Sweetblood (9781439108741) (15 page)

I don't know where I'm going, but I'm sure I'll find out soon enough.

Adrift

It is 1:00
A.M.
The Sacred Bean is quiet. No blue-lipsticked women playing music and only a handful of customers at the tables. I order a latte from a curly haired barista. Shall I take my latte with sugar, or aspartame? I wonder where my blood glucose is at. Probably high, since I've cut back on my insulin. On the other hand, I walked half an hour to get to the Bean. Just to be on the safe side, I stir in a couple of sugar packets. I carry my latte to a table in the back and open my book and read and sip and read some more.

The Stranger
is about a man named Meursault whose mother dies, and he goes to her funeral but he just can't seem to get into it. It isn't real to him, or at least it isn't important. She's dead, so what's the point? He sits for hours by her coffin, which I guess you have to do in France, then finally he
gets so bored he lights a cigarette, which you are not supposed to do even in France, but it turns out it's okay because the undertaker smokes too.

I wish I smoked. I would smoke right now if I had a cigarette. I would smoke a whole carton.

I look up from
The Stranger
and check out the other late-night caffeine fiends. The scene is not so goth tonight. There are a few black-leathery types, and a few college-student types, and one older college-professor type. That's fine with me. Even if Dylan were to show up, I'd probably ignore him. I go back to
The Stranger
. I know how he feels. I am on page twenty-three when I sense a presence. I stop reading, but I do not look up.

“Hey there, baby bat.”

Now I look. It's Weevil, the tall, orange-eyelashed, snakebite-swilling goth.

“You all alone?” he asks.

“I have a book,” I point out.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks, then sits without waiting for my answer. Tonight he is drinking espresso. He looks older than I remember. I'm guessing thirty. He holds his espresso delicately, pinching the handle between his long thumb and forefinger.

He says, “So how you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Reading Camus?”

I nod.

“You ever listen to the Cure?”

I shake my head.

“They do a song about that book. It was on their first album.” He sips his espresso. His lips are thin and flexible; they grip the rim of the cup like soft, flat fingers.

“How'd you get the name Weevil?” I ask.

He laughs. “My real name is Andy Anderson. Wouldn't
you
rather be called Weevil?”

“Do you go to Harker?”

“Not anymore.”

“What do you do?”

“This and that. You and Dilly gonna be at the Carfax this Friday? It's Wayne's annual Halloween costume party.”

“I haven't been invited.”

“I'm inviting you now. I know he wants you to come. He likes you.”

“I think he's a little old for me.”

Weevil laughs. “
Everybody's
a little old for
you,
baby bat.”

“Anyway, I don't have a costume.”

“I bet you do. It's Bizarro Halloween. Everybody comes dressed like a mundane.”

He waits for me to respond, but I'm confused and say nothing.

“Look,” Weevil says, “for us, life is a costume party three-hundred sixty-four days a year, right? So on Halloween, we cover up the tattoos, yank the piercings, and wear khakis and pastels. It's corduroys and penny loafers and sport coats and perky bows. It's Lands' End and the Gap and JCPenney and Sears. You must have something like that in your closet. Something your mother bought you.” He drains the last of his espresso and stands up. “Dare to be square, baby bat,” he says as he walks off.

The chrysalis is dark gray, a capsule of smoked glass. I think maybe it is dead. Looking closer, I see orange stripes and flecks of white, and I realize that I am seeing the
monarch butterfly folded within a thin, transparent capsule. Most of the gold dots are still present, but one of them has turned bright blue.

I prick my finger to check myself for signs of life. My meter counts down, then delivers its pronouncement: 474.

Too high, too high, and I've had nothing but that one latte since dinner. In fact, I ate almost nothing for dinner—just a spoonful of rice casserole and a little salad. I inject a few units of insulin—not too much this time—and crawl into bed. The latte gave me a stomachache. Maybe I'm pregnant; a Virgin Vampire. Maybe I'm lactose intolerant. My mind is spinning and stuttering with coffee thoughts. The moon, nearly full, comes in through the window and bounces off my glass table, casting a milky light on the ceiling, lighting up Rubber Bat and the Seven Sisters. I wonder what they are saying.

A chat room for the sisters.

I close my eyes and my thoughts swirl back to Mark Murphy. Maybe he would like to go to Wayne's Halloween party with me. The question then would be, since he always dresses like a mundane, would he have to dye his hair black and get his nose pierced? I smile in the dark, imagining it.

There was a time when I was maybe eleven or twelve when I had fantasies about marrying Mark. I would be a famous anthropologist, and he would be a professional golfer. We would travel all over the world together, exploring ancient ruins and winning golf tournaments. I don't know why, but I always imagined him with a mustache, and me with blond hair down to my waist.

Now, of course, the idea of Mark plus
moi
is way beyond the weird barrier. How would we look at the Seward prom? Mark smiling with his long wrists sticking out of a powder-blue rent-a-tux; me in funereal black and scowling. The photographer would crack a lens.

I look at my clock. Two thirty-four. Five hours until school starts. Am I going? I don't think so. The question is, how to negotiate it with the parentals. Maybe I pretend to be sick. Maybe I won't have to pretend. Maybe I'll wake up and my blood sugar will be some strange unheard-of digital mishmash, like 4.7 π r
²
bc. Or maybe I'll wake up dead, victim of a latte overdose. Or maybe a freak October blizzard will blow down from Canada and bury us all in nine-foot snowdrifts. Maybe the river will rise and flood
the city. I see myself adrift on a river lined with lockers. My hand trails in water, soft and warm. I hear voices from the lockers as I pass:
Chaos. Disruption. Revelation. Eruption.

I should just do what they tell me to do. Go to school. Be good. Do my homework. Be nice. Dress dorky. Eat meat. Act my age.

I could be an actress. Is that what Little Miss Perfect Diabetic Sandy Steiner does? Is she onstage 24/7? Maybe inside she's just as messed-up as me. Maybe she secretly thinks she should
be
like me. Ha. More likely she is a shape-shifter from the planet Dinglebat. I should take her to Wayne's. Tell her it's a diabetes seminar: Achieving Better Blood Glucose Control Through Creative Bloodletting. All you need is a vampire with a sweet tooth for the ultimate in diabetes management. I see Sandy with her little insulin pump trying to be perky and cheery in a roomful of goths. I think of Weevil drinking snakebite, his smile red with raspberry cordial. The girl with orange stockings and the boy with the bolt through his nostril. Wayne and his butterflies. The sound of a hairbrush on violin strings. I wonder how Gruber looks with a black eye. Maybe I should invite him, too.

Angst

Have I ever had a morning when my mother's voice is not the first thing I hear? I bury my head in my pillow. Her strident tones slice right through the feathers and into my brain. I hold out as long as I can, then finally ooze over the edge of my mattress and insert myself into my bathrobe and shuffle out to the kitchen. My mother is making oatmeal. My father eats oatmeal every morning for his cholesterol. Then he eats great slabs of animal muscle for dinner. Go figure.

“I'm not going to school,” I say.

“Aren't you feeling well, Sweetie?”

“I think I'm still recovering.” In fact, I'm feeling kind of rotten. I had to get up to go to the bathroom about five times in the middle of the night. I wonder what my blood sugar is this morning.

“What's this?” My father enters, stage right. He is all
suited up today. Big important meeting, no doubt. Going to sell some widgets to some dingbats. “No school?”

“Called off due to the plague of locusts,” I say.

He actually looks out the window. No locusts. The corners of his mouth tuck in and he shakes his head. “Three days off is more than enough, Sport. Today you go to school.”

“Seriously, I'm not feeling good.”

He sits down before his steaming bowl of gruel. “No school; no computer.”

I can tell from his voice and the way he won't meet my eyes that he has gone into his stubborn mode. Nothing I say or do now will change his mind. I could be having a seizure. I could be bleeding out of my eyeballs. I could have a knife jutting from my chest, and they'd still hustle me off to school.

I stomp up to my room to get my backpack. As I'm packing my insulin and syringe in my bag I try to remember whether I've taken my morning shot. I think back. I've given myself so many injections they all blur into each other. I'm pretty sure I already took it. I wouldn't want to give myself
two
injections—that would lead to another hallway tussle with Gruber.

I leave the house in a miserable black cloud. I don't even bother to test my blood. I really
am
sick, I think, whether they believe me or not. There must be
something
wrong with me.

At school everybody ignores me, like I never passed out in class or punched out the vice-principal. BoreAss is still prattling on about acids and bases and everybody is staring through him with varying degrees of incomprehension and no one seems to remember that seventy-two hours ago I disturbed their mundane reality with my hypoglycemic
event. Maybe I'll have another one, just to liven things up.

Forget it. I'm too tired and cranky to pass out.

Nobody says a word to me till the next class when Dylan—excuse me,
Guy
—sidles up to me and says, “
Ça va?”

“
Ça va
yourself. I'm not talking to you.” Actually, I'm glad to have somebody to take my crankiness out on.

“Why not?” He is smiling but his brow is wrinkled, like he's not sure if maybe he did something.

“Two reasons. One, you left me all alone with a vampire. He could've sucked the life out of me.”

“That's just—look, you don't really believe that stuff.”

“The other reason is you didn't call me after… after I ran into Gruber. I could've been dead.”

“I heard you were okay.”

“Oh yeah? From who?”

“I don't know. Everybody. I mean, if you were really sick we'd all know about it, right?”

“You didn't call,” I say.

“Sorry.”

“I probably wouldn't have talked to you anyways.”

“Oh. So, how come you never told me you had diabetes?”

“Because it was none of your business, maybe?”

“Does that mean you're not interested in going to a Halloween party tonight?”

“Why? Because you think I shouldn't eat candy?”