Alexander sighs. “I don’t care who she was, Jason.”
“I know,” Jay snaps. “But I do, so don’t be a dick.” He grabs the diamond locket up off the velvet cloth. “I’m giving this back to her sister.”
“That’s worth a lot of money,” Alexander reminds him, tone cold.
“It’s worth more to Ashley,” Jay answers, and lets the door slam behind him as he leaves.
~
He catches the bus to the hospital, grateful for the mayhem and waiting of the emergency department. There’s a couple of headache tablets still in the blister pack in his pocket, and Jay pops them out of their foil and into his palm. Holding them in the curl of his hand, he goes up to the reception desk.
“I was told I could get a Ziploc baggie here, to put these in? I’m supposed to split the dose up,” he says, giving a friendly smile, holding out his hand with the pills in it. The nurse on duty hands a baggie over, smiling back, and Jay slips the pills into the bag. “Could I get an admissions form, too? Thanks.”
The clipboard is shiny red plastic and the ballpoint tied to it is a little chewed at the end. Jay goes back outside into the driveway outside the emergency room and sits at the bus stop. He takes the pills back out of the baggie and tosses them aside, slipping the locket into the plastic pocket carefully. Then he puts down Jenna’s name at the top of the admissions sheet and a bunch of details about her—eye color, hair, sex. On the dotted lines where patients are meant to list any existing medical conditions, Jay scrawls “Personal Effects: One Locket”, and strikes the pre-printed list of ailments out with a decisive dash of his pen. If something looks deliberate and official enough, it hardly ever gets questioned. He clips the top of the baggie to the board on top of the form, and goes around to the main entrance of the hospital.
The morgue is on the upper basement level and the corridor is bright and cool as Jay steps out of the elevator. Ashley is sitting against the wall beside the coroner’s office, down to the left, her face red and damp.
“If you’re looking for the Chamberlains, my parents are in there,” she says, pointing at the wide double-door which segments the hallway to the right of the elevators. Her voice is dull and slow, and she doesn’t look up at Jay. “I’ve never seen a dead body before. She looks like a fucking photograph.”
“I’m from property collection upstairs,” Jay says in the soft, impersonal voice doctors and nurses use with the bereaved. “Can you sign for this?”
Ashley glances at the locket clipped to the re-purposed form, then gives a nod. She scrawls her name across the signature line of the form, not really seeing it, and takes the baggie when Jay hands it to her. Jay straightens, takes the clipboard back, and goes back to the elevators.
As he steps inside and presses the button for the ground level, he looks back at her one last time. She has her head bent forward, red hair a curtain obscuring her face as she clips the necklace around her throat.
Jay leaves the clipboard on the floor by the main doorway, and throws the crumpled signature form in the trash can near the bus stop. It isn’t even midnight yet.
BETTE
On Monday, after detention, Bette goes home, gets changed out of her uniform so that it doesn’t stink too bad for Tuesday and she can procrastinate doing laundry for just a little bit longer, and heads around to Rose and Tommy’s.
She climbs up the tree and in through Tommy’s window, because she’s feeling energetic and those thorns down near the basement window have done more than their fair share of damage to her legs recently. Tommy’s not in his room, though his schoolbag is so he’s probably around somewhere. Tommy carries all kinds of weird non-school stuff in his bag. For a while there Bette and Rose thought he was secretly dealing drugs, but then when they confronted him he explained that no, actually it was just downloaded stuff off the internet—movies and TV shows that weren’t easy to get on DVD, or were too expensive, and comics and albums and stuff. Tommy can find pretty much anything on the internet.
He always has his bag with him when he goes out, in case someone’s looking for some illicit HBO or something while he’s hanging, so if his bag’s in his room it probably means he is too.
Bette looks around at the posters on the walls and the junk on everything else, and feels a twist in her stomach that’s almost like nostalgia or regret, like she’s already missing this dumb teenage-boy room even though she’s right there in it. The feeling’s probably just because it’s been a while since she’s been in here, now that they’ve got Rose’s basement to do most of their time-spending in. The tiny bit of unfamiliarity that the room now carries is enough to make Bette realize that someday they’re all going to be not-teenagers, adults, with other rooms and other interests. Someday Tommy won’t want posters of bands he got out of magazines pinned up on his closet doors and shit like that.
Bette leaves Tommy’s room with a final glance behind her and clatters down the stairs. Rose and Tommy’s mom is home from her shift at the salon, still smelling like sprays and conditioners and gels and that weird smell that too much blow drying leaves on a person. She’s watching TV in the living room with an iced tea beside her, and Bette is willing to put money on the tea being the Long Island kind. Rose and Tommy’s mom gets worn out at her job, and likes to chill out when she gets home. Not like Bette’s mom, who doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the phrase ‘chill out’.
“We have a front door right there, you know,” Rose and Tommy’s mom says, flicking channels with the remote.
“Didn’t want to make you get up,” Bette replies. Rose and Tommy’s mom rolls her eyes.
“You kids, you’re gonna be the death of me, I know it more every day. How’ve you been, kiddo?”
“All right. Rose and Tom downstairs?”
Rose and Tommy’s mom nods, taking another sip of her drink. “Rosie’s working on a new painting. See if you can get them to decide on what they want for dinner, huh? They just shrug or say ‘dunno’ when I ask them. I don’t know how any of you manage to pass English with vocabularies like that, I swear. All you ever say is ‘dunno’.”
“But it expresses everything we want to say so eloquently,” Bette replies, grinning. “I’ll ask ‘em.”
Down in the basement, Rose is doing planning sketches for a painting, and refuses to let Bette see.
“No, no. This one’s not ready to share yet. You know how I get about that. But, oh! I know what you can look at!” Rose pulls a loose sheet out of the cardboard pocket on the inside of the sketchbook cover. “I’ve been scribbling down lyrics ideas, and so’s Tommy. Give it a shot, and then pass it along to Jay after you’re done I guess.”
Bette nods. “Okay. I’m pretty shitty at poetry, though. Just warning you.”
Rose rolls her eyes. “It’s not poetry, it’s lyrics. Half the most important songs of the last century had totally dumbass lyrics anyway. It’s not make or break for our future careers.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Bette says, sighing. Rose pokes at her thigh with the tip of one sneaker.
“What’s up?”
“It’s dumb. Don’t worry.”
“I am the master at dumb problems. Spill.”
Bette shrugs, curling up against the sofa-end of the folded out bed and hugging her knees. “You know how I was reading Mary Shelley’s diaries, right? It’s got letters she wrote in it too, and there’s one… she was just a teenager, not much older than us, and she’d just had her first baby a couple of weeks ago, and then it died in its sleep. She wrote to her friend and asked her friend to come stay with her, and the letter ends with ‘I am no longer a mother now’. That’s just… fuck. That’s so fucking sad.” She scrubs at her eyes, hoping Rose didn’t notice the stinging tears welling up. “It’s just so bare and simple and there’s so much heartbreak behind it. I don’t know how people cope with a world that has tragedy that naked in it. It makes me think of that thing Ernest Hemmingway said, about how he could tell a story in six words: For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.”
>
Rose sits beside her and gathers her in a hug, squeezing as Bette blinks away the threat of tears and then just holding on. “It’s okay. Shh. It’s okay. There’s good stuff in the world, too.”
“It’s hard to remember that, sometimes,” Bette says quietly. She can feel the pulse in Rose’s throat against her cheek. The razor-scratch is closed and almost healed but Bette can imagine easily how the skin would split anew under the pressure of her teeth, even though they’re just dull human blunt teeth. And then, just underneath that skin, the blood…
Bette pulls back from the hug, the smile she forces onto her face feeling thin and false. “I’m. I’m thinking of going back to the warehouse. Want to come?”
Rose shakes her head. “I want to work on this.” She gestures to her sketchbook. “I just had an idea. Do you mind?”
Bette does mind. Right now she minds everything. Everything in the whole world is wrong.
She shakes her head. “No, that’s fine.”
~
And so Bette, without Rose, watches her first vampire hunt from a rooftop in the Fulton River District. She feels like a character in a superhero comic. She’s doing her best not to think about how poorly young women usually fare in superhero comics.
Will has his phone, and a travel-sized first aid kit, and two hand-held Tasers—with some modifications obvious on their small black handles, in the cracking arcs of electricity which whip in wide arcs when he flicks them on to test. He has a pistol, too, a little snub-nosed gang piece which Bette is more than a little awed by.
“I hate it,” Will says, shoving it back in his pocket. “I only agreed to carry it because I wanted Lily to have one, and she demanded I get one as well. So don’t get all fetishy, okay? It’s a gross, messy, violent tool I use for gross, messy, violent jobs.”
“You forgot stylish,” Bette replies lightly, smiling. Will glares.
“You’re such a teenager.”
“Yeah, well, you’re such a vigilante.”
The insult makes Will snort, amused. “Yeah, whatever.” He pulls his phone out, punches a few buttons, and holds it to his ear. “Let’s do a roach trap, ‘kay? No, let Anna, your ankle’s still weak after… don’t whine, it makes you sound like a brat.”
Will snaps the phone shut and gestures to the edge of the roof. “Okay, show time. You’re not scared of heights, right?”
“Little late for that,” Bette points out. “I’m not, since you’re obviously so concerned.”
She leans over the cement rail bordering the roof, down at the narrow space of fire escapes and garbage and hubcaps and grime. Lily and Anna come into view from the wider road at one end, the other exit blocked off by the high wall of a canning factory.
Lily blends off into the shadows on one side, too directly below where Bette and Will stand for them to be able to see her at all.
Anna hoists herself up on the lid of a trash can until she can grab at the lowest rung of one of the fire escape ladders, then scrambles up onto the first level of the narrow metal staircase.
“There are different… gangs, I guess. Of vampires,” Will tells Bette as they watch his friends below. “We’re going after Scrabblers tonight. There are more of them than the rest put together, but luckily they’re the easiest to kill and the easiest to spot. They’re more like zombies. They don’t disguise themselves among people, like most of the other gangs.”
“It all sounds like Vampire: the Masquerade or something,” Bette remarks. She and Rose used to be into all kinds of role-playing games a few years back, before they were old enough to go out to see music very much.
Will snorts. “More like Jets and Sharks.” He hits her on the arm, points down, and says “Show time.”
Anna’s got one arm, bare to the elbow, held out over the air beside the fire escape. Across the pale of her skin, on the outside of her forearm, is a long shallow cut.
The comparison to zombies made Bette expect that the vampires would be slow and shambling, but they lope together in a quick-moving group, fifteen or seventeen moving in a loose clump down the alley toward the smell of blood. They look just like the ones that attacked her and Rose.
Lily steps in behind the group, near the lip of the small space, and shoves over two of the trash cans to block most of the exit off. A bedraggled cat darts out of one and yowls, running off to find a safer and more peaceful place to scavenge.
At the sound of the falling cans, several of the vampires turn and run at Lily. She lets out a whoop, laughing and violent, and meets them halfway in a clash of hooked fingers and brawling punches.
The rest of the gang are gathered below Anna’s high spot, snapping and hissing and leaping up in their futile efforts to reach her. She pulls a small weapon out of the back of her waistband, a curved blade set perpendicular in its handle, like a small-scaled scythe, and swings one knee over the fire escape’s rusted guardrail.
“She’s not —” Bette manages to say, appalled, before Anna does, launching herself down into the thick of the pack below, which promptly closes over her, swallowing her from view. “Oh my god.”
Will’s eyes are darting back and forth between his two agents, Lily’s crude street brawl of deep hacking cuts and the thick of creatures which the still-unseen Anna is reaping her way out of. Bette can’t remember ever seeing anything so horrible, or so thrilling.
It takes a long time, but eventually all the vampires are dead. Anna and Lily grab each other and spin around and around, the movement not nearly sedate enough to be mistaken for anything like a hug. Then they begin to stack the corpses in a heap against the wall, heaving what they can lift and dragging what they can’t.
One match, thrown by Lily, makes the pile flare up quickly. The smoke is acrid, and makes Bette’s eyes water when it rises up to where she stands.
“They burn fast,” Will explains.
JAY
It’s not that Jay makes a resolution to himself to cut off all communication with the vampires, it just turns out that way. For two days he goes back to his normal life, or whatever normal is and was for him. Michelle and Tommy don’t give him a hard time about how absent he’s been from their usual trio, and they click back to the old rhythms without pause.
That’s nice. It’s… no, it’s more than nice. Nice is a colorless word for something Jay now realizes he prizes quite highly. The way Tommy and Michelle never demand anything from him but that he live according to his own terms is, above all else, reassuring. For all that Jay might like to pretend that he’s a tough, independent kind of guy, older than his years, the truth is that he’s still a human underneath that, and sometimes humans need the comfort of security, of friends who will forgive them for their failings.
Jay shakes his head and smiles to himself as he changes out of his school uniform and into his pajamas. It’s late, well past even the late sunset of the elongated summer, and he’s been at the mall all afternoon with Michelle and some of her other friends, hanging out in the food court and the arcade. Tommy spent the afternoon with his sister and Bette, but he and Jay exchanged phone messages the whole time, planning to get together soon for another band practice.
It’s all dumb, small, ordinary stuff. School and friends and band. Jenna would probably think it was ultra-lame that Jay’s retreated into all this in response to her death. He misses her a lot, and even more than he misses her he misses the potential of all the things that might have happened, her weird day-dreams about the glossy, shallow future she wanted, and perhaps more stolen kisses in another cloakroom at another party, and even just future conversations they might of had and never will now. He’s mourning all of those things, as well as his friend. And Jay has always hated mourning.
His computer has sat, untouched, since the last time they talked on the webcam. He should probably clean out his inbox of the usual spam that accumulates, at least. He’s on the mailing list for way too many bands, and so there’s always alerts about secret shows and music videos looking for extras and a bunch of other n
ormal, boring, human stuff that he could start going along to again, if he wants.
There’s an email from Timothy, and that’s all it takes to rip the fragile peace of the last two days into flimsy shreds. Jay feels almost angry at the contact, of having the short monotony of calm disrupted, even as his heart kicks up to a faster beat in excitement and he opens the message. He doesn’t want to be so excited and happy and energized by the contact, but it’s not like he gets a choice about what he wants to care most about in the world. If he could choose, he might choose the normal stuff, and that would be such a calm, dull life.
∞
how come your phone’s on voicemail? you’re not responding to any of my texts either. :( alexander wants to find a way to show you that he feels bad for upsetting you but you have to tell him HOW you want him to show you. i said he should buy you a FERRARI hehe that would be awesome wouldn’t it? we could go on a midnight road trip across the country that would rule so hard.
please don’t shun us it will never happen again, blake says your whole school is going to be under official protection now. nobody will hurt any of the students or they’ll have to answer to us. that’s something, right?
please write back.
The letter’s already a day old. Timothy hasn’t written again.
Jay sighs and scrubs his face with his hands. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say. He clicks ‘reply’ and puts his fingers to the keys, letting impulse guide him in his response.
∞
Timothy—I’m not avoiding you, I promise. I’ve just been busy with school and all that stuff. We’ll hang soon, okay? Jay
Jay feels like a total jerk for every word, because they’re jerk words and he does like Timothy, he likes all three of them, likes them in ways that are utterly unlike his feelings for Tommy and Michelle but just as true, just as strong. Timothy deserves better than a short dumb letter like that.
Still, it’s all Jay can offer until he sorts himself out inside his head, so he clicks ‘send’ and shuts the computer, climbing into bed and waiting a long, long time for sleep to come.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 10