Sweetblood (9781439108741) (19 page)

“Are you okay?” His voice sounds far away.

The room is spinning. “I'm fine,” I hear myself say.

“Sit,” he says, tugging at me.

I pull my arm away. The spinning slows; the room shudders back into focus. “I have to go,” I say. Rubber legs carry me off as a woozy thought drifts across my brain: So this is what it feels like to be drunk.

Draco calls after me, “Lucinda!”

I push through the plastic curtain. The party is still going strong. Weevil has organized an apple-bobbing competition. The kitchen is full of grinning, apple-eating wet-heads. Their voices are the roaring of a waterfall and their faces are cartoons. I blink and afterimages appear on the walls. My legs seem to have grown another six inches. Is it the wine, or am I having an insulin reaction?

I blink again and find myself in the library. I don't remember leaving the kitchen. I stare at the shelves, the titles all running together:
Exsanguinarius Rex The Practical Vampyre Book of Black Magic & Ceremonial Magic Pictorial Key to the Tarot Cream of the Jest….

Maybe I
am
having an insulin reaction. I rubberleg my way to the next room and find a bowl of Halloween candy on an endtable. Butterfingers and candy corn and miniature chocolate bars. I grab a handful of the chocolate bars and start eating them one after another. Chocolate coats my mouth; I swallow and imagine a long brown syrupy rope flowing down into my stomach. Chocolate is my favorite way to treat an insulin reaction.

Fiona appears in front of me. Where did she come from?
“I thought
you
couldn't
eat
chocolate,” she says.

“I can eat anything I want,” I say as I shove another bar into my mouth.

“Are you
okay
?”

“I'm fine,” I lie. I lurch off. I can't remember how many glasses of wine I had. Everything is confusing. My gut hurts. Too much chocolate? I wander through three or four rooms and suddenly I am facing Fiona again.

“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.

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.

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.