“And it sounds so stupid when we talk about it, so self-indulgent and ridiculous, but I’m no better than him, am I? I’m just another Edgar Allan Poe, forever chasing the chilled Annabel, the lost Lenore. I fall in love with those I would spend forever with, but I never fall in love with anyone who’ll stay forever. I can’t.
“If Artie had been a different man, a man who would have let me save him and turn him into something lasting, then he wouldn’t have been the man I loved. For him to be who he was, it had to end the way it did. And it always ends that way, it always, always ends, and I’m so tired…”
Her eyes are bright and wild, and Bette feels sure that if Gretchen were capable of blushing then her face would be flushed, pink with the same half-mad emotion that makes her voice quiver.
“The critics said that Edgar killed Virginia. Hastened her death, at least. He didn’t give her the tuberculosis, but he didn’t save her as he might have, either. They said he’d done it so he could write his odes to her memory. His lamentations. Do I do that? Do I let them die where I might have kept them if I’d wanted it enough?”
Bette’s blood runs icy. “Gretchen, don’t…”
“You and Rose would be such beautiful vampires, Bette.”
Bette shakes her head, tears welling in her eyes. She tries to pull away but Gretchen holds her still. “Please don’t do this,” Bette whispers. “I don’t want to die. I’m still just a kid.”
“So was I.” Gretchen hangs her head and lets Bette go, but she looks so small and alone that Bette can’t bear to run like she knows she should. “I’m leaving this city. If I stay, I’ll fall in love with you and Rose. I think I have already.” She gives Bette a twisted, rueful smile. “And so I’m going to go. I’ll let you have a life. I can give you that. I could give you so much else, but I think that is most valuable.”
Bette nods. “Thank you,” she replies, her voice a whisper.
Gretchen’s smile softens, becomes resigned and sad. “Goodbye, Bette.” She turns, walking away.
“Wait,” Bette says quietly, knowing she won’t have to raise her voice for Gretchen to hear. “You… I mean. I can’t give you that. I wish I could, but I can’t. I’m going to grow up and make music, like I promised Artie, and start a revolution, like I promised Russ. I have a hell of a lot of life left to live before I’m ready to die. But I… I can give you tonight?” She bites her lip, hoping the offer doesn’t sound as pathetic and lame to Gretchen as it does to Bette’s own ears.
But Gretchen steps back to her side, and takes her hand, and then leans in and kisses Bette gently. If Rose ever hears about this, Bette is so totally a dead woman.
“I’d like that very much,” Gretchen says, and smiles.
~
Bette goes to school the next morning with the ghostly memory of Gretchen’s teeth in her neck making her shiver whenever she thinks of it, and the ghostly taste of Gretchen’s blood on her tongue whenever she swallows. She’s distracted all day, even when Rose and Tommy and Jay come home with her and they all mess around in her garage on instruments. They’ve almost got something approximating a song already, even if it does have totally crazy lyrics.
“They’re about a story a friend told me,” Jay answers, when Tommy asks about the verses that’re in Jay’s looping scrawl. “They went to this little country in Europe where there was this giant golden statue of an egg, and the idea was that someday something beautiful was going to hatch out of it, you see? And my friend was there with his friends and they all thought yeah, whatever, it’s a nice idea but it’s really just a big lump of metal, you know? Metaphors don’t mean anything in the real world.
“And they were out walking in the snow one night, and Alexander—that’s the friend who told me the story—heard this howling, because the wolves were coming back. They’d been wiped out from the area years and years before, but now they were coming back. And that seemed like it meant something, to him. More than the statue, even.”
“Cool,” Rose says, smiling. Bette just shrugs. She’s feeling punchy today. Spoiling for a fight. If she hadn’t been so distracted at school all day, she might’ve been able to get into a brawl with a jock asshole or something, but she didn’t think to and now she’s got no outlet.
Tommy and Rose’s mom calls Tommy’s phone and summons them home for dinner. Jay starts to pack up his stuff, too, and Bette is trying to untangle and wind all the cables and cords but they’re knotted and they just get worse as she tries to pull them apart.
“Hey, calm down,” Jay says, and she realizes she’s been grumbling to herself out loud. He puts a hand on her shoulder and she shrugs it off, feeling furious for no particular reason except that she’s thirsty and cranky and she wishes that people wouldn’t touch her without permission.
“Bette?” Jay looks a little wary of her, and takes a step back.
Before her brain catches up with what her fist’s planning, Bette’s already landed a punch square on Jay’s mouth. His lower lip splits against his teeth, leaving a streak of blood on her knuckles as she pulls her arm back and blinks at him. Jay looks more surprised than hurt.
Bette’s never been some kind of sadistic freak who gets off on fighting or anything, mostly because she usually really hates, loathes, whoever she’s trying to fight with, and she might be fucked up but she’s nowhere near fucked up enough to get turned on by the bullies at school.
Plus, she might be a teenager and all, but she gets in a hell of a lot of fights, and even teenagers aren’t mindlessly, totally, fuck-or-die horny that much of the time. It’d make getting through a normal week pretty tough, not to mention how expensive her condom budget would end up.
The point is, clocking a guy in the jaw for being an asshole doesn’t typically make a bolt of want and need hit Bette in the belly and shoot down, doesn’t make her breath go raggedy and her arms and hands ache. But Jay’s staring back at her, looking just as shocked and wild-eyed as Bette feels, and when he sucks his wounded lower lip into his mouth Bette growls, this weird choked groan noise she had no intention of making, and then she’s grabbing Jay’s stupid poser hair and pulling his head down so she can kiss him hard, rasping her tongue against the tiny cut so she can taste the blood.
She is a creepy, creepy, fucked up freak. So is Jay, apparently, because he’s kissing her back just as hard, one palm grazing against the edge of her breast as he pulls her closer, the other sliding up her arm and over her shoulder to her hair. On the way, his hand brushes over her collar and the bruises underneath and Bette shivers hard, groaning softly against Jay’s mouth.
Bette doesn’t even care if this is a bad idea or if it screws up the band or anything. She just doesn’t, doesn’t care. She breaks the kiss for long enough to take a step back and wrench her shirt up and off. She’s wearing one of her older, kind of scummy-grey sports bras underneath, but she doubts Jay even notices her bra at all with the way his eyes are fixed on her bruises. His cheeks are flushed a hectic red, expression curious and dazed.
“Those look new,” he says. His fingertips reach out to touch the cut and Bette tilts her head, encouraging him.
“They got reopened last night.”
“Oh,” Jay says, and Bette gets the feeling that she could have said anything and he would have reacted in the exact same way. Before she can tell him he’s a jerk who doesn’t pay attention to what people are saying, Jay leans in and swipes his tongue against the bites, and Bette gets another sharp hard jolt of want through her bones.
She manages to get his shirt off, and finds the little dark bruises on his own neck, with little pale fang scars in the middle of them, like makeup from a horror movie.
“Did Remember the Stars save you, too?”
“Huh?” Jay asks, still nuzzling at the soft pulse below Bette’s jaw, his hands roaming over the bare skin of her lower back.
“Were you attacked? Did the hunters save you?” Bette specifies. As wild and unlikely as it is, she can’t help but hope that Jay has met another vampire
like Gretchen. To be able to talk to someone who understands how confusing and crazy something like that is would be a weight off Bette’s heart, but she’s not stupid enough to expect that it’s going to happen.
Jay moves away from her throat and steps back, a strange and almost ashamed expression on his face. “Nobody saved me. I’m, um. Kind of dating one. A vampire, I mean.”
“Oh,” Bette answers absent-mindedly, because apparently sometimes she’s just as vague as him. Then, the words sink in, and she blinks. “Wait, seriously?”
Jay takes another step back, looking around the garage floor for his shirt. “I guess I’d better, um, go.”
“Are you —” Bette starts, words tumbling over themselves in her nervousness and haste. “Are you exclusive? Because my mom isn’t home and there’s condoms up in my room and I think that if I don’t have sex my vagina’s going to explode, which would be a shame because I love my vagina most of the time, but I don’t want some vampire pulling my arms and legs off for molesting their boyfriend.”
Jay looks back at her, not picking up his shirt, and swallows. “No. No, not exclusive.”
Bette breathes out in relief and grabs his hand, leading him toward the door into the house. “Good.”
~
Weekends where Bette’s mom wants them to see family are the absolute shittiest weekends of all the kinds of weekend there can be. These meetings are never on actual occasions, like a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving or anything. They’re just whenever Bette’s mom gets an attack of the guilts for not seeing them and calls everybody and arranges a lunch at Bette’s grandparents’ house.
This is Bette’s mom’s own family, not the people still alive on Bette’s dad’s side, and Bette’s mom has like a zillion sisters and cousins and brothers and sisters-in-law. When Bette was going through a really awful awkward stage when she was thirteen, all of her boy cousins teased her and made her miserable. Now they try to see down her top and ask her if she’s got a guy and that’s all even grosser and stupider and more awful than the teasing was.
Bette’s mom always makes her dress up really nicely for these family things, and that part is very closest to being the shittiest part of the whole thing. Today Bette’s got a light blue sun dress made of linen, printed with darker blue little stars, and it practically starts creasing as soon as she looks at it. On someone else it might be pretty but Bette feels dumb and she knows that Darcy will be able to tell that Bette’s dressed up in a fake version of herself.
Darcy is the worst part of the family days.
“How’s school?” Bette’s grandfather asks as they eat. It’s leg of lamb and Bette’s just eating the vegetables and not making a fuss, because back when she first decided not to eat meat anymore her cousins gave her heaps of shit and her grandparents sniffed and grumbled that kids didn’t know how spoiled and greedy they were, turning their noses up at good food, and Bette’s mom had frowned and looked disappointed. So now Bette just shuts up and eats lots of pumpkin, imagining that it’s the pulpy orange flesh of a grinning, fanged, fiery jack-o-lantern, and that eating it gives her dark demonic powers.
“Good,” Bette answers, wishing that’d be enough of an answer to satisfy them. She knows from experience that it’s not, though, so she searches for something family-friendly and cheerful to say that’s not about detention or getting beat up or freaks leaving dead puppies in the gym. “My friend Rose is in the school musical. I’m doing good in Chemistry, so my teacher wants to put me in this achievement program for high schoolers that the university runs. It’s more homework, but it looks good on college applications.”
Darcy makes a noise that only Bette will think is anything but random and accidental.
Darcy has pumpkin in front of her too, in a little plastic bowl, and she’s spooning little mouthfuls of it to Kristina, the plump dark-haired nine-month-old wriggling on Darcy’s knee. Darcy’s not going to college any time soon, or even going back to high school any time soon. She has a pretty good job as a receptionist at an industrial laundry company, so it’s not like she’s miserable or hopeless or anything. Her life just went a different way to Bette’s.
Bette heard about the laundry job from her aunt Sara, who’s Darcy’s mom. Bette and Darcy don’t talk to each other much anymore, but Bette can remember when they were kids and the only two girls in a generation of boys and they would play dolls together. The stories they told with their dolls were always violent and weird, full of rapes and kidnappings and murders and other fucked up shit. Darcy had always gotten cranky if Bette mentioned something she’d done with Rose and Tommy, so Bette would do her best not to mention them, or to remind Darcy that they were family, and that was always gonna be as important as any other friends Bette had.
Then Bette’s dad got sick and Bette remembers the wake, all of her family dressed up in black and crying and standing around Bette’s house holding uneaten ribbon sandwiches full of disgusting stuff like egg and herb mayo and cucumber puree. Bette had felt so angry about that, that even now that the really awful sick-sad-waiting part was over, and they’d said goodbye and sang hymns and said prayers and everything, everyone was still miserable.
Bette had been so tired of being miserable. She wanted to be able to remember her dad for the good stuff, the way he hugged and how he told stories and the gross things he’d make for dinner if Mom was out in the evening. Bette wanted to have a party and yell and laugh and celebrate how great her Daddy had been and how much she was always going to love him, but instead everyone was still looking just like they had in the church for the funeral.
So Darcy and Bette had snuck upstairs and put on swimming clothes—Bette in the new bathing suit her mom had bought her for the trip they’d taken with Dad to the beach just after the last round of chemo failed, and Darcy in Bette’s older suit because Darcy was skinnier. Then they’d put on lipstick and blush from Bette’s mom’s makeup table, and set up the sprinkler in the front garden of the house, and ran back and forth under the sharp cold spray, yelling and yelping at the shock of the cold on their sun-warm skin.
The grown-ups came outside, drawn by the noise, and Bette had heard some of them muttering about ‘disrespectful children’ and ‘too young to understand death or grieving’, and ‘irresponsible’. Rose and Tommy had come over but Tommy was too sick to get wet like Bette and Darcy were, so Rose and Tommy just stood off to one side like pale big-eyed freaky gothic children from a weird picture book and watched while Darcy and Bette shrieked and screamed and ran around. And if Bette cried, the sprinkler washed away her tears and left her fresh and cool and strong.
But it was after that day that things had started to go shitty. Well, sort of shitty. That was the problem. Some things got better, and so Bette can never work out properly how she feels about all of it in her head. The compensation and insurance Bette and her mom got from Bette’s dad dying turned out to be more than they thought it was going to be, and Bette’s mom decided that a big chunk of it should be used to send Bette to the prep school that Rose and Tommy had their names down for. Even though the school wouldn’t take them until eighth grade, this decision made Bette relieved and happy, because she’d worried all the time about what was gonna happen when they were stuck at different schools, Rose and Tommy at one and Bette at another, and how that was going to ruin everything. Now it wasn’t going to be a problem at all.
Bette and Darcy had never been in line to go to the same high school, because their families lived on totally opposite sides of the city and everything, so Bette had never imagined for a second that these new plans would affect them at all. But it had meant something to Darcy, something bitter and lonely and quiet, and they’d drifted apart and apart and now it’s almost like they’re enemies or something, which is awful and crazy.
The bird tattoo on Bette’s arm—peeling a little, and rough to the touch, and so itchy she wants to amputate the entire limb, oh god seriously—has necessitated a navy cardigan over the linen dress. Her mom doesn’t know abo
ut the ink yet, and it’s going to be bad enough telling her without their entire family there too. Bette fiddles with one of the buttons of the cardigan, staring down at her plate, and tries not to think about Darcy or her dad or anything else until the whole horrible visit is over.
On the drive home Bette stares out the window, distracted, thinking about Darcy’s baby and Bette’s dad being gone and how sad and crazy and complicated ideas about good luck and bad luck actually are. At one point, as they’re waiting at a stoplight, Bette’s mom reaches over and gives Bette’s arm a squeeze and says “I know it’s rough sometimes, baby”.
But if Bette’s mom knows how much Bette hates these family gatherings, why does she always pitch such a drama fit when Bette says she doesn’t want to go?
“Can you drop me off at Rose and Tommy’s?” Bette asks and god, even her voice sounds miserable and tired. Her mom gives her a worried, small smile.
“Sure. You don’t get enough wear out of that dress. It suits you.”
“I feel more comfortable in my normal clothes. They suit me better on the inside,” Bette protests, still sounding to herself like a worn-out and unhappy child. Bette’s mom sighs with a bit of weary frustration of her own, and that makes Bette feel guilty, so she adds “But sure, I’ll wear it out tonight. The dress. I think Remember the Stars are playing. Don’t wait up.”
Bette’s mom shakes her head. “I know better than to try to with you, kid. I consider it a victory if you make it home alive within the week.”
Overcome with a sudden wave of affection for her mother, Bette leans over and gives her a peck on the cheek. “Okay, boss. Come back alive. Got it.”
~
Rose and Tommy are both down in the basement, Rose painting that secret project she isn’t letting Bette see, and Tommy’s getting killed badly on the X-Box.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 16