Sweetblood (9781439108741) Page 2

  Mrs. Winter looked at it and said in her wintry voice, “Perhaps I wasn’t clear on the self-portrait concept, Lucy.”

  “Really?” All innocent, blinking honey-colored eyes.

  “One would think that you would be able to approximate the hair color, at least. I would say yours is quite black.” She turned away. I opened a fresh jar of black tempera paint and began to follow her instructions.

  What I didn’t tell her, because it was none of her business, was that the picture I had painted was as honest a self-portrait as I could make. It was the Lucy I saw when I looked into a mirror. Blond and stupid and grinning and thoughtless and—you could see it in the eyes—blind as the bat that bit me. Or didn’t bite me. Whatever.

  The hair was my real hair color. I’ve been dyeing it black since the eighth grade, but Mrs. Winter didn’t know that. And she’d never seen me smile, so she didn’t recognize the teeth. And she didn’t know anything at all about diabetes and retinopathy, and how kids that get diabetes when they are six years old can go blind—something I think about a lot.

  Fish says that’s not true. It used to be true, but my generation is smarter, he says. He says if I control my blood sugar I can live to be 100 and have dozens of kids and fly to the moon for vacations. “When I was a kid,” he says, “they told me I’d never make it through medical school.”

  I used the whole jar of black paint, laying it on so thick that the cardboard got all wavy. I would have painted her all black, but my name is Lucy, short for Lucinda, which means light, so I left the whites of her eyes and her two canine teeth.

  Mrs. Winter gave me a D.

  When my dad gets home from the golf course he knocks on my door, waits a few seconds, then sticks his head in. His face is red from the sun, but his hairless dome is white. He is smiling. Dad is in sales, and when you are in sales you have to smile all the time. I think that’s why he is always so tired.

  “Hey, Kiddo.” He always calls me Kiddo or Tiger or Sport. This is not as bad as Sweetie, Sugar, or Honey. In fact, I actually like it—unless he does it in public.

  “Hi,” I say. I am sprawled the wrong way on my unmade bed with my nose in Anne Rice’s book. “How’d you do?” He likes me to ask about his game.

  “Shot a seventy-eight!” He is proud of his score.

  “That’s great, Dad.”

  His head looks around my room. I imagine it as disembodied, just a head that drifted home from Longview Country Club. His eyes take in the piles of dirty clothing, mostly black, and my rubber bat hanging from the ceiling, suspended by a thread. He looks at my self-portrait hanging blackly on the wall above me and his smile loses a few watts.

  “You are one spooky kid,” he says.

  “I do my best.” I can’t quite suppress a grin.

  He picks up on it and his own smile returns to full luminescence. He winks at me. I wink back. He taught me to wink when I was about six years old. It’s a thing we do.

  “You coming to the block party?” he asks.

  “No.”

  His eyebrows go up. When my mother is perplexed or concerned or whatever, her eyebrows scrunch together, but Dad’s go straight up like two levitating caterpillars.

  “Why not?” he asks, as if he can’t imagine how any sane person could pass up bratwurst and Jell-O mold.

  “I’m not feeling so good,” I say. “I got my period.”

  “Oh!” His mouth closes and he gets his serious look. “Well, okay then, Sport.” His head withdraws. I laugh silently. All I have to do is mention menstruation and he panics. Like most guys, my father is scared to death of a little blood.

  4

  Sblood

  The Queen of the Damned is not as lame as most vampire books, but it’s typically inaccurate. She gives vampires all these superpowers, and if they don’t get blood they starve, and sunlight kills them. I happen to know that none of that is true.

  Ignorant people always fall back on the supernatural to explain things. Like when a baby girl has a deadly disease and for some reason she survives they say, “It’s a miracle! God saved her!” Or the baby dies and they say, “God took her.”

  It’s the same thing with vampires. Many years ago, ordinary people saw some behavior that frightened and confused them. But instead of trying to figure it out, they made the poor, wretched creatures into evil monsters with mysterious powers.

  I have read almost everything ever written about vampires. You might say that I am an expert. Real vampires do not turn into bats. They don’t have fangs or superpowers, and they are not immortal. The truth is, the Age of the Vampire ended back in the 1920s, when a man named Sir Frederick Banting extracted a few milliliters of insulin from a vat full of cow pancreases and injected it into a dying would-be vampire named Leonard Thompson.

  Of course, there are still a lot of us potential vampires around.

  Another knock on the door.

  This time my mother’s disembodied head appears. She wants to make sure I know she’s left a bowl of vegetarian baked beans in the fridge. She calls them vegetarian baked beans so that I won’t overlook the fact that she has made them special for me.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say.

  “Are you working on your paper?” she asks.

  I’ve already forgotten all about the paper I’m supposed to be writing. I hold up The Queen of the Damned. “Research. Myth, legend, and idiocy in the twentieth century.”

  Her head bobs weakly and she is gone.

  Before eating, I check my blood sugar like a good little diabetic. I jab my thumb with my spring-loaded finger-pricker and squeeze out a dark ruby pearl of blood. I touch the blood droplet to the sensor strip on my meter, then wait a few seconds for the machine to make its pronouncement. Tick tick tick… a number appears on the display: 234. Too high! Bad girl! Bad, bad, evil, wicked girl! Sugarcoated blood cells are destroying my body from within. Kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy, horrors!

  Ho-hum. I shoot up ten units of insulin and eat the bowl of beans. Good beans, Mom, but they could be a little sweeter.

  I can hear the shouts of kids down the block. When I was a little kid I loved the block parties except for the part where my mother the food cop showed me all the things I couldn’t eat. No Jell-O, no brownies, no lemonade, no fruit salad. Beans and brats. That was it. According to the food police, sugar was as dangerous as heroin and arsenic combined. Now, of course, she’s more enlightened. We Undead can eat like ordinary people as long as we add enough insulin to the system, but my mom still gets that panicky look whenever she sees me eating a cookie.

  The thing about nondiabetics is that no matter how many times you explain the whole blood glucose/insulin/food thing to them, they just don’t get it. First off, they think that because it comes down to the numbers and equations, you ought to be able to control it. Well, I can control it—the same way you can control how many potato chips you eat, or your temper, or a six-month-old puppy. Sometimes there’s just not much you can do.

  I take three or four or five shots a day. Every morning I take a dose of long-acting insulin. That’s the background insulin that lasts all day. Then, whenever I eat, I take a few units of fast-acting insulin, depending on how many grams of carbohydrate I’m about to consume. Sounds simple, but there’s hardly a week when I don’t mess up. Any little thing can throw off the numbers—stress, hormones, exercise, illness, you name it.

  I eat my beans and wonder which way my blood glucose is going. If I took too much insulin it will be dropping into the danger zone, below seventy milligrams per deciliter. I could be heading for another insulin reaction—MEEP MEEP MEEP—danger, Lucy Szabo, danger! Brain cells shutting down, dangerous coma ahead—MEEP MEEP MEEP—get out the glucagon, doc, she’s going veg-o-matic.

  Or maybe I didn’t take enough insulin and the beans are driving my sugars up, up and away—400… 500… 800! Uh-oh, the Big Scary: diabetic ketoacidosis. Blood going toxic, get her to emergency before she mutates into a bloodsucking fiend…

  I e
at my beans and let the numbers take care of themselves.

  The Transylvania room is a place in cyberspace where so-called vampires gather. I log on as Sblood, which is short for Sweetblood, my cyberself. It’s a little early—the best vampire chats happen around midnight—but Vlad714 and 2Tooth are in the chat room. I’m in a pissy mood, so I start right out complaining:

  Sblood: ok you guys I’m reading The Queen of the Damned and so far it sucks. which one of you losers told me to read it?

  2Tooth: Whome? JACK DOWN, blood

  Sblood: stop SHOUTING.

  2Tooth: Sorry.

  Sblood: book is ok except for being 100% bs.

  2Tooth: Mayb e90

  Vlad714: *Interview* ws btr.

  2Tooth: More sexy :)=

  Vlad714: Y

  Sblood: you guys drain any virgins lately?

  Vlad714: y. virgie burger. BTW, anybody rd *the blood countess*?

  2Tooth: N

  Vlad714: about Elizabeth Bathory. She usedto drain the blood from virgin girls and shower in it. Truefaq.

  2Tooth: HOw come she did that?

  Vlad714: forever young + beuaty.

  2Tooth: Sounds sticky. It work?

  Vlad714: IDK

  2Tooth: She drink it too?

  Vlad714: IDK not done w book.

  2Tooth: Wonder if she’s stillarround

  Sblood: that was 400 years ago, you morons. she was locked up in her castle till she died.

  2Tooth: How come U know this?

  Sblood: I am very well red. ;)=

  Elizabeth Bathory was a pitiful psychotic monster who lived in Hungary back in the sixteenth century, right around the time of Vlad the Impaler, another pitiful psychotic monster. They both killed a lot of people, but at least old Vlad had a political agenda—he was no worse than Stalin or Hitler or Osama bin Laden. Elizabeth did her killing and dying out of vanity.

  I don’t know why I bother with the Transylvania room. Most of the people there are basically ignorant. Plus, they can’t type. But every now and then this guy Draco pops in, and he’s got some interesting perspectives on the whole vampire thing. For instance, he claims to actually be one, and I’m not 100 percent sure he’s kidding.

  You meet a lot of weirdos on the net.

  The chat room gets me thinking about another one of my theories. I go back to my computer and read over some old notes. All of a sudden I am writing. I write for an hour straight, my fingers hammering the keyboard. Mrs. Graham might just get her stupid essay after all. I imagine her mouth turning down as she reads.

  I’ll show her disturbed.

  5

  Blue Eyes

  I am Sweetblood. I am Honey, Sweetie, and Sugar. I am Sport and Tiger and Kiddo and Skeeter. It all depends on who you are. Fish calls me Lucinda Szabo. At school they call me Lucy, or Luce.

  There are 246 kids in my class and two of us are diabetic: me and Sandy Steiner. Sandy just got diabetes last year and to talk to her you’d think that God reached down and gave it to her as a gift. She was insufferably cheerful and disciplined and friendly before she got sick, but instead of calming her down, the diabetes made her even more unbearable. Now she’s like the diabetes ambassador, telling anybody who will listen all about her diet and her blood sugars and how well-controlled she is. But the worst thing is that she’s decided that we’re the diabetes sisters. Every day she hunts me down.

  This morning I almost make it to my first hour class before she finds me.

  “Hey, Luce!” As usual, she looks as perfect and stiff as a store mannequin.

  “Hi, Sandy.”

  “So how was your weekend?”

  I keep on walking. “Okay.”

  “How have your blood sugars been?” Sandy has these perfect Julia Roberts lips that curve up when she smiles.

  “I’m still alive,” I say.

  “Ha ha ha.” Sandy laughs as if she’s reading it from a script. I get very uncomfortable around her. She says, “I stayed between eighty and one forty the whole weekend. Isn’t that great?”

  “That’s amazing,” I say, both irritated and impressed. Eighty and one forty? I haven’t stayed between 80 and 140 for more than a few hours ever. “I always get up at three in the morning to test. I’m seeing Dr. Fisher next week and he wants my diary to be complete. You know. For my pump?”

  Sandy’s latest thing is she wants to get an insulin pump. I think it’s ridiculous. I’ve been controlling my diabetes for ten years with injections. You get used to it. Personally, I don’t want a machine hooked up to me twenty-fours hours a day, even one as small as an insulin pump. But Sandy is totally into her diabetes. It’s her holy crusade. If the technology exists, she has to have it.

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” All worried.

  “If Fish thinks your sugars are too good, he won’t put you on the pump.”

  “What do you mean?” Really worried now.

  “Usually they only prescribe pumps for people who can’t control their diabetes.”

  “What? That’s not true.” She’s not sure if I’m kidding her.

  “Sure it is. If your control is good, they’ll just keep you on the shots.” We have reached room 230, my chemistry class. “See you!” I leave her standing in the hall with her perfect mouth hanging open.

  Chemistry and French are my worst subjects. I am failing both so far this semester. I’m failing chemistry worst of all. Mr. BoreAss (he spells it Boris) is writing gibberish on the board and I am drawing pictures of red blood cells in my notebook. The red blood cell has an interesting shape, sort of like a cough drop that’s been sucked on for about ten minutes, or a Life Saver with the middle filled in.

  So I’m drawing and listening to BoreAss babble on about acids and bases. I don’t know why I signed up for this class. Maybe because last year I was smart, but that was last year. People change.

  This year my best classes are English and art, although lately I haven’t been doing so good in art. Not since my black painting. Maybe I’ll do a painting of red blood cells. A cutaway view of an artery with all the blood parts in full gory glory. I could do a series of paintings detailing my personal blood history, from the first bat-borne microbes to the rabies vaccination to the full-blown attack on my beta cells by my berserker immune system.

  It would be an epic tragedy, a real tearjerker.

  The real tragedy this semester is that French comes right after chemistry. Most days I arrive nearly comatose.

  I fell way behind in French just two weeks into the semester. Comprendez? Not moi, not hardly a word, and this is French deux. Mme. D’Ormay has us reading Baudelaire while I’m still trying to figure out the difference between nuit and noir. One means black and one means night and I just can’t keep them straight. Oh well. If I’m flunking one class, I might as well fail deux.

  I enter the language lab in my usual impervious-to-learning trance but wake up when I notice a new body at the other end of the table. His hair is as black as mine, his face is pale and smooth, and he is wearing a black leather vest. Just as my eyes lock on to him, his head snaps around and he nails me with a pair of bright blue eyes.

  Part of me is thinking, This is so stupid. But another part of me is dissolving. We stare at each other for, I don’t know, two or three seconds. Inside I am screaming at myself to look away, but he looks away first and I feel an instant hollowness, as if he has yanked a stake from my heart.

  During the next hour I do not learn much French, but I find out that Blue Eyes has just transferred here from Kennedy High on the west side of the city. Mme. D’Ormay gives him the French name Guy, pronounced “gee,” as in geek. His real name is Dylan Redfield. Both names suit him, I think.

  I used to eat lunch with some of the more disturbed kids from art class, but a couple of them ruined my appetite building tabletop sculptures out of bread and lasagna, so now I dine alone. Our school has an open campus policy, so most of the kids—the ones with jobs or money, anyway
—head out to one of the nearby rude-food outlets. The rest of us either eat in the cafeteria or, when the weather’s nice, out on the lawn. Today it’s raining and cold, so I’m stuck sitting at my corner table in the cafeteria with my yogurt and carrot sticks and a box of blood (what I call cranberry juice in a box).

  “Hey.”

  I look up; it’s Blue Eyes.

  “Hey.” I try not to sound hysterical.

  He puts his tray down across from me, not asking my permission.

  “You’re in that French class, right?” he asks.

  “Oui.”

  He laughs as if I’ve said something delightful, so I forgive him for interrupting my dejeuner.

  “I’m Dylan,” he says.

  “Lucy,” I say, pointing at my nose with a carrot stick.

  “I thought it was Lucinda.” He makes a stab at the French pronunciation and garbles it so bad I actually giggle—and I am not the giggling type. But instead of getting offended he laughs with me, then says, “My French sucks.”

  “I think French sucks, period,” I say. I look at his tray. He has the Seward High cafeteria special: unidentifiable glop in assorted colors, a couple of bread-and-butter sandwiches, and a carton of milk. “You gonna eat that?” I say. Right away I wish I hadn’t, because it really isn’t very nice to slam somebody’s food before they eat it. I jam a carrot stick in my mouth to shut myself up.

  But Blue Eyes is oblivious. He thinks I’m encouraging him to chow down, and that’s what he does. I don’t know what I expected, but it’s a bit of a disappointment to find out that he eats like a normal teenage boy. I try not to watch as he shovels.

  “So how come you sit all by yourself?” he asks abruptly.

  I shrug. I’m not ready for that question.

  “Are you new here, too?” He isn’t going to let it go.

  “I have an incurable, highly contagious disease,” I tell him. It’s true, except for the contagious part.

  “Really? What is it? Bubonic plague?”