Vampire Crush

by A. M. Robinson

  He ignores me. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like an anime character?” he asks Violet. “I kind of dig it.”

  “Neal!”

  “Cowboy Bebop. Come over sometime and check it out.”

  Violet looks to me, helpless, as if genuinely confused as to what the proper response is.

  “Neal, if you don’t stop I will kick your pocket,” I threaten.

  “But—”

  “I will.”

  Looking more befuddled than scared, Neal turns around. Partly relieved—and yet partly offended that Neal so readily accepted me as a hamster kicker—I scribble my address on a slip of paper. Really, what’s the downside? If I can lure her to my house, I may be able to get her to concentrate enough to answer one or two questions.

  My last class of the day is journalism, and while it’s usually my favorite, the nonexistent progress on the interview front has me worried. Sure enough, Lindsay’s already at Mr. Amado’s desk when I get there.

  “I’ve talked to three of them already,” she boasts as Mr. Amado listens with bemused patience. She’s about to say something else when she spots me lingering at the door. “Isn’t this project great?”

  Sure, if you’re a sucker for torture. Why didn’t I get the chatty ones? I slump into the front row just as Mr. Amado shoos Lindsay away from his desk to address the class.

  “Most of you stopped by to see me this morning, and I think we all have a good idea of our individual responsibilities for the first issue. We go to press in two weeks, so I’m not going to bore you with my classroom rules or make you share what you did last summer. Let’s get started.” He points to Neal, who is busy drawing something on the back of his binder. Neal does the monthly comic strip for the paper and thinks that his class participation should end there. Mr. Amado, on the other hand, insists that he should try his hand at articles as well. Sometimes I think that their power struggles are the highlight of my life.

  Mr. Amado walks over and takes a place in front of Neal’s desk, tapping the corner when His Boy Friday fails to look up. “Neal, what have you found out about the missing donated blood from the Back-to-School festival?” He shoots a glance toward Lindsay. “Students worked hard to make sure there was a volunteer component this year.”

  “Well, there was blood . . . ,” Neal starts.

  Mr. Amado’s eyes light up with hope. “Yes?”

  “. . . and now there is less blood.”

  Mr. Amado gives a tight smile. “You’re going to need more than that for your article,” he says, straining to keep his voice encouraging rather than frustrated.

  Neal goes back to shading the complex design he’s sketched on the back of his folder. “Isn’t this something for the police?” he asks, distracted.

  “I wanted you to look at it from the student’s perspective, talk to the girls who manned the booth. They were there until eight that night.”

  “I did.”

  “Great!”

  “They don’t know what happened.”

  Mr. Amado sighs. “Just do me a favor, Neal, and dig a little deeper. Please.”

  Neal salutes. “Righto, Mr. Amado.”

  Unappeased, Mr. Amado bends down to Neal’s level and starts to whisper encouraging threats, or possibly threatening encouragement. Lindsay takes the opportunity to lean over and study my closed notebook. Hers is already covered in scribbles. Editor-in-chiefly scribbles.

  “So, what’s your angle going to be?” she whispers. I can spot the competitive edge through the friendliness.

  “Why the new students hate me.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” The least I can do is act like I might have something to write down. I flip open my notebook and try to make conversation. “Have you met all of yours yet?”

  “Almost,” she says and turns the page. “Everyone except for James. Hey, do you want to maybe see a movie on Friday? There’s that indie cinema on Main Street that always plays cool stuff.”

  “I can’t,” I say, still annoyed that she is beating me.

  “Oh, okay. Well, maybe—”

  “Mr. Amado’s on his way over.”

  Lindsay straightens in her seat while Mr. Amado strides toward us as purposefully as one can in loafers. Crouching down, he peeks at what we’ve written. I put up my hand as a shield.

  “So,” he starts, and then holds up a finger before Lindsay can speak. “I think I have a good idea about Lindsay’s progress; I’m interested in what the other half thinks.”

  The other half has no idea what to say. Put on the spot, I ask some of my actual questions. “Don’t you think it’s strange that they all seem to know one another? And think Michigan is charming?”

  Mr. Amado doesn’t respond at first, just gives me a look akin to the one you’d give the homeless person who stands outside the grocery store shouting that there are aliens in the bread. If his mustache had fingers, it would be wagging one at me right now. “Sophie,” he says. “I thought we talked about this.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lindsay shooting me covert sideways glances like she was once warned not to stare directly at a loser eclipse.

  “I know,” I say, “but—”

  “We’re not investigating,” he says. “We’re celebrating. Try it again tomorrow.”

  He raps the desk and walks away, leaving me to wonder why Neal’s curiosity is encouraged while mine is smashed into tiny little bits. I sink into my chair and draw circles in my notebook for the rest of the period while Lindsay rattles off all the juicy tidbits she’s collected about the two boys who were hanging around Vlad in the cafeteria. Their names are Devon and Ashley—a slap in the face to their obvious aspirations to be brick walls.

  “They don’t speak all that much, but we managed,” she says. “Do you know that they were in the circus when they were little?”

  “Wait. You’re telling me that they’re mute circus people?” I ask, wondering if this is some great cosmic experiment: See how long it takes Sophie’s head to explode if we drop her in a vat of weirdness and continue to tell her that no, the soup she’s in is perfectly normal.

  “Well, okay,” Lindsay admits, “it’s sort of different. But it’s going to make a great article. Unlike Andrew Archer, who doesn’t want to talk about anything but dirt bikes.” She closes her notebook. “What about Vlad? He’s yours, right? He seems interesting at least. A little show-offy. I can’t believe Morgan let him get away with that this morning.”

  Me either, Lindsay. Me either.

  Chapter Three

  At dinner that night I am treated to “The Vlad Show.” Vlad is hot. Vlad is cool. Vlad has a silver Hummer with tinted windows and he offered to drive Caroline around in it. Vlad is rich. Vlad’s parents are away on business in Europe, so he has the house to himself. And yes, he’s delighted that they let his friends come stay with him this semester so he wouldn’t be lonely. Caroline’s so excited, she’s shoveling vegetables into her mouth without inspecting them first.

  “And get this,” she bubbles, holding her fork aloft. “He wants to know everything, absolutely everything about me. When I was born, where I was born, what my plans are after high school, if I have any birthmarks . . . everything! How cool is that?”

  If I were a less petty person, I’d thank Caroline for plopping all this information at my feet, albeit coated in the slime of infatuation. Instead, I try to steer the conversation to other subjects. But when Caroline starts to reenact their good-bye scene by her locker, I can’t take it anymore.

  “He’s weird,” I say. “What’s with all the bowing?”

  Caroline colors. “He’s European,” she says defensively.

  “No, you said his parents were in Europe.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Okay, that makes absolutely no sense at all. None of this makes any sense at—”

  “Did you meet any of the new students, Sophie?” Marcie interrupts, attuned to stopping sibling fires before they start.

  “V
iolet. I think she’s crazy,” I say and then pause, remembering our earlier address swap. “She, uh, might be coming over.”

  A childhood of saying things meant to shock Marcie has made it tricky for her to tell when I’m serious. Her lips twitch before finally deciding on an indulgent grin.

  “Okay,” she says. “Just let me know. I’ll put the knives away.”

  She’s still smiling at me, proud of her joke, so I smile back. She’ll understand when Violet shows up looking like she just rolled around in her great-grandmother’s suitcase. Thankfully, my dad dominates the rest of dinner with talk of bankish things. After I help do the dishes, I beat a hasty retreat to my room before Caroline can corner me with more Vlad babble.

  Our house is a renovated Victorian that still retains a few creaks. My room is on the very top floor in what used to be the attic, and I’m in love with it, even though the ceilings are low and slanted and eau de mothball lingers in the air. When I was twelve I painted the walls a deep, dark red. Marcie once said that makes it look like a bordello, but if so, it’s an inactive one—the only boy who’s ever been in my room is James. (When we were nine and played doctor, I tried to give him an appendectomy with a plastic fork. He chickened out mid-surgery.) My favorite part is the two small windows that jut out and create little pockets of space. I have a padded window seat in one, and I’ve squeezed my desk in the other. When I take a break from doing homework, I like the cramped, cozy feeling of tucking my feet up on the chair and staring across at the house next door.

  Tonight, however, I don’t have time to waste. The info Caroline dropped at dinner at least gives me something to work with before the next class. I jot down what I know so far.

  Vlad

  Likes: Expensive cars, being the

  center of attention, my sister

  Dislikes: Common courtesy, me

  Marisabel

  Likes: N/A

  Dislikes: Vlad talking to Caroline

  Violet

  Likes: Mystery boy, showering in

  perfume, teen magazines

  Dislikes: Listening, making sense

  Neville

  Likes: N/A

  Dislikes: Basic Skills, going to it

  And I’m tapped. I throw my pencil down in frustration and end up staring out the window anyway. At first all I see is the reflection of my room—the light behind me, my daybed, and a darker version of my frustrated face—but then, beyond all that in the window across the way, a little halo of light.

  Déjà vu comes swift and cold. Since our parents were cheap and lame, James and I used to use flashlights in lieu of walkie-talkies. We even had our own Morse code, uncrackable by Caroline or Nazis. Two long flashes and one short meant “I’m so bored that I want you to come over”; one long and two short meant “Go to bed and stop bothering me”; and three short dashes meant “Please close your window, weirdo exhibitionist.” Needless to say, that one got a lot of play during his sixth-grade, I’m-going-to-play-basketball-in-the-park-with-my-loser-friends-every-evening phase.

  I press my face to the glass to get a clear view of the neighboring house. True, there are no cars, but Marcie did say that she thought someone had moved in, and she has a sixth sense about that sort of thing. When another dot of light flickers to life, I smoosh in closer, letting my cheek grow cool against the glass. Breath held, I wait to see if this is the beginning of an old pattern. But when it flickers out and doesn’t repeat, I feel foolish for hoping . . . hoping what?

  I’m not Veronica Mars or Nancy Drew. I’m too paranoid to sneak into someone’s house to steal confidential files, and the old clocks and hidden staircases of the world can keep their secrets. But checking on that light isn’t investigative rocket science. A quick peek should do it. I promise myself I’ll come back up here afterward to stare at what remains of my high school journalism career.

  That decided, I formulate my plan of attack. The easy thing to do would be to ring the doorbell, but what would I say if someone answered? “I was spying on you from my bedroom window and thought I should introduce myself at night and without cake.” Not likely. I could peek in the front windows, but that might attract the attention of our neighborhood’s resident cat lady, Mrs. Sims, who has a habit of calling the police if she sees anyone she doesn’t recognize out and about after seven thirty. And since she’s half blind, there are very few people she recognizes from more than five feet away. I’ll have to cut through the back.

  After tiptoeing downstairs, I ease past the living room where Caroline and the parents are watching some incarnation of CSI, head through the kitchen, and then slip out the back door into the summer heat. Our backyard is small and mostly taken up by Marcie’s garden of pale tomato and cucumber plants. It is surrounded by a wooden fence that’s older than me; whatever paint it once had has long since chipped away, and the wood is turning gray. But this is good—if someone had ever decided to paint it, they would have noticed the two missing planks that make a secret superhighway to the yard next door.

  The gap is hidden by overgrown lilac bushes on both sides. I discovered it when I was ten and desperate to find the missing shoe that James had thrown over the fence in retaliation for my spraying him with water when Marcie wasn’t looking. I said the hose had accidentally gotten away from me; he said my Little Mermaid flip-flop had accidentally flung itself into his yard; and Marcie told us both to be quiet, she was watching Oprah. James’s clothes dried out, but I never recovered the flip-flop, even after several covert scouting missions. When I push away the bush’s scratchy branches and duck through the gap, a part of me still hopes, irrationally, that I’ll find it.

  The yard is a mess. The remains of a rusting swing set lurk in the far corner, and the smell of urine emanating from the collapsed shed suggests that it’s the new home of the local strays. James’s mother’s old, crumbling birdbath still stands in a small circle of defeated geraniums, and I wonder if it attracts only robins, like it used to. For a while the harried Realtor had attempted to keep up with the maintenance, but if the grass is any indication, he lost hope a couple of months ago. It’s high enough to tickle my knees. If I were really dedicated, I could crawl on my belly and be invisible.

  Settling on the half crouch of the semi-determined, I sneak onto the rickety back porch. There are no curtains hanging in the family room window, so I waddle up and peek over the sill. From this spot I can see down the hallway, all the way to the front door. Not much moonlight makes its way into the house, but there’s enough to realize that, other than dust and a few snaking cable wires, the family room is empty.

  I sit back on my heels; there must be some sort of limit to how many times I can be wrong in one day. I’m just about to start my return creep across the yard when a figure darts through the far hallway. For a second my shocked brain scans for a “Stop, drop, and roll” sort of acronym that explains what to do when you’re about to be caught spying. I decide on RLH—Run Like Hell.

  I take a flying leap off the porch and hit the ground sprinting, resisting the urge to look behind me, even when I hear the quick creak of a screen door opening and closing again. The tall grass slows me down, and I’m so panicked that my breath is coming in short, jagged little bursts. The lilac bush is only ten feet away when a heavy weight tackles me from behind. My attacker lets out a startled curse as we both fall to the ground.

  My side hits first, but the weight of a person on top of me rolls me to my back. I know I should have my eyes open so I can defend myself, but fear is keeping them squeezed shut, and my brain is shouting stupidstupid-stupidstupidstupid. I’m flinging my fists up wildly, but they bounce off my attacker’s shoulders. It finally registers that I should be screaming, so I suck in a deep breath and start to wail. But it’s soon smothered by the hand that clamps across my mouth.

  “Sophie.”

  It’s a male voice, but soft and exasperated whereas you would think a potential murderer’s would be hard and menacing. All my concentration is currently occupied with trying
to jerk my knee up where he has my legs pinned, so it takes a moment to realize that he’s said my name. I open my eyes.

  His features haven’t changed, but they’re sharper somehow, and squarer. He still has the hint of a scar on his forehead from the rock I lobbed at him from over the fence, and even though it’s night out I can tell that his hair is still black. It’s shaggier than I remember, but back when I knew him his mother was always dragging him off for haircuts twice a month.

  Seeing that I recognize him, he lifts his hand away from my mouth.

  “James? James Hallowell?” I yell in disbelief, causing him to clamp his hand back over my mouth. I scream a few other things into his palm, most of it not fit for my own ears, let alone children’s. As my tirade rolls on, he starts to smile, his teeth glinting in the darkness. It only enrages me further.

  When it comes to anything involving a ball or special shoes, I’m not very athletic, but once upon a time I attended a weekly karate class with the same fervor as a nun attending Mass. It was three years before my sensei told Marcie that he was afraid I was there for the wrong reasons. I believe the word “bloodthirsty” was used. Right before the phrase “I think you should get her checked out.”

  Now I channel all of my anger and lingering fear into one mighty upward chop to the nose. When he covers his face, I bend my knees up and use my legs to pop him off of me before rolling sideways and scrambling to my feet, my legs still shaky from the adrenaline. All the action has made me dizzy, and I bend over to catch my breath as I wait for the ringing in my ears to pass. When I look up, he’s hauling himself off the ground. Now that he’s standing, I should add about a foot and a half to my list of things that have changed.