Sweetblood (9781439108741) (4 page)

“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?”

“Worse.”

“AIDS?”

“Much worse.”

He has to think hard now. “I know. Leprosy!”

“Do I look like a leper?”

“Well, I can't see
all
of you.” He grins. I spend a couple seconds trying to decide whether his remark constitutes sexual harassment. I decide to let it pass.

“You don't want to know what I have,” I say.

“Really?” Now he is trying to figure out if I am serious.

I'm trying to figure that one out myself. I feel as though I'm teetering on the edge of a cliff. Do I want to expose this blue-eyed
Guy
to all my unadulterated weirdness in the first five minutes of our acquaintance? Do I want to sit alone with my brown-bagged haute cuisine for the rest of the school year?

I suck my cranberry juice-in-a-box dry.

“Fact is,
Guy
,” I say in my most serious whisper, “I'm a vampire.”

The Sad Truth About Bloodsucking Demons

by Lucy Szabo
Creative Writing, 4th Period

There are many tales about vampires, but almost none of them are true. So why are there so many books about vampires? Why do so many different cultures have their own vampire stories?

The truth is, vampire legends are based upon actual fact. Vampires were (and are) real, as I shall prove in the following paper.

Most of the modern ideas about vampires come from a book by Bram Stoker titled Dracula. Count Dracula (according to the book) was a vampire who lived in a castle in Transylvania and drank blood to stay alive. He could turn into a bat, and he was hundreds of years old. He was superfast and superstrong and 100% evil. Bram Stoker got many of his ideas from Romanian folk legends, and from reading about a real historical
person named Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Impalement is an interesting punishment that was quite popular in the Middle Ages. The way you do it is you insert a sharpened pole into a person's rear end and then stand the pole upright so that he squirms on top of it like a living shish kebab. This was Vlad Dracula's favorite way to punish his enemies. It was said to be very painful.

But the real Vlad Dracula was not a real vampire (as far as we know). He was just a sadistic sicko, much like Elizabeth Bathory, who liked to bathe in blood collected by murdering local maidens. She also liked to bite them and torture them.

Basically, Bram Stoker was just a writer who cobbled together a few folktales and some twisted history into a kind of ghost story. But ever since, the vampire legend has grown to become a huge force in modern literature. The true story, however, was lost in the mists of time—until now.

Most myths and legends are based on real events. For instance, the story of Noah's Ark might have been inspired by a real flood, and the Abominable Snowman is probably a rare species of bear.

This is also true of vampires.

First, you have to realize that when the vampire stories got started there was very little knowledge about diseases and medicine. People treated cancer with leeches and rubbed dirt into cuts to make them heal. Ignorance was even greater then than it is today.

Even thousand of years ago there was some knowledge of diabetes. Not that they could do anything about it, but the ancient Greeks knew that diabetics had too
much sugar in them and that no matter how much they ate, they would soon waste away to nothing. But that was all they knew.

As an insulin-dependent diabetic myself, I have read a great deal about the disease. Today, we diabetics take insulin and test our blood glucose (sugar), and most of us do okay. We worry about blindness and kidney disease and heart disease and neuropathy (terminal numbness), but that's only after many years of having the disease. But before insulin was discovered, things didn't go so good for diabetics. Without insulin to turn glucose into energy, the body's cells literally starved to death. The untreated diabetic would get hungry and thirsty, but the more they ate, the sicker they got. The sugars would build up in their blood until they were so sweet that their body would start burning up fat and muscle and eventually there would be nothing left. But it wouldn't happen right away. An untreated diabetic might take weeks or months to die, and her body might go through some very peculiar changes on its journey from life to death.

Untreated insulin-dependent diabetes is pretty much extinct today. When a person starts getting thirsty and ravenous and feeling sick and peeing all the time, they go to a doctor. The doctor gives them some insulin and a syringe and modern medicine triumphs again. So it's hard for us to imagine what it was like before, when diabetes was as incurable and fatal as the electric chair. So I have made a list of some of the symptoms of advanced, untreated diabetes. This is what might have happened to a diabetic teenage girl in the Middle Ages.

The first thing is, she starts getting very hungry and thirsty. She can't get enough water. She devours bowl
after bowl of gruel (whatever that is). At first, her parents are angry at her because they are poor and gruel is not free. But she can't stop herself from eating everything in sight. Soon, she starts losing weight. She is eating like a pig, but the food is going right through her. Her parents are afraid she might be possessed. They hide her from the neighbors because if word gets out, their daughter could be burned at the stake.

Weeks go by. The girl has lost a quarter of her body weight. She is pale and she smells sweet, like honey. She sleeps most of the day, but it is a restless sleep, tossing and turning and whimpering. When she awakens she is hungry and thirsty.

She wets the bed repeatedly, and after a week of that her mother stops bringing her fresh straw and simply lets the girl lie in her own filth. The girl doesn't seem to care. She talks to herself in her sleep, crazy garbled conversations with imaginary people. Her skin becomes pale and beaded with sweat, her lips are ruby red, and she has a peculiar, acrid odor.

One day the mother brings the girl a chicken leg. The girl sits up on her soiled straw pallet and snatches the chicken leg and tears into it with the ferocity of a starved wolf. The mother recoils from what she sees—the girl's teeth have grown longer, and her mouth is bloody. She gobbles down the chicken leg, crunching the bone between her long, bloody teeth. Her breath reeks like a stew of rotten fruit and fetid meat; her eyes are so dilated that they look like black holes in reality. The mother, terrified, flees.

The next day, the girl staggers out of the cottage, looking for food. As the midday sun strikes her she screams and covers her eyes and crumples to the
ground. Her parents are shocked to see her this way, in full sunlight. Her skin is white as a fish's belly, her hair has fallen out in patches, her limbs are thin as broom handles. The father carries his wasted daughter back to her pallet and lays her down.

The next morning the girl is still and unresponsive. Her forehead is icy cold. There is no sign of life. The mother tells the father that the girl is dead. They cover her with a sheet. They tell the neighbors that their daughter has died. Tomorrow they will bury her in the graveyard by the village church.

But that night a strange thing happens. The girl awakens. She throws aside the sheet and climbs to her feet. She does not know where she is, but she is ravenous. She staggers through the cottage, confused and terrified. The mother sees her and screams in horror. The girl claps her hands to her ears. Too loud! The terrified father grabs a knife and waves it at her. She runs from the cottage, runs from the screaming and the flashing blade. She sees a flickering light in the distance. She hears voices. She smells cooking! She heads for the light, bursts into her neighbors' cottage, grabs a chunk of pork from their stewpot and crams it whole into her mouth. The neighbors run away and the girl gobbles their supper. She wanders off into the countryside. The next day some village boys find her lying motionless in a beet field. The village elders are called. The local tooth-puller pronounces her dead; the priest says that she is possessed. They decide to burn her quickly. A pyre is erected on a hilltop. The girl's body is placed atop the enormous pile of dry logs and branches. The priest throws a torch onto the pyre and within a few seconds the flames are roaring and the villagers' faces
are orange with reflected firelight. Then something inside the tower of flame moves, and they see the shape of the girl. She erupts screaming from the pyre into their midst, her entire body on fire. She twists and turns and leaps in a dance of death as the villagers run shrieking. Then she dies—for real, this time.