Night Creature
I don’t get home until almost five, but my mother is only moderately perturbed. I go straight to my room. My computer has not magically reappeared, but the chrysalis has changed color. It is slightly bluer, like the color of spruce needles. I see faint shadows beneath its surface, dark, parallel lines. I watch it, trying to imagine the consciousness inside. I think how it would feel to bind myself into a cocoon, to metamorphose, to become a Lucy… plus. I might grow wings, or the hard, chitinous shell of a beetle, or the powerful stinger of a wasp. I once read a story about a man who woke up and found he had turned into a giant cockroach. I would prefer to change into something not quite so creepy-crawly.
I should check my blood sugar, I think. Sometimes when I have weird thoughts—like turning into a bug—it means my glucose is out of whack. Maybe that triple cappuccino kicked it up into the 400s. Or the long walk home brought it down into the thirties. Where it is now, nobody knows. I write down a number on a scrap of paper: 112. I want my blood sugar to be 112. A nice, normal, nondiabetic number. A number that I won’t have to bring down with an insulin shot or raise by stuffing food in my face.
I take out my blood glucose meter and stare at its chipped, worn plastic surfaces. This meter has been like a detached part of my body for years. It has analyzed gallons of my sweet, rich blood. Every time I feed it a warm red droplet, it judges me mercilessly. I’ve been good or I’ve been bad. Perfect or flawed. Virtuous or wicked. Saintly or sinful. Black or white. The meter will only deliver hard, cold numbers. It won’t say, “You’re a little bit high this afternoon, Luce, but not too bad considering what you’ve been through. I understand completely. Besides, I could be wrong.”
Meters are not like that. I decide not to test. I don’t need another hole in my fingertip. Besides, maybe my blood sugar is 112. Why waste a test?
I am furious at Guy. I know it’s stupid—I told him I couldn’t meet him—but I’m mad at him anyway for not showing up at the Bean. Things are happening in my head, angry little explosions leaving vapor trails of thought. Three times I reach to turn on my computer, but it’s never there. I put a Concrete Blonde disc in my Discman and my headphones in my ears and lie back on my bed and crank the volume high enough to obliterate thought. I am swallowed by Johnette Napolitano’s husky, shredded voice.
I am awakened by headphones being yanked from my head and the harsh sound of my father’s voice shouting in my ear. My ears ringing from the headphones, I try to decode his shouted words.
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” He pulls me upright by my arm.
“What are you DOING?” I yell. “Let GO of me!” I jerk my arm from his grasp and flop back onto the bed. My mother is behind him, doing her hand-wringing thing.
“Sweetie…,” she says.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” my father growls.
“I’m FINE. I just fell asleep. What do you WANT?”
“You didn’t answer when I called you for dinner,” my mother says.
“Or when we knocked,” my father adds.
“We were afraid you… we thought maybe you weren’t feeling well, Honey.”
“Going to ruin your ears with that!” My father thrusts his index finger at my Discman, the headphones still blasting.
I turn off the CD player. We glare at each other like dogs trying to decide if they want to fight. I open my mouth to snarl something but catch myself just in time. If I lose it with them now, I might end up in some institution.
“So… what’s for dinner?” I ask.
Over dinner, I find out that Fish is just as bad as the rest of them. My parents tell me that he wants me to see a psychologist. Some guy named Carlson, a specialist in adolescent behavior. Dr. Carlson is going to “evaluate” me. Evaluate. That’s where they tell you if you have any value—or if you’re a worthless human being. My father tells me this as if he is giving me wonderful news. He has already made an appointment for me.
“We’ll get this thing figured out in no time, Sport. Dr. Fisher says Dr. Carlson is one of the best.”
My mother’s oven-roasted sliced potatoes, normally one of my favorites, taste like disks of greasy brown corrugated cardboard. I chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. When I can’t swallow any more, I excuse myself and return to my room.
I stare up at Rubber Bat and the Seven Sisters and I listen to the murmur of my parents talking over the remains of dinner. My ears are very, very sharp. Like my grandmother used to say, I can hear a mouse walking on velvet. I can’t pick out the individual words, but I know they are talking about me. After a while the conversation lags. I hear the soft clatter of dishes going into the sink, the hiss of running water, the rattle and clack of the dishwasher being loaded. Washing dishes used to be my job, but a few weeks back I just quit doing it. It was really weird. I expected some sort of scene, but my mother never said a word; she just took over, as if all the times I’d done them meant nothing, as if I hadn’t really mattered.
I imagine how she looks now with her hands plunged in the soapy water. Have I ever mentioned that my mother used to be beautiful? She keeps a photo on her vanity. In the photo she is twenty-four years old. She has long blond hair and she looks happy, as if life could not possibly be better. That was before she had me. She looks different now: brow semiscrunched, half smile, forced cheeriness, and that haunted, scared look in her eyes. I know what she’s scared of. She’s scared of her daughter, the wicked protovampire Lucinda. Wherever I go, whatever I am doing, I see her face accusing me. I see her hands washing my dishes. I want to say, This wasn’t my idea. I didn’t ask to be born.
Finally there is a brief silence, then the sharper sound of electronic chatter from the den. My parents, intellectual giants, watch about four hours of TV every night. They will stare at it until it’s time to go to bed. I wait until they are completely hypnotized, then sneak downstairs and get my father’s cell phone out of his coat pocket. I creep back up to my room and call information. There are only three Redfields listed. I get the right one on the second try.
“Hello?”
I recognize Guy’s voice right away.
“Where were you?” I say.
“Who is this?”
“This is the grounded vampire.”
“Lucy?”
“Where were you? I went to the Bean, but you weren’t there.”
“I thought you were grounded.”
“So?” I’m not going to make this easy for him. If he really likes me, he’ll have to learn to deal.
“Sorry—I didn’t think you’d be there.”
“Well, I was.”
“Oh.”
“You know what I’m doing right now?”
“Talking on the phone?”
“I’m looking at that bug you gave me.”
“Yeah? Is it doing anything?”
“It’s just sort of hanging out. Where’d you get it?”
“I have my sources. Hey, you want to go over to the Bean? They’re open till two. They have live music at night.”
“Can’t,” I say. “I’m grounded.”
Guy doesn’t say anything for a couple of seconds, then, in a tentative voice, he asks, “Does that mean that I should go to the Bean anyway, just in case you decide to go—even though you can’t go because you’re grounded? Or do you mean you really can’t go? Which is it?”
I can be a real bitch sometimes.
Twenty minutes later I feel bad. I call Guy to tell him I was just kidding, but a woman answers—his mother, I suppose—and tells me he went out. I hang up before she asks who I am. I flop back on my bed and imagine him sitting at the same table I was at, sipping cappuccino and watching the door. Serve him right. At the same time, I know that I’m being completely unfair. I lay there letting the thoughts swirl around in my head. After a while I go downstairs and return the phone to my dad’s coat pocket and wander into the den. The parents are zombied-out, watching a rerun of Little House on the Prairie, my mother’s favorite show.
“Hey,” I say.
Heads turn.
“You think you could turn it down a little? I’m going to sleep.”
Wordlessly, my father lifts the remote and lowers the volume.
“Thanks,” I say.
I go back to my room. Now that I’ve announced that I’m going to bed, they won’t look in on me.
I put on my black denim shirt with the silver buttons. I touch up my eyeliner and layer on a fresh coat of lipstick and run a brush through my hair and add a few rings to my fingers and grab my black cotton trench coat and climb out the window and down the antenna post to the ground like the predatory creature of the night that I am. I head up the dark side of the street, the long tails of the trench coat flapping behind me.