Insoolin
Daisy pricks her finger without flinching.
She wipes one droplet of crimson blood onto a microscopic white tab which immediately turns the same color. She lets the blood clot on her index finger, pressing it into her camouflage pant leg. The pocket-size device she’d poached from her belt beeps. Numbers appear suddenly on the screen. She sneaks an apple juice out of her backpack and pricks the straw into the opening. She doesn’t draw blood this time, just sugar-y juice.
She sips as she discards the blood-red white tab, covers the finger-pricker with a plastic case, and stows all of it away in the belt that hangs low on her hips.
“Want one?” Daisy asks.
She hands me an apple juice and we sip in solidarity, though only one of us had to bleed for it.
“What’s it feel like?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, nothing.”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“Not if you poke the same spot,” I look at her, eyes hooded in doubt, “There’s this one spot on my finger that hurts less than the others. I poke that one.”
“Oh.”
Daisy resumes her sipping. I resume clenching my knuckles around the plastic carton, apple juice dripping down my throat.
Campers at a day-camp on the edge of town, it is under the spell of summer that Daisy and I’s friendship begins.
She moves through the world as if a horse unbound by saddle and horseshoe. I, a manicured jockey, am out of my depth. I observe her with a keen eye, deeply curious about the mechanisms that lead her to yield this freedom. Her wildness and imagination appeal to me on a level I don’t yet have words for. I’m the girl whose mind lives bound by anxious thoughts and expectations. She’s the girl whose self-sovereignty and freedom seem to be both a product of her age and a dismissal of it.
It’s a life I imagine for myself–the one of the wild horse–though not one I'd lived nor, years later, mature into.
In hindsight, I suspect the qualities I so admire are delivered, at least in part, because of the pouch that rests above Daisy's hip, carrying her life support.
Daisy is diabetic.
She wears an elastic pouch holding her glucose monitor, lancing device, and a carton of disposable white tabs. She wears this equipment not with pride nor with disdain, but a sort of admirable indifference, as if it is not there at all. She regards the equipment as if her hip's obligation. Yes, she pricks her finger multiple times a day and tracks her glucose fluctuations, though, for the most part, the equipment is the responsibility of the hip–a reminder only when it gets caught on her clothes. Otherwise, invisible.
When you're six and think you've found your soulmate, you wonder why you are not identical, in interest as well as in affliction. I doubted that I'd been created without diabetes, and if it wasn't diabetes, a mistake was made on the part of the divine. Daisy’s crutch, though she’d never called it as much, offered a comfortable cushion to sire my own.
I wonder what numbers my blood produces and if they're the same as Daisy's. I wonder if I should start carrying around apple juice cartons in my backpack. I tag along to the nurse's office during Daisy's mandatory daily visit, just in case the nurse senses I need attention, too.
Daisy doesn't mind. She likes the company. She never seeks pity–tied as it is to her hip–so it isn’t in her awareness to notice mine.
"They gave me all this stuff," she carelessly lifts the pouch, "when I was four-and-a-half." I wonder if at six, my diabetes is still waiting to be caught. "Good thing, though, cause I kept peeing and everything looked blurry. Now things are better." I squint at the concrete ahead of us, wondering if the edges are a little fuzzy. "One-two-zero is my number. My mom kept saying that after the doctor's. 'One, Daisy. Two, Daisy. Zero, Daisy. Repeat after me.' Either way, this thing beeps if it is too high or too low."
"One. Two. Zero." I mutter under my breath. Daisy swings open the door to the nurse's office. She's still looking in my direction, pedaling backward inside.
"Daisy! Welcome, hun. You've brought a friend!" The nurse, short hair resting just below her chin, spins in her swivel chair. It’s as if she’s been waiting for Daisy’s arrival all morning.
"Oh, yeah." Daisy says. I immediately sense an air of defeat. I know because her dimples disappear. She wears her dimples deep-set in her cheeks; a trademark far more pronounced than the pouch under her shirt.
Daisy’s affliction catches the attention of a concerned adult and the dimples disappear into a smooth cheek in the harsh glow of the clinic.
"One-hundred forty-five," the nurse frowns, "did you have an apple juice this morning, Daisy?" She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, nods. "Okay. You're a little high," the nurse puts the glucose monitor back into Daisy's pouch, requiring her to wheel closer. "I want you to check in an hour and if it is still above one-hundred and forty, come back, okay?" Daisy zips her pouch, mute. "You'll have to help her remember," the nurse turns my way, "think you can help Daisy remember?"
I nod ferociously.
"Come on, let's go." Daisy opens the office door again while I hum to myself.
"One. Four. Zero. One. Four. Zero." I repeat.
Daisy’s dimples return as we climb the hill towards the swimming pool. Our hands, clasped, swing between us.
We learn the breaststroke and the butterfly and splash each other with chlorine before we march into the abysmal locker room to change.
I have a hard time focusing on anything besides the perpetually wet floor and the lost bathing suit bottoms under the wooden bench. I cringe everytime I step, trying to avoid the filth.
Daisy, alternatively, is not watching her step nor avoiding the loose band-aids or wet tissues littered below us. She doesn't seem to be concerned about the state of the locker room, only with a piddling joke that I don’t hear. Her hooves are mud-trekked and she doesn’t notice.
She whips the pouch off, deposits it on the wooden bench beside her disheveled clothing. I wonder whether it is safe to leave the pouch here, so far from its scion, but I tear my eyes away when I see a small bump disrupting the otherwise smooth bathing suit.
"What's that?" I ask.
"Insulin." Daisy drags the suit down her rash-like skin.
"In-soo-lin?" I repeat.
"Gives me a little boost when I need it." She pulls the suit completely off her dripping body and turns to me. She points at the white adhesive attached to her skin, tears it as if the stickiest band-aid, leaving one slim catheter protruding from an undistinguished hole in her body.
Horrified, I stare at the puffy skin around the injection site: the plastic tube, the extra appendage. I forget about the filth of the floor below me, transfixed by her exposed impairment.
That's not the kind of diabetes I want, I think.
We finish dressing and Daisy, one again, straps the pouch to her hip, anchored. She pricks herself four more times that day, but we don’t return to the nurse’s office because I can’t remember if it was One. Two. Zero. or One. Four. Zero. If Daisy remembers, she doesn’t say.
The next day, when Daisy does not show up to camp, I remember that the number is One. Four. Zero. I force myself to look at the grimy locker room floor as punishment.
Daisy returns to camp eventually and resumes her dimpled existence with me by her side. Four weeks slip by like sand through my fingertips and eventually I don’t see Daisy at all. Without the sticky binding of summer camp, there is nothing to hold the wild horse and the tamed jockey together.
It is only many years later when I see her again, this time through the fuzzy pixels of my phone screen.
She cut off all her hair and dyed it blonde. In her pictures, she wears bikinis and crop tops. There is no pouch nor white adhesive nor catheter. Nothing to indicate she’s diabetic. It is erased from her digital persona.
Her dimples are gone, too. They seem to have disappeared with the momentary flash of a picture before it is uploaded, captioned, and shared on Instagram.
I dwell on her profile, wondering if she still pricks her finger or sips apple juice or goes to the nurse’s office when she’s above One. Four. Zero. I wonder if she remembers her soulmate, the nondiabetic, as fearful of surprise catheters as locker rooms.
I close Instagram and turn my phone off, but all I hear is the nurse’s warning echoing in my mind.
“You’ll have to help her remember,” she says, “think you can help Daisy remember?”
I don’t answer, just sink my feet further into the stirrup and brace for the ride.