The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

That was okay; everybody pushed their kids. Josh wasn’t the only one taking extra science, math, and creative writing electives. In fact, he was doing pretty well. He even liked the writing work. The teacher was giving him A minuses and B pluses, and he was really getting into it.

  Then he broke his leg. And then Steve Bowlin’s crazy dog bit him, two surgeries’ worth. Then he got mono (better than getting rabies, ha ha). A whole parade of pain. No wonder he messed up on his SATs.

  His father said, “Josh, you should hear this from me first: If you had major sciences talent, we’d have seen it by now.”

  His mom said, “Okay, you’re not the next Richard Feynman or Tom Wolfe—so what? You’ve got more creativity in your little finger than that whole high school put together!”

  So, on to after-school classes at the Community Arts Center: oils, clay, watercolor, printmaking, even a “fiber arts” class that (despite strong encouragement from the instructor) he bailed on early. The retards at school were already spreading a rumor that he was gay. He eased out of team sports around that time, too. You do not want to be the weediest guy on the field with a bunch of Transformers who think (or pretend to think, just for the fun of it) that a guy who does any kind of art must be queer.

  The worst, though, was when the portfolio of his best drawings didn’t get him into the Art Institute Advanced Placement program. Probably he shouldn’t have included those comic book pages he’d been so proud of. So he wasn’t good enough; but that was what art school was for, wasn’t it? To help you do it better.

  His parents said, “Some creative people are late bloomers.” They smiled encouragingly, but disappointment hung over them like those little black rain clouds that float above sad cartoon characters. Josh got depressed, too. He quit drawing, writing, even hanging out in the local museum (a small collection, but they had two awesome Basquiats and a set of spectacular watercolors by a local guy—he could see these things in his mind anyway, they were that good).

  He shut himself off as much as he could, using his iPod to enclose himself in a shield of sound: Coldplay, a couple of rappers, some older groups like the Clash. And the Decemberists, at the top of his list since he had heard them in a live concert and had been blown away.

  Then at the farmer’s market one Saturday he heard a band performing and stopped to listen.

  They were heading for a music festival in Colorado, according to the cardboard sign propped up in an open guitar case: a sturdy guy on a camp stool with one drum and a light, easy beat; a skinny, capering guitarist who wore a T-shirt on his head like a jester’s cap and bells; a low-slung blonde who padded around with her eyes half closed, fiddling the sweetest riffs Josh had ever heard; and a square-shouldered girl with a voice like a trumpet, belting out off beat love songs and political ballads without ever needing to pause for breath.

  They were too cool to talk to—in their twenties, playing barefoot on the grass for gas money—but he stayed until they started to repeat themselves. Their songs were good—quirky, catchy, wry, sad, the works. Okay, they were not Danger Mouse or the Decemberists. But they were surely what those groups had been when they started out: talented friends who went out to play whatever they could to whoever would listen, learning how to make great songs.

  That was what he needed to do. That was the life he wanted.

  So when the class play, an original musical, needed more songs, he volunteered to help. His reward was to be assigned to write two songs with Annie Frye. Writing verses (what was he thinking? Now he was really going to be killed in the boys’ bathroom)—with Freaky Frye!

  But Annie was fun to work with, and lyrics for her tunes came surprisingly easily. Didn’t that mean something?

  Annie introduced him to some seniors she knew who played gigs around town for beer money. They called themselves the Mister Wrongs, and they needed a writer (obviously). He began spending time with them, rehearsing in Brandon White’s garage. Annie had a fight with the drummer and walked out. Josh stayed, not just writing songs but singing them. His voice was getting better. They said if he could grow some decent stubble, he might make himself into an acceptable front man.

  He had two big problems. One, his mother thought pop music was stupid and destroyed your hearing, so for the first time she was carping about what he was doing instead of cheering him on.

  Two, he was so far behind! He couldn’t seem to get the hang of reading music. The only instrument he could play was a Casio keyboard (secondhand from Ivan’s). He existed, musically speaking, in a whole other galaxy from the Decemberists and their peers.

  But Brandon’s group liked his lyrics, and sometimes his words and their music did awesome things together. Brandon’s girl Betts knew some people in Portland. They talked about heading up there to do a demo tape. Things were looking good.

  Then Betts’s parents moved across the river, and Brandon’s house was repossessed after his whole family snuck away overnight. The others drifted away, and it was all over.

  Josh holed up in his room, working on songs about wishing he was dead. He told his parents that he wasn’t going back for senior year.

  After the inevitable meltdown, his mom got him the summer job at Ivan’s mall, no ifs, ands, or buts. Obviously his parents hoped that a microscopic paycheck for grunt work in “the real world” plus some “time to think things over” would change his decision.

  As if! All he wanted was to get the hell out of Dodge and go someplace he could find new musicians to work with, someplace with a real music scene that went beyond country whining, salsa, and bad rock. He needed a fresh start, in Portland or Seattle—someplace. Once he got there, his nowhere origins wouldn’t be a problem. Colin Meloy was from Montana.

  Basically, though, what he really wanted was for the world to stop for a while so he could make a really good musician of himself. He needed to make up all the time he’d wasted on science and arts.

  The vampires’ arrival, of course, changed everything.

  The first-look sale of old Mrs. Ledley’s estate ran till eleven p.m. on a Friday night. Josh was posted in a back booth, with orders to keep his eyes open. The crowd was mostly dealers, but you couldn’t be too careful in a huge warehouse space broken up into forty-five different dealers’ booths and four aisles.

  Tired from schlepping furniture and boxes all day for Ivan’s renters (who all had bad backs from years of schlepping furniture and boxes), he sat at an old oak desk in booth forty-one (Victoriana, especially toys and kids’ furniture), doodling on a sketch pad. He’d have worked on song lyrics (“The day flies past my dreaming eyes . . . ”), but not with Sinatra blatting “My Way” from a booth up front that sold scratchy old long plays.

  Hearing a little tick, tick sound close by, he glanced up.

  A woman in a green linen suit stood across the aisle, tapping a pencil against her front teeth and studying the display in a glass-fronted cabinet. Josh sketched fast. She might work as a goth-flavored Madonna, being pointy faced and olive skinned with thick, dark hair.

  Next time he looked, he met a laserlike stare. Her eyes, crow footed at the outer corners, were shadowed in the same shade of parakeet blue as the polish on her nails (good-bye, Madonna).

  He closed his pad and asked if she wanted to see anything from the locked cases.

  “Have you got any furs?” she said. Her English had a foreign tinge. “Whole fox skins, to wear around the neck in winter?”

  He shook his head. “Some came in with the estate, but they’ve already gone to a vintage clothing store.”

  She sniffed. “Then show me what you’re drawing.”

  He meant to refuse but found himself handing over his pad anyway.

  She flipped pages. “Jesus and sheep? Are you Catholic?”

  “You can always sell a religious picture in here sooner or later,” he said, folding his arms defensively. “Minimum wage sucks.”

  “This isn’t bad,” she said, tapping the top sketch, “but I would stay in school if I were you.” What was
she expecting, Michaelangelo?

  “I’m dropping out.” Not that it was any of her business.

  “Then this is a good place for you,” she said, handing back the pad. “One can always make a living in antiques.”

  “It’s just a summer job,” he mumbled. “I’m a musician, actually.”

  “Oh? What’s your instrument?”

  “Keyboards. But I’m more of a songwriter.” She had moved closer. Her perfume was making his eyes water.

  “Can you sing something you’ve written? My name is Odette Delauney; I know a lot of people. Maybe I can put you in touch, ah . . . ?”

  “Josh,” he muttered, “and I’m a songwriter.” He was not about to sing anything at a building-sized party of old farts zoned out on—Stevie Wonder, now. He avoided mentioning two blurry video clips, made with Brandon and Betts, on YouTube. He had to remember to take the stupid things down.

  Odette Delauney’s beady stare was making him feel strange. His feet kept inching his chair backward, but his head wanted to lean closer to her.

  She swiveled suddenly on her high heels and pointed at a toy display: “If the donkey works, I’ll take him.” Then she was walking away, carrying a wind-up tin donkey that sat back on its haunches with a pair of little cymbals between its front hooves.

  The ambient sound of the wide dealer space roared in as if Josh had suddenly yanked out a pair of earbuds: conversation, Julie Andrews climbing every mountain, shuffling footsteps.

  Odette Delauney? Was she somebody? Had he just blown a big chance?

  Too late; she was gone.

  Josh stayed late to sweep up and turn out the lights. It was after midnight. His gray Civic was the only car left in the lot.

  By the glow of the floodlight outside, he saw that a plump, dark-skinned girl was sitting on the sagging slat bench by the front door. She had a mass of dreadlocks, shiny piercings in an ear plugged with a white bud, and a cigarette in her hand. Wearing jeans, a tank top, and pink plastic sandals with little daisies on the toe straps, she looked about fourteen.

  “Hey,” she said as he locked the front door behind him, “think I could get a job here? I’ve got expenses, and my aunt is so stingy.”

  “But she lets you stay out late and smoke weed,” he said.

  She snorted derisively and took a puff. Ivan would disapprove of her on so many levels. The dealers and buyers at the mall—mostly old, white, and from the boondocks—didn’t run, as Ivan said, in progressive circles (har har, progressive circles, get it?).

  “Is working here as boring as it looks?” she asked.

  “Worse.” He gestured at her iPod. “So, who are you listening to?”

  “Amy Winehouse.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’d you expect? The Jonas Brothers?”

  Josh thought fast. “M.I.A.”

  “ ‘Jai Ho,’ ” she drawled, but her expression relaxed. “You’re Josh? My auntie Odette met you inside.”

  “She bought a musical toy, right? Funny, she sure didn’t strike me as the type for that kind of thing.”

  “She’ll have a buyer for it somewhere. Those old animal-band sets are hot right now.”

  Then auntie was just another antiques dealer, not a record producer’s best pal, surprise surprise.

  “So—are you adopted?” he said.

  Studying him with narrowed eyes, the girl blew another slow plume of smoke. “My Main Line mom ran off with a bass player from Chicago. The wheels came off and they both split and left me with a neighbor. I call her auntie to keep things simple. I guess ‘adopted’ works. You a musician?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and that was enough about that. He didn’t want to come off as some dumb-ass poser. “You collect stuff, too, like your aunt?”

  “Sure,” she said, shifting aside on the bench. “Sit down—I’ll show you what I found tonight.”

  He had barely touched butt to bench when she grabbed him with steely arms, jammed her face down the neckline of his T-shirt, and bit him. His yell pinched down to nothing in seconds. Muffled panic surged through him as he slumped, unable to move or shout for help, staring over her head at the neon bar sign across the avenue.

  Am I dying?

  “That’s enough, Crystal.”

  The sucking sounds from under his chin stopped. Someone else took the girl’s place. He knew that perfume. The woman’s lips felt tight and cool, like the skin of a ripe nectarine pressed to his throat. . . .

  He came to sitting behind the wheel of the Civic with a stinging sensation in his chest and a headache. “Ow, shit, what happened?”

  Crystal said, right beside his ear, “Odette wants to talk to you.”

  It all came rushing back, paralyzing him again with sweaty horror.

  “Josh,” said Odette Delauney from the backseat. “I’m only in your town for a little while, buying antiques. I need an insider here to help me find the kinds of items I want and then to make sure I get them. Tonight I’ll just take a quick look at the storage area. If I pick something out, you show it to your employer tomorrow—”

  “Cousin,” Josh croaked. “My cousin Ivan owns the place.”

  “Show it to your cousin Ivan and tell him you have a buyer for it. I’ll come in the evening and make the purchase.”

  Something weird as hell had just gone down between him and these two, but what, exactly? Odette’s calm tone made it impossible to ask directly without sounding like a lunatic.

  Please go away, he prayed.

  “You could just take stuff,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t say anything.”

  “Of course not,” Odette sniffed. “But I don’t steal. And I’m not asking you to steal for me, either.”

  Gee, thanks. His trembling fingers found a swelling, hot and pulpy wet, low on his throat. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “What’ll I tell my parents about this?”

  “Nothing,” Odette said. “One of us will lick the wounds closed. Our saliva heals where we bite.”

  Agh, vampire spit! His teeth began to chatter. “Are you gonna turn me into a—like you?”

  “With one little bite?” Crystal hooted scornfully. “You wish.”

  “Certainly not,” Odette said, ignoring her. “Do as I say and you have nothing to worry about. Our arrangement will be brief and very much to your advantage. I’ll pay you a commission on every purchase that I make.”

  A giggle burst out of him, ending in a sob. “I’m supposed to work for you? Everybody knows how that comes out—Renfield eats bugs, and then Dracula kills him!”

  “We put the Eye on you,” Crystal said in a smug singsong. “Now you can’t tell anybody about us, so we don’t have to kill you.”

  “Unless,” Odette added, “you say no.”

  Which was how Josh went into business with Odette Delauney and her “niece,” Crystal Dark (a joke; Crystal, it turned out, was an avid fan of fantasy movies).

  It was true: he couldn’t tell anybody. When he tried to talk about the vampires, his brain fuzzed over and didn’t clear again for hours. It was just as well, really. All he needed was for word to get around that Josh Burnham claimed he’d been attacked—and then hired—by two female vampires from out of town.

  Pretending he had found a new band to hang with after work, he told his parents he’d be coming home late some nights. Luckily he was too old to be grounded. His mom put up a fight, but she left hot food in the oven for him on his late nights anyway (which was particularly important now that he was suddenly this major blood donor).

  His father, absorbed in updating a textbook he was coauthor of, said, “No drugs, that’s all I ask.”

  Twice a week after hours, Josh let the vampires in through the loading doors, which were hidden from the street by the bulk of the building. In the windowless back room, they cleared space on the worktable Ivan used for fixing old furniture, and they went through whatever new stock had come in.

  There was always new stuff. Business was booming. Ivan called it the “Antiques Roadshow effect”; that, and the stock market. Pe
ople were desperate to put their money into solid objects, things that they thought would get more valuable no matter what.

  That first week Odette bought: a tortoiseshell and ivory cigarette holder (fifteen dollars), bronze horse-head bookends (twenty-eight dollars), three colored-glass perfume atomizers (thirty dollars), a rooster-silhouette weather vane (twenty-five dollars), and a four-inch-high witch hugging a carved pumpkin, both in molded orange plastic (seven fifty).

  “Your aunt,” Josh said, “has weird taste.”

  Crystal shrugged (this was her favorite gesture). “Everything’s cheap here in flyover country. In real cities, the Quality will pay top dollar for the same stuff, sometimes just to keep some other collector from getting it.”

  By “the Quality,” she meant vampires.

  Josh worked up the nerve to ask Odette, “Who’s the pumpkin-toting witch for?”

  “Some old fool I know in Seattle. We’re not all rich aesthetes, Josh, whatever you may have seen in the movies.”

  “Aesthetes.” That’s how she talked. That was the kind of conversation they had, those nights that the vampires spent pawing through stacks of cartons and crates, flicking roaches aside (there were always roaches, even though Ivan had the whole place sprayed regularly) and deciding what Odette would buy the next day.

  And they would each drink some of Josh’s blood.

  This remained skin-crawlingly horrible, but once they laid the Eye on you, you just accepted whatever they did. Instead of wigging out over it, Josh turned to working obsessively on songs about mysterious night visitors and dangerous girlfriends, with Rasputina, Theatre of Tragedy, and Voltaire playing on his iPod.

  Not that Crystal herself was girlfriend material. She was just a kid, like somebody’s little sister you’d ignore completely (if not for the blood-drinking thing). Anyway, she said she was celibate right now, trying to put an edge back on her appetite for when she took up sex again. True or not (who could tell, with a vampire?), this was way more than Josh wanted to know—which was, of course, exactly why she’d told him.

  Generally, though, he felt strangely upbeat. Grim lyrics poured out of him, which made a kind of sense under the circumstances. Inspiration seemed a fair exchange for a little blood. He wasn’t satisfied with his work, but there were moments. Once in a while he took off on a thrill wave as his words fell together just right and he glimpsed the possibility that he could really do this—he could write songs for people to fly on.