Sweetblood (9781439108741) Read Online Free Page B

not ready for that question.
    â€œAre you new here, too?” He isn’t going to let it go.
    â€œI have an incurable, highly contagious disease,” I tell him. It’s true, except for the contagious part.
    â€œReally? What is it? Bubonic plague?”
    â€œWorse.”
    â€œAIDS?”
    â€œMuch worse.”
    He has to think hard now. “I know. Leprosy!”
    â€œDo I look like a leper?”
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œYou don’t want to know what I have,” I say.
    â€œReally?” 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.
    â€œFact is,
Guy
,” I say in my most serious whisper, “I’m a vampire.”

6
    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 historicalperson 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 toomuch 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