by Trisha Telep
She was there.
He stood in the shadows across the street. He watched her through the window of the place. She was reading a book. She looked happy, turning the pages and occasionally lifting the coffee cup to her mouth. He watched her for half an hour, feeling peaceful. He said her name.
“Penny.”
He knew that she couldn’t actually hear him, but it was at that moment that she happened to look out the window in his general direction. He stepped back, deeper into the shadows. He always wore dark clothing, so he blended in well, and he knew that she hadn’t seen him. When he composed himself, he noticed that the glasses she wore now were round, ugly and ill-suited to her face. He was unsettled.
He released himself to bat form and flew away.
He thought he would go home. That was what he should have done. But instead he found himself standing naked in front of that Goodwill store, staring at the vintage cat-eye glasses.
He punched the window till it smashed and then turned into a bat, grabbed the pair of glasses with his mouth and flew away.
When he got home, he dropped the glasses on his night table, turned back to human form, and lay on the bed. He stared at the glasses. He knew what he would do. He would go to the diner, and he would give them to Penny.
For five nights, he staked-out the diner, waiting in the shadows until at last she showed up. She wore a tight-fitting rainbow skirt with a Victorian-looking white shirt. She had a big bag of books. And she was wearing those round, ugly glasses. She kept pushing them up the bridge of her nose.
“Penny,” Miles stepped out of the shadows as she put her hand on the door of the diner.
She cocked her ear. He said her name again. This time she turned around.
They stood there looking at each other.
If he were alive, his heart would have been beating wildly. He did not know what to say. Words had escaped him. It was Penny who spoke first.
“I’m sorry I was an ass when I met you,” she said. “I got scared.”
It was not what he expected her to say. He expected a shove. Or a scream. Or something dramatic. Instead, she pulled the door open and motioned for him to come inside.
She invited him in.
Miles stepped into the diner. It had not changed much in sixty years. They slid into a corner booth and the waitress, as old as time in a brown uniform, handed them two menus. Her nametag said Stella. He watched her as she went back to the counter and leaned on it in a certain way. From the way she stood, he remembered that he had been in glee club with her. He looked at his menu for something he could eat.
“What are you going to get?” Penny asked.
“I don’t know,” Miles said. “I don’t really eat this.”
“Do you have money?” she asked.
“Yes,” Miles said.
“Good. Then I’m getting the cheeseburger deluxe,” Penny said. “You can pretend to eat my French fries.”
She signaled Stella, the waitress, who brought over two glasses of water and took their order. Miles ordered a black coffee. He figured that he could make it look as though it were being drunk by using napkins and spilling some. Over the years, he had become a master of looking as though he were still human.
“So,” Penny said. “What made you come find me?”
“I wanted to give you this,” Miles said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the glasses, placed them on the table and slid them across to her with his finger.
“Oh, wow,” she said. “These are beautiful.”
She put them on, and Miles thought that they suited her really well. She looked pretty. She took them off.
“Can’t see with them. I’ll have to get my lenses put in,” she said. “Thank you.”
She reached across to him and put her hand on his. Then she took her hand away.
“Wow, you really are cold,” she said.
“I’m dead,” Miles said.
“Right,” she said. “I knew that.”
She looked at him seriously. Miles poured a little of his coffee into the saucer.
“So, I actually was hoping you would come by,” Penny said. “I thought maybe I’d put you off.”
“I was taking a chance,” Miles said. “You did say you’d rat me out.”
“I know, I know,” Penny said. “I was hoping that you’d know that I didn’t mean it.”
“I wasn’t sure,” Miles said.
“I didn’t. And I’m glad you came, because I wanted to ask you something.”
“You wanted to ask me something?”
Miles felt that it was the other way around. He wanted to ask her something. He wanted to ask her how it was that she could make him feel as though he had a pulse. How she could make him see the colors—that for him were beyond the spectrum already—seem even brighter. How she could make him remember tiny little details from when he was a living, breathing being.
“Yes,” she said.
“What?” Miles asked.
“I want to paint you.”
“Paint me?” Miles asked. “You want me to sit for a portrait?”
He had sat once for a portrait with his older brother when he was seven years old. The portrait had hung in his Grandmother’s house.
“Not exactly sit,” Penny said. “I want to follow you one night and do a lot of sketches as you do your vampire thing. Then I will make a bunch of art based on that.”
“Out of the question,” Miles said.
Stella arrived with the deluxe cheeseburger. She placed it on the table and gave Miles a sideways look, as though she were struggling to place him. He turned his face away from her.
“Anything else for you kids?” Stella asked.
Miles and Penny shook their heads, and Stella gave Miles one more hard stare before she walked back over to her station beside the counter.
“Why not?” Penny said. “You won’t eat me, will you?”
“No,” Miles said. “I won’t.”
He would never drink her blood. He couldn’t. To him she was something more precious than food. She was life. His life. She was the thing that had made him feel something again. He would not do anything to put her in jeopardy.
“Hear me out,” Penny pleaded. “My art piece will be three paintings side by side. Different stages of the hunt.”
“No,” he said. “Just no.”
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“It’s dangerous,” he said.
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Miles said.
The truth was that he didn’t want her to see him that way. Fangs unfurled. Eyes wild. Running and hunting. Crouching over the victim and drinking. The ecstasy. He couldn’t even bear other vampires to see him like that, which is why he hunted and lived alone. He was disgusted by how it made him feel. The power and blood lust were so overwhelming that he hated himself for the deliciousness of them.
“You are a stingy bastard,” she said, shoving the cheeseburger in her mouth. She had ordered it rare, and there was blood that dripped off of the edge of the bun and onto her finger.
The sight of it made him catch his breath.
He wanted to take her finger and suck the juice off. If he wanted to be her friend, he would have to leave right away. It was either that, or he would attack her.
He slid out of the booth.
“Where are you going?” she said. “We’re not finished here.”
He was confused because she was smiling. She didn’t look angry that he had said no. She was open and fresh. She smelled ready for anything. She put the burger down and noticed the burger juice on her finger and licked it off herself.
Miles almost howled. He could feel his teeth come out. He ran out of the diner. He headed for the park despite the fact that he had already fed here too recently for his liking. He could smell three other vampires in the area. It would be bad for all if there were too many deaths in one place, but Miles couldn’t help himself. He was blinded by desire. He had to feed.<
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He went deeper into the park until he found himself under a bridge, hovering over a man. The man was passed out asleep on cardboard, wearing a large hoodie, and wrapped in a tattered brown sleeping bag. Miles leaned over him and exposed the man’s neck. It was streaked with dirt. He smelled of urine, booze, and feces. This was not the blood that he wanted. He wanted the creamy neck of a fresh-smelling girl. He wanted the blood of someone who was healthy and not as sick as the homeless man. Miles yelled with frustration. He punched the brick wall of the bridge. He threw the man’s possessions all around, ripping every item he could find to shreds. The man was so drunk he did not wake up.
“What are you doing?”
“Keep it down.”
“You’ll get us caught.”
The three other vampires he’d smelled surrounded him under the bridge. Miles was so far into his rage that he thought he would kill them.
“He has the rage.”
“He needs to feed.”
“He wants sweeter blood than a derelict’s.”
They clucked at him. They felt sorry for him. They surrounded him and ordered him over and over again to feed on the homeless man. They wore him down.
Miles sank to his feet, plugged his nose up, and bit the drunk’s neck.
As soon as the first blood hit his system, he relaxed. He drank his fill and then disengaged. Exhausted he sat next to his victim, leaning his head against the wall of the bridge.
He would not be able to feed here for a while. And he owed those three vampires a debt of thanks. Since Penny had invited him to the diner that evening, he now had a new place he could go to hunt. In his blood craze, he had fantasized about going back there and grabbing someone. Anyone. Maybe even Stella. Just to have blood that was not so tasteless.
It had been a curse to meet Penny.
After a time resting, Miles stood up and walked toward the water fountain to clean his teeth of the bits of skin.
“Hey there,” one of the vampires called to him from behind a bush. “We saved you some girl.”
Miles turned.
Spilled around in front of the bush, he saw the big bag full of books. There was a sketchbook near an arm that hung lazily out of the bushes. And not far from that was a purse whose contents one of the vampires was rifling through.
He threw the things carelessly out on ground. Keys. Lipstick. Wallet. Cat-eye glasses.
The vampire stood up and shoved the wallet in his coat pocket, and as he did he took a step back and stumbled onto the spilled contents of the purse.
The glasses snapped in two.
If Miles had had a heart, right then it would have stopped.
It was the last time he ever made a friend.
“THAT’S THE ONE.” Bridget pointed with her fork. “That’s the guy who says he’s a vampire.”
Jennifer, who had been picking distractedly at her tuna salad, looked up at her friend and frowned. “Who’s a vampire?”
“The new kid. What’s his name. No, don’t look,” hissed Bridget, who lived in mortal fear that one day a boy in the cafeteria would catch her or one of her friends looking at him, and the outcome would be—well, Jennifer wasn’t sure what Bridget thought the outcome would be, other than some sort of unspecified disaster. “The one with the dark hair and the weirdo clothes.”
Gabrielle, who was staring openly across the cafeteria, raised her eyebrows. “Oh yeah. I think his name is Colin.”
“It is,” Bridget said. “He said so in English class. He just got up and said: ‘My name is Colin, and I just moved here. And oh yeah, I’m a vampire.’”
“He just said that? I’m a vampire?” Jennifer stared across the cafeteria, fascinated. The boy with the dark hair was sitting alone at a table, wearing a long black leather trenchcoat over a black shirt and black pants. He had black gloves on his hands, too, the fingertips cut off. He had a lunch tray in front of him, but there was nothing on it. Under the black, black hair, he was pale as blank paper. “What did everyone else do?”
“Mostly laughed. Then Mr. Brandon made him sit down.”
“He’s a poser,” Gabrielle said, and grinned. Gabby had a bright, white grin that had never needed braces. Jennifer often wondered how it was that the two of them were cousins who shared genetic material, and yet Gabby had gotten the perfect teeth and the blonde hair, and Jennifer had wound up with dishwater brown hair—something no one else in the family had—and four years of orthodontics.
“He never eats,” Bridget said, ticking off her points on her fingers. “He wears sunglasses everywhere. He’s super pale. And he never speaks to anyone. Maybe he is a vampire.”
“Or maybe he’s just a misanthrope,” said Gabby. “Anyway, if he was a vampire, wouldn’t he burn up in sunlight?”
“Oh, there’s no such thing as vampires anyway,” Jennifer said. “He’s just some crazy goth kid.”
“Oh yeah?” Bridget said. “Well, he’s looking at you.”
Startled, Jennifer glanced back in the boy’s direction. He had something balanced against the edge of the table, a sort of book, open as if he were writing or drawing in it. He shook his head as she looked at him and even at this distance she could see the green of his eyes.
There was something else, too. A feeling that as he looked back at her, something zinged through their gazes, some kind of connection—
Jennifer turned around and looked back at the other two girls at the table: Gabby with her eyebrows up, Bridget chewing nervously on the end of her red braid. “You’re blushing,” Gabby said.
Jennifer shrugged. “He is cute.”
Bridget grinned. “All vampires are.”
On the bus ride home, Jennifer thought about vampires. She didn’t know much about vampire legends: certainly less than the other girls in her school, who loved vampire romances and horror movies. She’d seen one vampire movie, once, when she was fourteen and over at Bridget’s house. For the next week after that, she’d dreamed about beautiful people with pale faces who would swoop through her window and take her away from her boring parents and her boring life. She would live in Paris instead of Pennsylvania and drink blood out of wine glasses, except it wouldn’t taste like blood—hard and metallic—but like something sweet and thin. Fruit punch, maybe, or black-cherry soda.
Not long after she’d been in a bookstore and asked her mother to buy her a copy of a teen vampire romance novel. Blood Desire, or something like that. She should have known better. Vampires and supernatural creatures and magic didn’t fit with her parents’ strict conservative worldview. Her mother had taken the book out of her hand and shoved it roughly back onto the shelf. Vampires, Jen was told, were not something girls her age should be thinking about; they were monsters made up by pagans and Satanists and had no place in a child’s bedroom.
What her mother really meant, Jen realized later, was that vampires were sexy, and she wasn’t supposed to think about sex, or boys. Unlike Gabby, Jen was never allowed to date—not even with a chaperone, not even a date to go to the mall in the middle of a Saturday with a million people around. She was forbidden to bring boys home, much less have them in her room. Sometimes Jen thought it was a wonder she was allowed to go to school at all, considering that there were boys there.
At home, Jen slipped in through the side door to find her mother in the kitchen, stir-frying onions in a pan. Jennifer slid onto one of the kitchen stools, twirling her backpack by one strap and watching her mother, thin and efficient-looking with her graying brown hair tied back in a braid and an apron cinched around her waist. None of the mothers of Jennifer’s friends, even when they did cook, wore an apron—not Bridget’s, whose mother only followed macrobiotic recipes she got off the Internet, or Gabby’s, whose crazy artist mother didn’t know how to make anything but Hamburger Helper. But Jennifer’s mom stayed home all day—she disapproved of her sister, who worked—so Jennifer figured she had nothing but time to cook.
“Hey, Mom,” Jennifer said. “I was just wondering …”
/> Jennifer’s mom half-turned, brushing a lock of hair away from her face and smiling. “About what?”
“How come Gabby gets to date,” Jennifer said. “You know. And I don’t.”
“Oh.” Her mother stood for a moment, poking at the onions in the pan. “Look, you and Gabby—you’re different.”
Her mother had said this before, and it always annoyed Jennifer. “Different how?”
“Well—Gabby can handle herself better.” Jennifer’s mother had her lips pressed together. Jen knew how much her mother hated having this conversation, but she couldn’t help it. It was like poking at a sore tooth. Of course, it was true that Gabby was more confident and self-reliant than she was, but how could anyone become confident or self-reliant when their parents kept them in a glass cage and never let them go anywhere or do anything?
“I can handle myself fine,” Jennifer said. “I’d just like to be able to—maybe—go on a date.” She held her breath.
She might not have bothered. “You know that’s out of the question,” Jen’s mother said. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She gave a little shriek as a puff of smoke wafted up from the pan. “Oh! My onions!”
Jennifer sighed.
In the library the next day, trying to research a book on Norse mythology, Jen kept feeling her gaze drawn to other books—books that had nothing to do with the topic of her essay. Books with the word vampire in the title.
There were more of them than she would have thought:
The Encyclopedia of Vampires, and The Massive Book of Vampire Myths, and Vampires through History. Jennifer was just reaching for the last one when a voice spoke from behind her:
“You know, most of those aren’t very accurate.”
She whirled around. Colin was behind her, leaning against one of the low shelves of books. Up close, his looks were even more striking. He had one of those sharp, bony, delicate faces, like a British film star. His hair was pure black, his eyes a bright and feverish green like a cat’s. There was a ring on one of his fingers. He couldn’t be married, she thought. But no, it was on the wrong finger. She thought of what Bridget had said—that he wore weirdo clothes, but she thought they suited him.