Parasite Life Read online

  I slid a clean nightgown over her head and an adult diaper up her legs. She’d become incontinent over the past few months. Yet another dimension to her care that I was loath to take on, but what other choice was there? I shuffled her to into bed, pulling the blankets up to her chest.

  I suddenly had to lean against a bedpost. The headache that had been threatening all day had gotten meaner. A spike of pain stole my breath, left me immobilized for a moment. The whole world throbbed with pain and sharp light.

  When I looked up again, I was surprised to see my mom staring directly at me. She was frowning, and if she were anyone else I’d have said she was concerned for me. I smiled weakly at her, and her eyes darted away. Her lucid gaze faded as if it had never been there.

  I dragged myself to the opposite end of the hall to my bedroom, fingertips pressed to the wall for balance. I opened my bedroom door and sighed in relief. Here was my sanctuary, the one space in this big old house not taken over by dust and strangers’ memories. My room guarded me from all that.

  The tall windows faced the long, overgrown front yard with its metropolis of insects and critters. I had a spacious walk-in closet connected to a private bath, all kept meticulously ordered and touched only by me.

  The four-poster canopy bed had been my grandparents’ bed. This had in fact been their bedroom. The walls were pale violet damask wallpaper, iridescent in the light, the heavy drapes a faded retro brocade. There was a small white vanity and a large velvet chaise worn to the springs. It was fussy and old-ladyish, but I loved it.

  I stumbled to the bed, as if I’d walked miles to get there. I pulled the canopy drapes shut and I eased myself into the soothing darkness. No energy for schoolwork, and frankly, no desire either.

  I just needed to rest. My last thought before falling asleep was: This is my life.

  Seventeen years old, teetering on the cusp of adulthood, and I was already dead and buried.

  That was all I remembered, until I woke up in my mother’s room to her keening and strange wound. I staggered back to my bedroom—I had to get some sleep before school, but two scant hours later, my alarm forced me up. The prospect of going back there for one more day before the weekend was excruciating. But even worse was the idea of being stuck at home all day with my mom. I dragged myself up. I showered. I dressed. I wound my long thick hair up into a bun. Routine. Routine. Routine.

  I headed to my mother’s room and found her awake and gazing out the window. I pulled her up, harder than I knew I should, and changed her. I led her down the stairs and plopped her in her chair in the den near the fire.

  “You want to talk about last night?” I asked as I coaxed toast and some very watered-down coffee into her. She remained distant, eyes glazed over. I gave up and prepped her soup and sandwich for the day.

  I knew I’d been rough with her, and had been loud when getting ready. But the stunt early this morning with the wound and the mess had put me in a sour mood. I grabbed my things and left. I stomped down the drive without looking back, kicking the chunks of tar that got in my way.

  My walk to school was hunched, my teeth clenched until my jaw ached. It wasn’t as if something was different about this morning, compared to the hundreds before it. My mom hadn’t spoken in years, and she was often wounding herself. But this morning I was haunted by the night before, by my dreams, the sleepwalking, and the need for something to change. It was painful to admit, even alone with only a flat gray November sky to listen. I hated my life. I prayed for something, anything, to change.

  Just like someone who’d made a deal with the devil at the crossroads, later I’d really wish I’d been more specific.

  II.

  Ronald James High School was a large gray building, dark and institutional, a gold glow from the windows the only brightness it offered. I resisted the urge to turn around and go home, and pushed through the double doors. The silence outside was replaced by the cacophony of teachers and students, the heady scent of people and life, of body odor, burnt coffee, and a hundred perfumes. The fluorescent lights buzzed and sneakers squeaked along the mirror-buffed floors. My senses were strained by the onslaught.

  I came in just as the homeroom bell went off, slipping into my classroom without a minute to spare. Neither Mr. Henderson, the ruddy-faced science teacher, nor my homeroom advisor bothered to look up when I passed. Henderson had stopped talking directly to me some time ago. I sat down hard in my chair. I fumbled through my textbooks and worked to get as much of my homework completed as possible before classes began.

  It took a second for me to notice the silence in the room. I looked up to find my teacher and the majority of my classmates staring straight at me. I blinked and they looked away. I went back to my homework. The first period bell chimed and everyone got to their feet.

  I’d just stepped through the doors when a wave of dizziness hit me. I leaned hard against the doorframe, halting the exiting students behind me. A few grunted.

  “Miss DeVry, are you all right?” Mr. Henderson asked, his voice gravelly.

  I nodded, eyes watering at the astringent alcohol smell on his breath. I stepped into the hall, keeping close to the wall. Mumbles and snickers followed me. I arrived at my first class, head filled with cotton. My eyes were so heavy that I dozed through the lesson, nestled in the back of the classroom. The class was relatively full, but the neighboring seats were all vacant. But I liked my space. If I had a mother who spoke, or any family at all, they’d probably be worried by my complete lack of friends. I didn’t have the energy for them, anyway. Sometimes I felt like a ninety-year-old British lady instead of a teenager.

  Back when she still speaking, I would talk to my mom all the time, ramble on and on, about anything and everything. Vainly thinking she would care what I was doing and how my life was going. But she didn’t, even back then. She told me as much.

  “I do not care to hear about your life,” she actually said, once. Nothing like having your crazy invalid mother give you those two cents as you washed her and fed her and took care of everything else she needed.

  When she stopped speaking, I kept on with the talking for a while. I figured maybe it would help. Give her something to hold on to. Some voice outside her own head.

  Then one day I stopped that too. Since then, it had been short exchanges and the radio to fill the silence.

  Strangely I could remember the last real conversation we’d had. It was at the kitchen table, over a meal. The summer balmy and humid, fabrics felt damp, the wood everywhere sticky and the wallpaper curling. Crickets and peepers filled the night, and large moths and June bugs batted against the door screen. And us at the table, soup and salad. I’d been proud of the salad, vegetables julienned, a homemade dressing, all from a cookbook I’d found. My mother had been unimpressed though.

  “Maybe I could be a chef, someday. I think cooking is kind of fun.”

  She’d just glared at me, pushed the plate away. “It’s no good. Nothing you touch is any good. You spoil things.” And then she never spoke again.

  In some ways it made it easier, my mother being silent. At least the endless vitriol had stopped. Truth be told, I hadn’t much liked her when she was an actual person. Mercifully, I could barely recall the sound of her voice, it had been so long.

  While I was growing up, she’d spent most of her time locked up in her attic studio. I learned if I wanted to eat regularly, I’d need to shop and prepare things myself. She couldn’t be bothered, too busy working on whatever new series of paintings had her entire focus.

  When I was in elementary school I asked her about art, begged her to teach me and include me, even though I’d never been artistic, barely able to connect two dots, let alone understand shading and dimensions. But I wanted to have something to share with her, so I tried and tried, filling sketchbooks with my attempts. She’d been up and mobile still, though even back then she’d need long naps and got frequent flus.

  When I showed her all my hard work, she’d flipped through it. �
�You don’t have an artist’s eye. The drawings are fine, they’re a child’s drawings after all, but they have no soul, no heart.” She weighed me down with a stack of art books to study and sent me to my room and back up to the attic she went.

  Invitations from friends weren’t exactly forthcoming, but I didn’t care. I learned to focus on my schoolwork, and filled what little time I had with books and television. One more year and I’d be done with school anyway. I kept below the radar mostly, except for a brief moment my sophomore year when I’d briefly attracted the attention of an exchange student, Javier. He’d been kind to me, and maybe even interested, and the jocks had teased him mercilessly—so mercilessly that he’d ignored me the rest of the semester. It hurt, losing Javier after just a taste of friendship, but it also taught me to toughen up. The “normals” couldn’t see where I was coming from; they couldn’t understand. I’d always be a freak at school—if any of them spent half the time I did cleaning up after my mother’s accidents or binding her bedsores every day, they’d feel the same. It was better to keep my head down, better to not care at all.

  When I was younger, I thought maybe I smelled, or was ugly. Teachers only called on me for the sake of fairness, no one picked me for groups or sports. My report cards were filled with notes about being withdrawn.

  My mother, when she still functioned, always had an answer for them: I was just shy.

  Annoyed at my own thoughts, I tried to focus on class and put the melodrama in my head away. I took a deep breath, louder than I meant to, and a few heads turned. The teacher, Mrs. Cox pursed her lips disapprovingly. I ignored everyone and stared at the board. She resumed her lecture.

  “You’re all familiar with Lyme disease, I’m sure, growing up in these woods. Because of their diet, ticks are a carrier for at least twelve different diseases. Ticks satisfy all of their nutritional requirements as ectoparasites, which are parasites that live on the exterior of their hosts. They are obligate hematophages, which means they feed only on blood to survive and move from one stage of life to another. While they can fast for long periods, they’ll eventually die if unable to find a host.”

  I was nearly asleep again when the door opened and a girl walked in. She handed the teacher a folded slip of paper, an obvious newcomer. The girl was medium height, a little heavyset around the middle, and stood nervously, gnawing at her lower lip. Her dyed blue-black hair was pulled back in two pigtails, her eyes painted up like a pharaoh. She wore a black lace top and an old oversized army jacket, the cuffs rolled to reveal a ring on each finger and chipped black nails. She fidgeted, shifting from foot to foot in scuffed black boots, under the eyes of a curious and judgmental class. The teacher appraised her with a sour face and gestured at the room.

  “Find an open seat. You’ll have to share a book for today, and I’ll get you a textbook of your own after class. Everyone, this is our new student, Sabrina Karnstein. Please make her feel welcome.”

  The class erupted into whispers, and I slumped down farther at my desk, wanting to go back to my nap. A rustle of fabric and the scent of cigarettes and vanilla perfume made me look up. The new girl loomed nearby, eyes expectant.

  “Mind if I sit here?”

  I glanced around, a bit surprised, before realizing there were no other open desks in the room. I nodded, unsure if I should say anything, and then sat up, sliding my book her way. She shimmied her desk closer and pulled the book half onto her desk, balanced precariously. The room was silent, all eyes our way. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “Thanks, by the way. This new school thing totally sucks. I’m Sabrina.” She stage-whispered this, waiting for my response.

  “Jane,” I replied, my voice hoarse with disuse.

  We read together, nearly forehead to forehead. Sabrina was, in a word, distracting. She chewed at her lip almost constantly, breaking occasionally to put a strand of hair in her mouth, moistening it like she was threading a needle. She also picked at her nail polish, leaving flakes of black on the desk. Her lower body had a dance of its own: toe tapping, crossing and uncrossing her legs with a random kick to my shins with her heavy boots. She was incapable of stillness, and I wondered if I made her anxious or if she had something wrong with her. She made me very aware of how little I moved around. I was a rock to her surf. Ten minutes before the end of class she turned to me, her eyes hazel with flecks of green and gold.

  “Do you know where the gym is?”

  I nodded about to respond, but she continued, “I have PE next class, which is really just insult to injury at this point.”

  “You can follow me.” When the bell went off, I waited in the hall while Sabrina was issued her textbook. She bounded out of the room and we headed down the crowded hall together.

  “No offense, but this school is so rural. I literally feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere. I mean, I threatened suicide about a hundred times to my parents, but we moved here anyway. In my senior year. My dad transferred here for work. And my mom writes trashy romance novels so she can do that wherever, but she’s wanted to get out of the city practically forever. So it’s me and my little brother, uprooted and forced into a new school in the boonies. I mean, this town totally sucks. No offense, but there’s nothing to do here. What do you do for fun?”

  I walked beside her, but it took all my energy not to cringe at the direct question, or recoil at the sheer mania coming off this girl. She’d talked more to me in the last ten minutes than anyone had in months. Sabrina waited for me to answer, her large eyes on me.

  “There is absolutely nothing to do here. I watch TV, read, and sleep.”

  “Wow. Fun.”

  Together we shared a disgusted sigh as we passed through the double doors into the gym. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling, enjoying the company. The gym had a big red and white court, the mascot—an anthropomorphized cardinal with a muscular chest—painted nearly two stories tall on the back wall. Sabrina surveyed it, then looked back at me with a snort. I giggled, surprising myself.

  We snaked along the wall, toward the locker room. Inside there was plenty of commotion as girls talked, laughed, and tried to dress as fast as possible. I headed to my locker, Sabrina at my heels. She looked around the dim change room, grimacing.

  “It stinks in here.”

  “You don’t have to hang out in the locker room. You don’t even have gym clothes.” I replied.

  “Better in here talking to you then being ogled as a new student out there.”

  I slid on my gym shorts and fished out a T-shirt. I was standing on one foot putting on a sneaker when another wave of intense vertigo hit me and I leaned back into the lockers, almost falling. Sabrina yelped in surprise and reached out to steady me. Her hand felt hot on my arm, almost scalding. I frowned, seeing twin Sabrinas, one overlapping the other. I didn’t remove her hand until they’d merged back into one.

  “Are you okay? You looked like you were gonna keel over!”

  “I’m fine. Just got dizzy all of a sudden.”

  I rested my head against the cool metal of the locker door, catching my breath, centering myself.

  “Thanks for not letting me fall.”

  Sabrina nodded, watching me closely as we went back to the gym to sit with the rest of the class. She didn’t have to participate, and instead sat on a bleacher, headphones in, fiddling with her phone. For all of my inactivity, I did like to run, and normally enjoyed the feeling of my body in motion. Today I was too weak and afraid I’d pass out. I dropped my pace back to a trot. I was still ahead of most of the class, who barely even jogged, making a show of how unhappy they were to do even that.

  I could feel Sabrina’s eyes on me, and when I looked back at her she would stick out her tongue or wave. It was strange how quickly she’d decided we were friends. Did I even want any friends? Friends were work after all, they needed things, they wanted things. But I had to admit that having someone to talk to, someone who was not my mother . . . it could be nice.

  By the end of
gym class, I decided to be open-minded about Sabrina. I went to the locker room, rinsed off, and dressed.

  She was waiting for me by the gym doors. I knew she’d be there and it was a strange, comforting feeling. She slumped against the wall, snapping a piece of green gum. It was lunch period, and as we walked along the hall to the cafeteria, all eyes turned to us. Big news to be a new kid in a small school. Bigger news to be the new girl hanging out with the school freak. The cafeteria was loud and raucous, but we found an unoccupied end table and sat down. I had no appetite, so I just watched as Sabrina pulled out a rumpled brown bag and started peeling a cheese stick like a banana.

  “So what’s the story with you? Sitting alone in the lunchroom, slinking along the halls. No close friends, no boyfriends?” She said this as she scanned the room, her mouth full of cheese.

  I shrugged, indifferent.

  She scrutinized me, nose scrunching up, the wheels turning behind her raccoon eyes. “Mmm, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy the whole super-loner thing. You were nice enough to me from the get-go, so it’s not like you’re a bitch. You dress weird, but it’s more quirky than lame. And you’re like model tall. I don’t get it.”

  “I guess you’re a special case.”

  “I’m special?” She pressed a hand to her chest, teasing me.

  “Okay, not special . . . persistent. I mean, most people don’t go out of their way to talk to me. And frankly, I just don’t have time to care.” It like felt Sabrina had me under a microscope.

  “Why don’t you have time to care?” she asked in between bites of sandwich.

  “I didn’t realize you were my new . . . therapist.”

  We sat quietly while a group of football players entered the room hooting and hollering, their girlfriends in tow. When they caught sight of us they barked like dogs and laughed.

  “Dickheads.” Sabrina crumpled up the cheese wrapper, folding her arms. “All I’m saying is that it sucks being new and you seem pretty cool. Anyway, thanks. I mean, if you don’t care so much, I can leave you alone.”