Sweetblood (9781439108741) (5 page)

That is what might have happened to a diabetic a few hundred years ago. Imagine the stories the peasants would tell! All of the symptoms I described are possible symptoms of untreated diabetes. The sweet smell of too much glucose in the blood, the strange, acrid reek of advanced ketoacidosis, the rotten smell of bacterial infection. Madness, ravenous hunger, extreme sensitivity to sunlight and sound, bleeding, receding gums (that make her teeth look longer), cold, clammy skin, and deathlike coma—all resulting from untreated diabetes. Even the spontaneous, repeated revival from a deathlike coma is possible.

It seems clear to me that diabetes in the Middle Ages led to the folktales that led to Bram Stoker's book that led to Anne Rice's novels and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and all the other vampire stuff. Diabetics were the original, the
real
vampires. They weren't evil or superpowerful or immortal. They were just sick. Like me. I'm actually a proto-vampire. When I take an insulin shot now, I think of it as vampire vaccine. If I quit taking insulin altogether I would become that starving vampire girl from the Middle Ages. I might come crashing into your house and eat
your
pork stew.

Or whatever.

You never know what a vampire might do to you.

1655 words (including these)

Draco

I get a sick feeling as soon as I turn in my paper to Mrs. Graham. Like maybe I should have left out the part about impalement, or the part where I threaten to break into her house. Oh well, I just wrote what I was thinking. She'll have to deal with it, just like I have to deal with her. I don't know why all my teachers are so hard on me. It's not like there aren't a lot of other kids doing worse in school. Buttface, the school counselor, says they're hard on me because I've got so much potential. Like because I got straight As for a couple years, all of a sudden it's not okay for me to be average. What's so terrible about slacking off for a year or two? Don't I ever get to relax?

Buttface says it'll matter when I try to get into college. Just to piss her off, I once told her I was planning to go to beautician school to learn to do manicures. Buttface sat back and stroked her glass-bead necklace. She always goes
for that necklace when she gets upset. When I'm in her office she's usually pawing at it within seconds.

Buttface's real name is Ms. Butkus. She is married to a man named Steele but kept her maiden name. This reveals something about her, but I don't know what. She's not actually stupid.

After creative writing, I materialize in the doorway to her office. She is sitting behind her desk doing nothing, as if she has been waiting for me.

“Hi,” I say. “It's me.” Like she can't figure that out herself.

“Lucy.” She smiles sleepily. Buttface's style is to stay calm under all circumstances. I think she takes tranquilizers. With her round face and heavy eyelids she looks like a little kid ready for her nappy. “How are you doing today?” Her standard question.

I shrug—my standard answer. She nods as if I have said something, so I do. “This is a preemptive visit,” I say.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. You know—like for a problem that isn't a problem yet, but you might be hearing something about it.”

“Something you haven't done yet?”

“Not exactly. More like something I already did, but it hasn't hit the fan yet.”

“Oh.” She's still smiling, but she looks a little sad.

“I wrote this paper for Mrs. Graham. We were supposed to write an essay? It was supposed to be about our future, you know? Like, what I think my life will be like when I become a lawyer, or president, or something. Except I wrote something different.”

She holds her sad smile, waiting for more.

“Anyway, in case Graham blows a blood vessel or something, I just wanted you to know.”

“Know what?”

“That I was just messing around. I'm not crazy.”

“Nobody thinks you're crazy.”

“Yeah, right.”

That night at midnight I log on and drop into Transylvania. 2Tooth and Fangs are arguing about how much blood a full-blown vampire needs to stay healthy.

Nobody writes anything for almost a minute. We haven't heard from Draco in weeks. There is something about his “voice” that scares me.

I try to imagine Draco sitting at his computer. At first I see a tall, dark-haired, handsome man in his thirties. He has cold eyes and a cruel mouth. Like Pierce Brosnan only younger and paler. He is sipping red fluid from a wineglass. I shake my head to clear it. Now I see a pimply twenty-something computer nerd guzzling Yoo-Hoo and scratching himself and pouring a lot of misplaced energy into the net. Some jerk without a life.

Here is what I think: I think these cybervamps are playing games. If any one of them, including Draco, were to gulp a goblet of pig's blood, I bet he'd puke it right back up again.

I've been all over the Web. Several so-called vampires and vampire groups have sites where they talk about things vampiric. There are psychic vampires and energy vampires and vampire-lifestylers and immortal vampires and a few who just claim to enjoy an occasional taste of blood. Some of them believe in the classic supernatural
vampire: creatures that can turn into bats and show no reflection and so forth. Others maintain that vampires are a subspecies of
Homo sapiens
. There are also those who claim that vampires are victims of a retrovirus that requires them to drink blood to survive. And a few see vampirism as a religion or a form of meditation. But most of them, I think, are just posers. They just like to dress up and look cool and act weird.

I mean, maybe a few of the really warped ones drink a little blood now and then, but that doesn't make them real vampires. I could tell them about
real
vampires, but they wouldn't like it any more than Mrs. Graham will when she reads my essay.

I wonder if she's reading it right now.

I really wish I'd left out the impalement stuff.

Femmes Fatale

“I have a present for you, Vampire Lady.”

Guy is standing in front of me in the hallway. We have just survived another French class. He has a tattoo on his wrist: a red heart pierced by a black sword. I wonder why I didn't notice it before. A small white cardboard box rests in the palm of his hand.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Open it.”

I take the box and lift the lid. Inside, resting on a pillow of cotton, is a pale green object about an inch and a quarter long. It is smooth and semi-translucent, as if carved from jade. Its shape that of an imperfect cylinder. One end is bullet-shaped with a tiny black stem in the center; the other end is asymmetrical, like the point of a used green lipstick. A row of tiny metallic gold dots circle one end, looking as if they had been applied by a steady hand
with the smallest imaginable paintbrush. I touch it gently with the tip of my finger. It is firm, but not hard like stone. It is neither warm nor cool. I think of plastic, but with a softer, more organic feel.

“What is it?”

“A chrysalis.”

For a second I don't get it, but then something from biology class comes back to me.

“You mean, like a cocoon?”

Guy nods. “It's a monarch butterfly. It's alive.”

A river of students passes on either side of us, heading for their third-hour classes. I almost lose myself in Guy's blue eyes. I look away.

“You're giving me a bug?”

“Don't you like it?”

“Nobody's ever given me a bug before.”

It doesn't take long for Mrs. Graham to call a high-level Saturday morning conference. Buttface, Graham, and my parents are all at the school trying to decide what to do about me, the Evil Bloodsucking Witch Bitch of Seward High. They actually invited me to come, but I declined to participate in my own destruction. I didn't think I could stand to watch my mother wring the skin right off of her hands while my dad sits there with his jaw clamped and his forehead vein pulsing
thump thump thump
.

I'm
ostensibly
(love that word) staying home to work on my French grammar. For example, I have written the following highly grammatical sentences: