Read Online Sweetblood (9781439108741) by Pete Hautman - Free Book Online Page B

he is stuck in this examination room with a crazy crying teenage girl vampire. I allow myself a loud snuffle, then I shut off the faucet.
    â€œI just want them to leave me alone,” I say.
    â€œLike Greta Garbo,” says Fish.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œGreta Garbo, the famous movie star. When she gave up acting back in the 1940s, she told a reporter, ‘I want to be left alone.’”
    â€œDid she get what she wanted?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Fish says he will talk to my parents. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I trust Fish, but not 100 percent. Maybe he is going to tell them to lock me up.
    He sends me to the lab for tests. The lab vampire—she calls herself a phlebotomist—sucks out a few tubes of blood, covers the single fang mark with a bandage, and sends me away. It’s a few minutes after one when I leave the clinic, time to get back to school for English, but I really don’t want to see Mrs. Graham. Instead, I walk the ten blocks to Harker Village, an area near the college with lots of shops and restaurants. As usual, I stop at Antoinette’s Body Art to look at the tattoo designs in the window. Antoinette is sitting outside her door, smoking a cigar. She sees me coming and gives me a little wave.
    â€œHey, girl,” she says. Antoinette is about fifty years old,I think, with short gray hair, huge breasts, huge belly, huge everything. She’s been a tattoo artist for twenty years, and she knows everything about everybody. Today she is wearing her favorite outfit: jeans and a black leather vest with dozens of pockets. She has about fifty tattoos on her thick arms and shoulders. Half of them are small black crosses, all the same size. “Still shopping?” she asks.
    I look at the hundreds of tattoo designs displayed in the front window—everything from bloody swords to pink roses to shattered skulls to Bugs Bunny. At one time or another I’ve considered each and every one of them. I’ve imagined a fiery dragon wrapped around my left arm, a butterfly on my shoulder.
    â€œYeah. I’ve heard they don’t wash off.”
    â€œNot without one hell of a lot of scrubbing,” she says with a grin. Antoinette and I have had this conversation dozens of times. She finds me amusing.
    â€œMaybe I’ll get an armlet. A chain design wrapped around my arm. You know—to symbolize my enslavement.”
    â€œWhen did you become a slave?”
    â€œWhen I was born?”
    â€œReally! You are one pissed-off chick.”
    â€œI’m not pissed-off. Angry.”
    â€œOh. Well, that’s different then. What are you angry about?”
    â€œEverything.”
    Antoinette puffs on her cigar and gives me a squinty-eyed look through the smoke.
    â€œI used to be like that,” she says. She holds out her left arm and points at a tattoo, a flaming skull. “That’s how I feel when I’m angry. You want one like that?”
    â€œUh, not today, thanks.”
    â€œYeah? Well, you decide what you want, then come backand see me.” She flicks her cigar into the gutter. “In the meantime, lighten up, kid. Don’t get stuck on yourself. Life is change. Have some fun.”
    The Sacred Bean is just down the block from Antoinette’s. I decide to stop in for a coffee. Who knows? Maybe Guy will stop by. I order a triple cappuccino and sit at the back corner table and brood—something I do well. (I am a world-class brooder; I am the Tiger Woods of brooding.) I don’t expect the caffeine to stop the brooding, but it might make me brood faster. I stare across the room, out the glass front door at the fire-red leaves of a maple tree, and try to figure out what is going on with me.
    I used to like school.
    My parents didn’t used to bother me so much.
    I used to know how to have fun.
    Life didn’t used to suck.
    Just after school started, I made these complaints to Buttface the counselor. She