Sweetblood (9781439108741) (2 page)

Blood is my enemy. It carries death to my cells.

I still remember gulping orange juice right out of the carton, cold and sweet, pouring down my throat. Six years old, I could hardly lift the carton, but I was so desperately thirsty—
gulp gulp gulp
—I could've won a guzzling contest. Also, I could've won a peeing contest, because everything I drank went straight into the toilet.

You'd think my mother would've noticed earlier, but it didn't hit her how sick I was until I'd gone through about six cartons of juice in one week—and wet my bed twice. Then it was
whoosh
—off to the doctor. Dr. Gingrass with the big mole on his giant nose. He's the one who gave me my first shot of insulin. I stared numbly as he mixed the cloudy insulin with the clear, had me lift my shirt, and pinched up a bit of baby fat and slipped the needle in. It didn't hurt a bit, but my mother was freaking, crying and asking the poor doctor how this could happen. Even then, I knew enough to be embarrassed by her, but it wasn't until years later that I came to understand the fullness of what had happened to me. Insulin is more than just a treatment for the disease called
diabetes mellitus
. It is the thin strand that holds me to earth.

Without it I die.

Friendship

I've had three or four best friends in my life. They don't last. We have a fight, or they just get sick of my weirdness, and all of a sudden we aren't friends anymore. Or they go away. My previous best friend, Kathy Wasserman, moved away to St. Louis. That was a year ago. We e-mailed each other a few times, but it just wasn't the same. I haven't heard from her in months.

Right now I don't have a real best friend, but if I had to pick one it would be Mark Murphy, who lives down the block and across the street and who is one of the few people at school who doesn't treat me like a freak. He calls me Skeeter. He has called me that since he moved into the neighborhood nine years ago. That was after the bat thing, after I got sick. I don't know why he started calling me Skeeter. Nobody else ever did. Little kids are sensitive that way. Maybe he knew that one day I would
turn into a bloodsucking fiend, a human mosquito.

It is Sunday, day of rest for some people. I put on my black makeup and my purple lipstick and my black leather jacket and black leggings and my lace-up motorcycle boots and my sunglasses so dark I can hardly see through them and I go out to sit in the shade on the front steps to read Anne Rice and disturb the churchgoing neighbors by my mere existence. I am only pretending to read, though. Mostly I am imagining moving out of my parents' house and into an apartment over by the college and hanging out in coffeehouses and taking writing classes and meeting people who don't know anything at all about me. I don't smoke, but when I imagine myself independent and on my own I always see myself smoking nonfilter cigarettes and drinking straight espresso from a small, cracked cup.

I am thinking about this as Mark Murphy comes strolling by, dragging his size-thirteen Nikes, hands buried deep in his jeans pockets. He is wearing a faded orange Seward Stingers sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the name of a tractor company stitched on the front. Mark is not into fashion.

“Hey, Skeeter,” he says, stopping on the sidewalk.

I lower my book, giving my mouth an irritated twist to make him think he has interrupted a really good part.

“What're you reading?” he asks.

I hold up the book. He comes closer so that he can see the cover:
The Queen of the Damned.

“What's it about?” he asks.

“Vampires.”

“Vampires suck.” He laughs so that I will know he is making a joke.

I try not to smile, but I can't help it. Mark always knows how to make me laugh.

I say, “Got a cigarette, Monkey Boy?” I gave him that nickname a few summers ago when he fell out of a tree and broke his arm. It was also to get back at him for always calling me Skeeter. Which, actually, I like.

“Sorry. I didn't think you smoked.”

“I don't, but I'm thinking of taking it up. Don't ask me why.”

“Why?”

“Told you not to ask me that.”

“I mean why can't I ask you that?”

“You just did. Actually, since you insist on knowing every detail of my life, I'll tell you. I think it would be fulfilling to have a habit. Something self-destructive to do on a daily basis.”

“Why cigarettes? Why not just start smoking crack?”

“Too expensive.”

“How about heroin? You're not scared of needles.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Hey, you going to that thing tonight?”

“What thing?”

“You know.”

I stare at his face. When Mark was a little kid he had a broad, friendly face: brown eyes and freckles and a huge grin that made his teeth look small—a face that made old ladies want to pinch his cheeks. Then, a few years ago, he started growing like crazy and everything got out of whack. His face stretched out from top to bottom, his permanent teeth came in big and crowded, and his eyes got closer together. I can still see the little kid he used to be, but it takes some effort. He still has most of his freckles. I can also see another Mark—the good-looking man he will one day become.

“You mean the block party,” I say.

Mark nods.

“I don't think I
do
block parties,” I say.

“Two words.” He holds up two fingers, the sign for peace—or victory. “Free food.”

I laugh. Mark loves to eat more than anything.

“Besides,” he says, “What else are you gonna do on a Sunday night?”

“You mean besides eat burnt bratwurst and high-risk potato salad with a bunch of little kids and half-drunk parental types? Gee, I don't know… maybe beat myself over the head with a baseball bat?”

“Yeah, right. Well,
I'm
going.”

“You have a good time.” I return my attention to Anne Rice.

Mark stands there for a few seconds, then says, “You know, Lucy, I liked you a lot better before you got all punk.”

“I'm not punk.”

“Well,
goth
then.”

“I'm not
goth
.”

“Well, you're
something
.” He lets that one hang for a beat, then shuffles off.

My best friend.

I experience mixed feelings, but I'm used to that. One of my feelings is regret that I might have hurt
his
feelings. I also feel irritation that he judged me, relief that he's gone, disappointment that he has left, and delight that he actually thinks I'm
something
.

On the wall next to my bed I have written some lines from a poem by Walt Whitman:

Undead

I am not cool. Dead people are cool.

I am not dead. I am Undead.

Had I been born a hundred years ago I would be very cool. I would be cold. Cold bones and shreds of gristle moldering deep beneath a crumbling headstone.

People worry about race relations—blacks and whites and Asians and Aborigines and so forth—but I think that there are only two races that matter: the Living and the Undead. These races have been created by modern medicine, and with every year that passes, the numbers of the Undead grow. It is inevitable.

My mother is among the Living. My father is Undead. He had an emergency appendectomy a few years ago. Saved by modern medicine, like me.

The Chinese have a saying: If you save a man's life, you are responsible for him. In other words, by saving
someone's life, you have inflicted that person's continued existence upon the world. Whatever he does from then on—be it good or evil—it's your responsibility. So who is responsible for me?

I ask my mother what's for dinner.

“Dinner?” Her brow scrunches up as though I've asked her the atomic weight of cesium.

“Yeah. You know. Food? Like we eat every night?”

She says, “Honey, tonight's the block party!” My mother always calls me Honey or Sweetie or Sugar. I think it's a subconscious effort to undo my diabetes. It's moments like these that make me wonder what cabbage leaf she found me under.

“Oh. I guess I can make myself a cheese sandwich.”

“Aren't you feeling well, Sweetie?” She reaches out a hand as if to feel my forehead. I step back.

“I'm fine,” I say. I know exactly what she's going to say next, and she says it.

“Do you need a snack?” My mother is deathly afraid of my insulin reactions. (Fish prefers to call them
hypoglycemic episodes
.)

“No, I do not need a snack. If I needed a snack I would eat something. I just don't feel like eating bratwurst for dinner.”

“I'm bringing vegetarian beans, Honey. Your favorite.”

“I have to write a paper,” I say.

“Oh!” That one throws her.

“I've got a fifteen-hundred-word essay due tomorrow.”

“Oh! That sounds like quite a project. How many pages is that?”

“A lot.” Actually, the paper was due a week ago, but I haven't
been paying much attention to due dates lately, which is probably why I'm flunking two classes. The school has been sending my parents letters, so it's going to be hard for her to tell me I can't skip the block party to do schoolwork.

“I guess we could leave you some beans,” she says.

I give her my most syrupy-sweet, lovey-dovey, up-yours smile. “Gee, thanks, Mom.”

I have about six or seven insulin reactions every week. Mostly they are no big deal—I get shaky and start to sweat and I quick cram something sweet in my mouth and a few minutes later everything's cool. But sometimes I get cranky and don't know my blood sugar's gone out of whack, and I throw a fit over, say, not being able to find a sock. I'm sort of unpredictable and nasty when my blood glucose gets low, which partly explains why my mother gets nervous around me.

The other reason she gets nervous is because there have been a few times when I lose it completely. One time she came home and all of the kitchen cupboards had been emptied onto the floor and I was lying unconscious on top of a pile of breakfast cereals and crackers and canned tuna fish. She had to call 911. I woke up to find Fish bending over me looking straight into my eyeball with a flashlight.

“Couldn't decide what to eat?” he said.

“Nothing looked good to me.”

He laughed. Fish understands. He's had diabetes since he was nineteen. He's Undead too.

A few weeks ago in art class we had to paint self-portraits. I painted a picture of a glowing blond girl with rosy cheeks
and a huge toothy smile and big blank pale gray eyes.

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.”