“You have butterscotch,” the girl said. Strange tears began to flood across the bottom lashes of her bright blue eyes.
Annabelle had definitely never seen anyone react this way to ice cream.
“Um…yeah,” Annabelle said. “It’s kind of a retro thing.”
“I haven’t had butterscotch ice cream in years,” the girl said.
“Do you want a sample?”
“No, no thank you,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the memory it goes with.”
“Yeah, I have the same thing with mint chocolate chip,” Annabelle lied, although she couldn’t precisely think of a reason for it. Maybe she wanted the blue-eyed girl to like her. Annabelle had spent so much time in high school trying to convince everyone that she didn’t care what people thought of her that she actually began to believe it. She couldn’t think of a valid reason for the façade to continue especially since this new girl sparked a genuine interest. “I’m sorry. That was a lie. I don’t have any ice cream related memories.”
The girl covered her mouth with a delicate white hand and laughed. It was such a lovely sound, so pristine and controlled for pitch, timber, and length. Annabelle couldn’t immediately put her finger on it, but she thought she’d heard that kind of laugh before.
“I’m Debbie,” the girl said.
“Annabelle.” Annabelle reached her hand over the freezer to shake the girl’s hand. It was ice cold to the touch and softer than baby goose down. “Are you new to town?”
The girl shook her head. “I’ve lived here my whole life and then some.”
Annabelle definitely knew the feeling. She was having a hard time wanting to let go of Debbie’s hand. It was so soft, so smooth, and so well-kempt. By comparison, Annabelle’s hand looked ruddy and common with chewed nails and dry cuticles. They actually ended up holding hands for a time while each inspected the other’s fingers. The strangeness of the situation struck Annabelle first, although she didn’t pull her hand away because of it.
“You have really nice fingernails,” Annabelle said. “I mean, that’s why I was still holding your hand. To look at them.” She couldn’t believe it. She was no better at talking to girls than she was at talking to boys. It was a people thing, it must have been, because this was the exact sort of stupid thing she would do whenever she tried to talk to a guy in high school. She must have winced or given some outward sign of her discomfort because, when she tried to pull her hand away, Debbie refused to let go.
“No, it’s okay,” Debbie said. “Your hand is really warm. It’s nice.” She smiled in a coquettish way that also seemed familiar to Annabelle, but, more importantly, seemed knee-weakeningly hot.
“I just…I mean, do you want some ice cream?” Annabelle asked, a strange sense of comfort and familiarity washing over her when she gave in and accepted holding hands with Debbie as something they were both interested in.
“No, I just came in here to remember,” Debbie said. “At first, anyway.”
Annabelle smiled and looked down demurely. She caught a glimpse of herself in the reflective stainless steel top of the freezer. She never wore makeup to work. Her auburn hair was in a mundane ponytail. And she always hated how she looked in the pink polo, pink visor, and khaki pants that passed as the uniform for Baskin Robbins. She didn’t just think she looked like a dork, she definitely felt like one.
“I don’t normally dress like this, you know?” Annabelle said.
Debbie smiled again. “I know,” she said. “It’s a uniform. Even astronauts have to wear uniforms at work.”
Annabelle really felt like Debbie got her; oh how she hoped Debbie got her. She needed a new friend, and…there was something else there she wasn’t quite sure of, but she thought she might need that too. She didn’t dress, talk, or behave like any popular person Annabelle had ever known, but there was something decidedly cool about Debbie.
“It was nice meeting you, Annabelle,” Debbie said, “but I should get going.”
Their hands slipped from one another and Annabelle immediately felt less-than for it. Debbie walked to the door, hands pressed across the bar handle in the middle, and glanced back over her shoulder to Annabelle. “See you later, gator,” she said with a wink so brief, so fluid, and so charming that Annabelle couldn’t be absolutely certain it had even happened. But then she was out into the night and walking across the empty parking lot toward Vigil’s Grove.
Annabelle lifted the hand so long occupied by Debbie’s and smelled it, hoping for a hint of lotion or perfume that might have stuck to it. It smelled organic like dried leaves and lawn clippings. The mysterious smell only added to the mystique of Debbie and all Annabelle knew was she had to know more.
2.
The next day, Annabelle went to a vintage clothing store and did precisely what she imagined Debbie had done by closing her eyes and walking awkwardly up and down the aisles gathering items of clothing at random. She didn’t know if that’s how Debbie had done it, and judging from how many people and things she nearly knocked down in the process, she kind of thought it probably wasn’t right. She came up with a bedazzled jean jacket, a pink poodle skirt, camouflage combat boots, and a red t-shirt from a White Stripes concert that had a fading iron-on decal. The woman at the counter added fishnets to the ensemble, and who was Annabelle to argue? They made as much sense as the rest of it.
She tucked the clothes in a bag and hid it away at the back of her closet, unsure why she’d even done it or where she would wear the chaotic outfit. She felt closer to Debbie simply for purchasing it.
That night at work, she promised herself she wouldn’t fall asleep. She wasn’t planning on doing any actual work during the really slow hours, but she didn’t want to miss even the tiniest chance Debbie might happen by again. It was a quarter to ten and closing time before Debbie appeared. It really was an appearance as Annabelle had been vigilant in watching for her across the empty parking lot and suddenly she was pulling open the glass door without being spotted. Debbie was dressed in a green, plaid flannel shirt over a black turtleneck, a floral sun skirt that ran all the way to the ground and then some, and dollar-store flip-flops. This second eclectic outfit gave Annabelle all the proof she needed that the previous night’s clothes hadn’t been born out of a laundry day necessity.
Annabelle was prepared this time with hints of eyeliner, concealer on the patch of possible zits rising on her forehead, and just enough mascara to make her eyelashes pop. She didn’t want to look desperate—maybe 25% more attractive.
“Hey, Debbie,” Annabelle said, trying desperately to affect a breezy posture against the sundae making station opposite the counter. “How’s things…how are things going…how are you?”
“Peachy-keen, jellybean,” Debbie said with an adorable wrinkle of her button nose.
“That’s cool,” Annabelle said, focusing on not having another instance of word-salad. “Are you here for some ice cream?”
“Nope,” Debbie said, “I’m here for you. I noticed the other night that you close at ten. I thought we could go do something.”
“Yeah! I mean, sure,” Annabelle said. “I’d have to change first, but sure, I can do something. Let me mop the floors, count the register, and we can go.”
Debbie took a seat at one of the tables anchored to the floor and adjoining benches with metal bars, sitting sideways with her ankles crossed beneath the seat, hands folded in her lap. “I’ll wait right here.”
3.
The apartment over her parent’s garage was separate enough for Annabelle to not feel like a total loser in bringing Debbie back to it to change. Debbie wandered up and down the wood paneling walls covered with posters from punk bands as though she were in a fine art gallery while Annabelle quickly changed in the bathroom.
“Do you want to go see the pumpkins?” Debbie called to her from the bedroom.
“Um…sure,” Annabelle replied as she pulled up the fishnets. She didn’t know anyone under the age of fifty who was actually interes
ted in the displays of pumpkins at the harvest festival, but Debbie was so obviously on another plane of alternative that Annabelle had to assume there was some anti-establishment angle to the outing she simply wasn’t cool enough to get.
Annabelle emerged from the bathroom in her new vintage collage of an outfit, walking on pins and needles until she heard what Debbie thought of it. Debbie’s reaction flooded across her face in a rapid-fire emotion gun. She finally settled on confusion, although Annabelle thought she saw amusement, anger, and maybe even a little lust—the last one might have been wishful thinking.
“You hate it,” Annabelle said. She loathed herself for falling back on the stereotypical female defense mechanism of self-recrimination.
“No, I just…do you normally dress like that?”
“No,” Annabelle admitted with a huff. “You made it look so cool, so much like you didn’t care what the world said about fashion, that I just thought I’d give it a try.”
“I’d like to get to know you, and I can’t do that if you’re just mirroring me, you big goof,” Debbie said with her beauty queen smile that still seemed familiar to Annabelle. “Now go back to your closet and come up with something that will really razz my berries.”
Annabelle could glean from the context what razzing berries meant, but she didn’t really feel like putting in a ton more effort after her initial attempt had been shot down. She came back out in blue jeans, a zip-up red hoodie, and matching converse. Strangely, the mundane outfit seemed to razz Debbie’s berries, which made Annabelle question her interpretation of the saying. She linked arms with Annabelle and they went off walking through the chilly suburban night to hopefully catch the harvest festival’s gates before they shut.
The fairgrounds were well past closed when they finally strolled up at 11 PM. Debbie seemed so disappointed by the closed gates and darkened lights that Annabelle half expected her to call off the whole night and go home.
“I don’t know why I remember it staying open all night,” Debbie said as she stared at the sign that indicated the grounds closed at 10 PM. “Funny how our memories of things don’t quite match the things themselves. Total foggin’ in the noggin’.”
“Yeah, I get that.” The funny thing was, Annabelle really did understand. She’d made a concerted effort to seek out things she’d loved about the speck of a town in rural Vermont since graduation in hopes of finding some nostalgia to hold onto until she could make her escape to wherever—probably New York. But it never quite went the way she thought it would. The carnival at the Elk’s Lodge was a bust. The 4th of July parade disappointed. And the rides at the county fair couldn’t hold a candle to Six Flags or even Disney World. She and Debbie locked eyes and something passed between them on an emotional, wordless level, a shared misery of some kind; at least, that’s what Annabelle thought happened. She seized the moment, stepped across the space separating them, and scooped Debbie’s face in her hands to kiss her with awkward fervor. Debbie kissed back, tilting her head ever so slightly up to take a more demure role. Annabelle pulled away first, not entirely sure why she thought kissing a girl was something she should do or if it even meant anything when girls kissed. It sure didn’t seem to on reality TV or late night commercials. The experience was so different from the lone kiss with a boy that she’d had at a boy/girl party freshman year. Debbie’s lips were softer, smoother, and cooler than the chapped lips of the random freshman boy she’d had to kiss during spin the bottle. Kissing a girl was decadent by comparison.
“That was probably over the line,” Annabelle said.
“You’re a total dolly,” Debbie said with a little giggle. “Why wouldn’t I want you to kiss me?”
“So you probably kiss a lot of girls…”
“Not as many as I’d like,” Debbie said with a surprisingly genuine smirk. “Listen, for freams like us, the world can’t always understand what flips our lid, but that doesn’t mean what we do is meaningless.”
“Freams?”
“Outsiders,” Debbie explained. “The rules say girls go with boys. Being girls who like girls makes us freams.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Annabelle said. “Lesbianism and drunken bisexuality is pretty commonplace.”
“It is? That’s just tops! Here’s hoping it stays that way.” Debbie grabbed Annabelle by the back of the neck, pulled her in for another kiss, this time leaning into the act with the force of her tongue and an exploratory hand slipping inside the front of Annabelle’s hoodie.
4.
Annabelle and Debbie went back to the garage apartment. They cuddled on the old pullout couch, watching the Nick at Nite network, with Annabelle resting her head in Debbie’s lap while Debbie played with her hair. Annabelle wasn’t sure if this was what lesbianism entailed, but if it was, she was all in. She began to drift off to the sound of black and white reruns and the soft, cool fingers stroking her hair. A few snippets of the television show, she wasn’t sure which one, managed to filter through and she heard a lot of the slang in it that Debbie used. There wasn’t anything particularly alarming about the realization in her dozing state; if Debbie took her lingo from TV Land that made her even cooler as far as Annabelle was concerned. Still, the Gidget mannerisms didn’t appear to be affected—it was all too polished not to be primary nature.
As she slipped closer and closer to genuine sleep, Annabelle thought she heard Debbie discussing something with someone else in the room. The discussion was turning toward an argument, although Annabelle couldn’t pull herself from sleep enough to discern why. Her limbs were incredibly heavy, her eyelids almost impossible to pry open, and Debbie was still stroking her hair in such a relaxing fashion that the best Annabelle could manage to deduce in her semiconscious state was that there was a dark figure in a shadow in the corner of the room where there shouldn’t have been a shadow and Debbie was arguing with it. A shudder ran up Annabelle’s spine, although she still couldn’t drag herself from sleep.
“I can’t do that to her,” was the last thing Annabelle heard Debbie say before she fully succumbed to sleep.
5.
Annabelle awoke alone the following morning with no memory of when Debbie left. A faded newspaper clipping sat on the other pillow, yellowed with age, and on the verge of disintegration. Annabelle carefully lifted the scrap. It was intentionally cut in such a way that left the date of the paper’s publication along the top edge: August 31st, 1955.
The newspaper story stated the search for two local teens, Deborah Poole and Philip Cox, was called off after two weeks. Their disappearance was blamed on a drifter who was last seen in Vigil’s Wood although the police were unable to locate the man for questioning. A grainy picture of the couple in front of a Ferris wheel at the county fair was believed to be the last photograph of them alive. Annabelle squinted at the picture. When that didn’t disprove the likeness, she retrieved the hobby magnifying glass from her desk for a closer look. Enough doubt remained in the complete implausibility of it, but Annabelle was nearly certain the girl in the photograph was Debbie.
Annabelle walked through the rest of her day in something of a fog. She didn’t have much experience with young love, or any experience really when it came to relationships, but she was fairly certain she was falling in love with Debbie. Still, she didn’t have Debbie’s phone number, didn’t know where she lived, hadn’t even asked what her last name was yet, and couldn’t figure out what the hell the newspaper clipping meant; she knew what she felt though, and she thought it was love.
Work crawled by while she waited for Debbie. They hadn’t departed with any sort of plan to meet up again, but Annabelle felt it was fated. In the waning parts of dusk, Annabelle stood at the enormous picture windows of Baskin Robbins, staring out across the parking lot, watching the bare-limbed oaks of Vigil’s Grove gently sway in a light autumn wind. The grove was once a true forest, or so Annabelle’s grandmother was fond of saying. The encroachment of farmland, which then gave way to suburban sprawl, had whittled the
once legendary forest into a few dozen acres of slowly shrinking wilderness. Try as Annabelle’s grandmother might, she couldn’t seem to get her granddaughter to care.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 13