Sweetblood (9781439108741)

by Hautman, Pete

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks.

  “I’ve been here before,” I say.

  She laughs. “Are you drunk?”

  Maybe I am. My stomach has broken free and is doing backstrokes in my gut. Is it okay to go swimming if you are a full stomach? One part of me laughs at my silent joke while another part tells me that it is time to go.

  “Have you seen Dilly?” I ask.

  “Dilly? You mean Dylan? I think he’s watching the fish.” She points to the next room.

  I find Dylan sitting before a large aquarium staring at brightly colored tropical fish.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He looks up at me with a silly Dilly grin. “Hi, Lucy!”

  “I want to go.”

  “Now?”

  “I want to go now.”

  He stands up, staggers to the side, and falls flat on his face.

  “Oops.” He pushes himself up. His nose is bleeding.

  “You’re drunk,” I say.

  “I’m okay,” he mumbles, touching his nose, looking at the red smear on his hand.

  Maybe I’m drunk too, but I’m not so drunk I’d get in a car with him driving. “Where’s the jacket?”

  “I don’t know….” His eyes are pointing in two different directions.

  I plunge from room to room, searching, and finally find Mark’s letter jacket draped over the back of a chair. I throw it over my shoulders and I’m heading for the door when Draco materializes before me like a movie vampire.

  “Lucy,” he says, his hands cupping my shoulders. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Let go.” I slap his arms aside.

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “I have to go.” But he is standing in front of the door.

  “Then I will miss you.” He reaches out with his left hand, very slowly. I watch it coming toward my face. The backs of his fingers brush my lips gently, then he brings his hand to his mouth and kisses it where it touched my lips.

  My stomach lurches. He sees the revulsion in my eyes. He smiles.

  “I have to go,” I say again.

  Draco shrugs and steps aside, and I am running down the stairs, I am pushing through glass doors, I am running through the night.

  26

  Snail

  I am thirsty.

  The sidewalk is slick and hard and peppered with tiny pellets of ice larger than poppyseeds but smaller than peas. It is like snow, and it is like hail. I will call it snail. My cowboy boots skitter and skid on the ice, but somehow I do not fall. I am walking through the snail, protected by Mark’s enormous jacket, ice pellets rattling off the hard leather sleeves.

  The streets are empty. It must be three or four in the morning. I wonder how many miles away from home I am. Maybe a taxicab will drive by. My boots crunch, my breath is a cloud of steam, my guts are heavy and sore. Maybe I am pregnant, abducted by aliens and seeded with a star child. Or Draco planted a demon child inside me when he touched my lips. Or it is cancer, a huge tumor. I’ll take the tumor. The streetlamps are haloed and painfully bright.

  I walk past a small house sandwiched between two apartment buildings. The lights are on; the curtains are open. A woman sits at a table drinking from a purple mug. Why is she awake? I stop and watch her through the window. She is drinking tea, I think, and reading a book. Maybe she can’t sleep. She sips her tea again; I can almost taste it I am so thirsty. What if she looked out the window and saw me standing there? Would she invite me in? Would she offer me a cup of tea? A glass of water? Or would she call the police? As I am thinking this her head turns and points directly at me. She stares blankly for a few seconds, then returns to her book. Did she see me, or was she looking at her own reflection in the glass?

  She turns a page and sips her tea. I do not exist. I am not real to this woman. I am not part of her world. I am thirsty and I am invisible.

  I continue down the sidewalk, crunching ice pellets with my boots and grateful for the sound. The snail knows I’m real. It is two inches deep on the sidewalk and a slushy mess on the street. I wish I had called a taxi from Wayne’s. I wish someone would stop and give me a ride to Mark’s so I could return his letter jacket. It would be terrible if I didn’t. Maybe Mark will give me something to drink. Water, port, snakebite, anything.

  I once read that if you relax your arms and shoulders and hold your head high you can walk all day without tiring. I am very tired. My neck is tucked between my hunched shoulders. I would pull it in all the way if I could, like a snail. My stomach hurts. I don’t think I’ve walked even three miles, and I have at least that far to go.

  The twenty-four-hour Laundromat is so bright it stings my eyeballs. Nobody is there, but two dryers are running. The phone is broken. I feed a dollar into the soda machine. Diet or regular? I buy a regular Coke. I need the sugar, I think. I still have a long walk ahead of me. I stand and watch my reflection in the tumbling dryers and drink the Coca-Cola. I am almost done with it when I remember Draco’s hand touching my lips and suddenly my belly clenches. I drop to my hands and knees and vomit wine and chocolate and Coke onto the floor. Chaos, upheaval, revelation. The pain is excruciating and the room is whirling. I am being spun and squeezed by a giant invisible gorilla, emptied like a tube of toothpaste.

  I’ve had my last drink ever, I tell myself, and I throw up again.

  I hear someone whimpering. It’s me.

  I am lying on a Laundromat floor staring at a lake of vomit. Disgusting, repugnant, loathsome, repulsive. I climb to my feet. Vomit is soaking onto the leather sleeve of Mark’s jacket. I rinse it off in the sink. Maybe it will be okay. I dry the sleeve with a T-shirt someone has left on the folding table and stumble out of the Laundromat. The snail is piled deeper. I slog onward at snail speed.

  I am eating snail. It is crunchy and cold and it soothes my throat. I am able to eat three handfuls before the invisible gorilla comes to squeeze a few more ounces of vomit from my aching gut. My brain is not working. There is something I should know; something I should be doing. I am so close. I try to stand up again but my body weighs a thousand pounds. I flop onto my back on the cold wet ground and stare up into the falling snail.

  Polyphagia, polydipsia, polyuria, mental obtundation. Abdominal tenderness, decreased bowel sounds. Hypothermia is the rule…. It is not a voice, but a memory. Words I have read. Polyphagia: uncontrolled eating. Polydipsia: uncontrolled drinking. Polyhemodipsia : uncontrolled drinking of blood. Now I am making up words. Polyhemosnaildipsia: uncontrolled drinking of bloody snail. Must be that mental obtundation.

  I am too thirsty to think and too tired to move. I close my eyes and let the images come, butterflies, vampires, port wine, chocolate. I see a page covered with type. Polyphagia, polydipsia, poly… I remember now. They are symptoms of the Big Scary: diabetic ketoacidosis. I’m not drunk, I’m dying. My body doesn’t need chocolate or Coke, it needs insulin. Did I take my morning shot? Apparently not.

  My name is Lucy Szabo. I live at 429 Johnson Avenue. My telephone number is… I can’t remember. There are so many things I don’t know. The last two days are a dream. This is not the twenty-first century, it is two hundred years ago. Transylvania. I can hear the wolves howling. The peasants will find me here in the bright cold morning, my eyes frozen, my oversweetened body covered with snail. I will have become something different. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will rise from my coffin and demand their blood.

  I open my mouth and let the tiny pellets of ice fall between my lips.

  27

  Logic

  I see faces.

  I see Draco; I see Wayne. I see Guy. I see Mark. I see Fish and Buttface and Dr. Rick. I see a woman drinking tea in the middle of the night. I see myself reflected in the hot glass of a tumbling dryer. I see my mother in the framed photo of herself she keeps on her vanity: beautiful, tall, healthy, cheerful, normal. I see my father—never a handsome man, but always brimming with confidence—now fearful and confused. They are all looking at me.

 
None of them are real. My eyes are closed, so how can they be real? What did Draco say? Reality is money and pain. And pleasure. But he is wrong. I know he is wrong. Money is a symbol. Pain is a sign or something else. Pleasure is an illusion. So what is real? Butterflies?

  Reality is the beeping I hear. And the smell of disinfectant and flowers. And the warm, dry, scratchy fabric.

  I hear my mother’s voice. “Sweetheart? Honey?” That is real too.

  I know where I am now. That doesn’t stop my mouth from asking, “Where?”

  “You’re in the hospital, Sweetie.”

  Undead again. I open my eyes. She is peering at me. The flesh under her eyes is dark and soft, the smile lines sag on her cheeks, and her skin looks thin and brittle. She looks old. When did she get old? How long have I been asleep? I want to ask her what year it is, but I am afraid.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired.” I look down my arm at the IV drip. I look down my legs at two balls of white bandage. I wiggle my toes; the bandages move, but it hurts. “What happened to my feet?”

  “A little frostbite, Sport.” My father’s voice. He is standing at the foot of the bed. He looks old too. “Your blood sugar was over eight hundred when they brought you in.”

  “Oh.” A new record.

  “You were lying in the snow for hours.”

  I remember that. It was cold. I was thirsty.

  My mother says, “We didn’t even know you were gone, Honey. I went to your room to wake you up and”—her face crumples and her eyes tear up—“you weren’t there.”

  I look away. My eyes land on blue denim legs. I follow the legs up to an orange sweatshirt, to Mark Murphy’s freckled face.

  “Hey, Skeeter,” he says. He doesn’t look any older.

  “Hi.” I don’t feel like calling him Monkey Boy.

  “Mark found you,” my mother says.

  “You were curled up under the lilac bushes in my backyard, covered with snow,” Mark says. “I thought you were dead.”

  “So what did you do? Go back inside and eat breakfast?” I mean it as a joke, but it doesn’t come out funny. “Just kidding,” I say.

  He barely smiles. “I brought you inside and called 911.”

  My father says, “I’ll let the doctors know you’re awake.” He walks out of the room.

  “Are you hungry, Sweetie?” my mother asks. I want to reach out and smooth her brow, but I know she’d pull back.

  “I’m a little thirsty,” I say. She pours a glass of water from the pitcher on the bedside table and offers it to me. The water tastes flat and stale. “Could I get some Diet Sprite or something?”

  “I could get one from the machine.” She grabs change from her purse and heads out on a Sprite hunt. Good. I need to talk to Mark.

  “How long have I been here?” I ask him.

  “Since yesterday morning.”

  “Is that all? My mom looks so old.”

  “She’s pretty beat. I don’t think she’s been home since they brought you here.”

  “I’m sorry about your jacket. I puked on the sleeve.”

  He shrugs. “You were sick.”

  “I was trying to return it to you. I think that’s why I ended up in your yard. I guess I wasn’t thinking so good.”

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “Thanks for not asking.”

  “Asking what?”

  “You know. Where I was and stuff.”

  Mark shrugs.

  “And for not being scared of me.”

  “I’m a little scared of you,” he says.

  “But not like you avoid me.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You still like me?”

  “Like you?”

  “Me.” I point at myself. “Who I am.”

  “Ms. Szabo?”

  “Hey, Fish.”

  “Having a bad week?”

  “I’ve had better.”

  He flips through my chart, shakes his head, then sits down in the chair next to my bed and crosses his legs. “What happened?”

  “I was a bad girl.”

  He raises his eyebrows and waits for more.

  “I think I forgot my morning insulin.”

  “Weren’t you testing?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Is that all? Ketoacidosis doesn’t usually come on so quickly.”

  “Well, I’d had a few bad days. I thought I was just, you know, stressed out. Things got kind of out of control. And then I, ah… is this just between us?”

  Fish thinks about that for a few seconds, then nods.

  I tell him as much as I think he can handle. I tell him about the port wine and the chocolate. And when I’m done talking, he tells me that my heart stopped beating for almost two minutes.

  “I was dead?”

  “Near enough. You got here just in time. Fortunately, you’re young and otherwise healthy. The remarkable thing is, Lucy, that you have recovered so quickly. But we’re going to have to keep an eye on you for the next few weeks to make sure you haven’t suffered any organ damage. And I’d like to schedule you with a diabetes educator to go over your regimen.”

  “I know what I’m supposed to do. I just didn’t do it.”

  Fish smiles. “That’s what they all say.”

  They let me go home later that afternoon. My mother is into her cheerful act; my father grips the steering wheel with his big hands, saying nothing. I can feel, taste, and smell their fear and anger. I am bad. I have inconvenienced them. Made them worry. Bad girl. Do I feel bad?

  Mostly I feel angry. If they hadn’t taken away my computer none of this would have happened. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I believe it. If they hadn’t made me go to school I’d never have punched Gruber in the eye. That doesn’t make any sense either. I don’t care. I am beyond logic.

  I look at the back of my mother’s head, at her practical haircut with its streaks of gray. Every one of those gray hairs is my fault, I suppose—although it’s really her fault for giving birth to me.

  It’s Dylan’s fault too. He got too drunk to drive and so I had to walk home. I am very angry at Dylan. I am even a little bit mad at Mark, and I don’t know why. Yes I do. He lent me his jacket. Why did he do that? Why didn’t he just say no, or make me tell him why I wanted to borrow it? Why would he just do what I say? He says he’s a little scared of me. Why is he afraid?

  That’s the thing about Draco. He’s not afraid of me at all. I can be who I am. Everybody else I know treats me like nitroglycerin. I treat myself that way sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m the worst one of all.

  When we get home I shuffle up the stairs in my hospital booties. I won’t be able to wear regular shoes for a few days. My room feels small and deserted. The crumpled shell of the chrysalis still hangs from the edge of the shelf, my bed is unmade, my clothes are strewn. This is what my mother saw when she went to look for me Saturday morning. I sit at my desk and test my blood sugar. It is perfectly normal—just like everybody else. I could eat something if I was hungry. Or eat nothing at all. For this moment it is as though I do not have diabetes. Perfectly normal.

  I sit on the edge of my bed and take off my paper booties and unwrap the gauze bandages and look down at my angry red toes and I start to cry.

  Dying has a curious effect on a person. I recommend it to anyone who thinks that they need more insight about themselves. But don’t expect to get any happier. When it comes to self-realization, the more you know the less you like. At least that’s how it worked for me. I have tremendous insight, but I am miserable.

  Insight number one: I could be dead. I am staring up at Rubber Bat, and I could be dead. My toes are throbbing, but I could be dead. My parents are watching TV… I could be dead. Instead I am Undead again. Does one cancel out the other, or am I double-Undead? Nobody said that insights have to be logical. I am alive, but I am Undead.

  Insight number two: When you are dying, your life does not flash before your eyes. At least m
ine didn’t. That means that I have to pay attention to everything that happens to me from now on, because I only get to see it once. Several interesting things have happened to me lately. I will try to remember them.

  Insight number three: When you die and then come back, the people who are there when you wake up are the people who love you.

  And that is why I am miserable. Because they are the people I hurt the most.

  28

  Me

  It is four days before I can wear regular shoes again. Four days of shuffling around the house in paper booties, then in a pair of my father’s slippers after the booties fall apart. Mostly I don’t care what people think, but I would die if anybody saw me in those blue booties.

  By Thursday I am able to pull my boots on. I dress in the blackest clothes I have. I slather on the eyeliner and apply a slash of lipstick the color of eggplant. Still feeling naked, I put on my big shades. Then I comb my hair forward over my face. Now I can’t see. I push it back and glare at myself.

  “Who do you think you are?” I ask.

  At school they are all terrified of me. I don’t blame them. Who wants to be around someone who could keel over and die at any moment? Why should they waste a precious moment on a surly black-leather goth/not-goth freak when they could be laughing and smiling and having fun with their perky-healthy friends?

  In French class, Dylan offers up a tentative smile. I give him the invisible treatment. Sandy Steiner, Little Miss Perfect Diabetic, approaches me in the hall between classes. She asks me how I’m doing.

  “Fine,” I say. “Why?”

  “Well, I heard you had”—she lowers her voice—“ketoacidosis!”

  “No biggie. A little intravenous insulin and I’m back to normal. You should try it.”

  “No!” She can’t handle it. The very idea of blood sugars over 400 send her into a complete panic.

  “You get used to it after a while,” I say as I walk away. Of course, it’s not true. You never get used to being Undead. But I like messing with Sandy’s perfect little brain.