “Then I went home.” He is really red now.

  “To tell your mom?”

  “I went home for lunch.”

  “You…” My mouth is hanging open. “You left me there in the woods?”

  “I was just a little kid. I didn’t know.”

  “I was in the hospital for days! Why are you telling me this?”

  “I just had to. Look, I was thinking you were, you know, Sleeping Beauty. You could sleep for years. And I was hungry.”

  He looks so uncomfortable I feel a laugh spilling from my mouth. “Hungry? You’re always hungry.”

  “I know,” he says as if confessing to a terrible sin.

  “How long did you wait before you told somebody where I was?”

  “A couple of hours. Your mom came looking for you.”

  “So you told her where to find me.”

  “Not exactly. I knew everybody would get mad at me for just leaving you there, so I went back to the woods by myself. You were still asleep….”

  “More like in a coma.”

  “So I tried to wake you up, but you kept on sleeping. Then I remembered that there was only one way to wake up Sleeping Beauty. I kissed you.”

  “You did?”

  “I… I’m sorry.”

  “For kissing me?”

  “For being so stupid. For leaving you like that.”

  “Did it work?”

  “What?”

  “The kiss.”

  He shakes his head. I can almost feel the heat from his cheeks. “I had to run and get my mom. I never told anybody how long I’d left you there. Till now.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I say.

  “I still feel bad about it.”

  “We were just kids. Forget about it.”

  I see the muscles in his face relax. He says, “You know what I think about sometimes? I imagine that I’m walking through the woods and I find you lying there, and I take you to the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess to make up for before. I know it’s really stupid, but I wish I could save your life sometime.”

  Okay, I think, this is a little too weird. My best friend, rock-solid Mark Murphy, is going off the deep end. Now I am embarrassed too. I wish I could give him something, a way for him to feel better about himself. Maybe I could ask him to do me a favor. Then I think of something.

  “How late do you go to bed?” I ask.

  “Pretty late.”

  “What are you doing tonight, say, around eleven?”

  “Uh… I don’t know.”

  “’Cause I was wondering if I could come over.”

  He stares back at me with such an utterly bewildered expression that I have to laugh.

  20

  Studying

  Sblood: real world—where are you guys? what city?

  Fangs666: Paris

  2Tooth: Istanbul

  Roxxxie: Ancient Babylon.

  Sblood: SERIOUS! come on you guys! I realy have to know.

  Fangs666: Fortress of Solitude

  2Tooth: Mars City

  Roxxxie: Ancient Babylon *SERIOUS* I’m logged on through a time link.

  “
I don’t think they’re gonna tell you,” says Mark in a low voice. We are being mouse-quiet. His parents are asleep upstairs. We are in his room, way down in the basement, but his mom can hear hair growing, he says.

  “I’m not surprised. Last thing most of them want is to meet a web friend face-to-face. Everybody knows we’re all fat and ugly with questionable personal hygiene.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

  I swat his shoulder with the back of my hand. It’s like hitting a stone wall. “Ouch,” I say. “When did you get so Schwarzeneggery?”

  Mark grins and rubs his shoulder. “I’ve been working out.”

  2Tooth: Y U wanna know?

  Sblood: personal.

  Mark says, “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m trying to figure out if this guy I met at a party is from our chat room.”

  “What guy?”

  “An older guy.”

  Mark doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. When I look at him he has this funny expression on his face. “You going out with him or something?” he asks.

  “Me?” I have to laugh. “No!”

  He looks relieved. For a second I don’t get it, then I realize that Mark is jealous. Over me! And that makes me feel like I’ve got a lot of air in my chest. I breathe out.

  “He’s just this… kind of weird guy.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I will if I ever see him again.”

  “But the people in the chat room could be anywhere, right? I mean, what are the chances they live here instead of a thousand miles away?”

  “Pretty good, actually. Transylvania started off as an offshoot of a local goth Web site.”

  Sblood: anybody know where Draco’s from?

  2Tooth: N.

  Roxxxie: Last we talked he said he was on a diet. No more blood from fat people. No more pig blood. Skinny girls and alleycat blood only.

  Sblood: ever meet him F2F?

  Roxxxie: NO WAY. I’m a skinny girl. He wants my blood he’ll have to suck it out of me through my keyboard.

  Fangs666: Tasty

  2Tooth: I think he’s from New Orleasn. He knows Anne Rice.

  Roxxxie: Not New Orleans. I know all the Big Easy vamps.

  Vlad714: What r you guys talking?