Sometimes, if they’re in the same city, she teams up with Amanda. Amy is everything that Katherine isn’t, cold and sharp and ruthless. She seems to like the company, though, and Kate doesn’t mind it either. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to, to make plans with, to say goodnight to when the sun comes up and it’s time to sleep.
But they don’t miss each other when they’re apart. From what Kate can tell, from watching Mikhail, missing somebody is part of what makes somebody family. He seems to miss his family even when he’s with them, miss who they used to be in earlier moments. It seems to Kate that love is always meant to have that bittersweet edge to it, when it’s real love. Real love isn’t the easy, obligation-free companion ship that she and Amy slip into when it suits them both and then abandon when either one feels stifled.
When she’s alone—which is most of the time and, Katherine suspects, always will be—she spends her nights reading. She likes old superhero comics from the 1940s, back before every detail of their powers and plans had to be explicable by science and logic. She likes science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s for the same reasons. Trying to make everything make sense limits the boundaries of the imagination.
Sometimes she wishes that being a vampire was stranger and more magical. More like it is in books. It would be inconvenient to be invisible in mirrors, sure, but that’s a trade-off she’d be willing to make in order to be inexplicable. Too much of the world is predictable; Katherine feels that monsters, if nobody else, should at least keep the right to be strange.
But there she is in the mirror each evening as she washes her face, pale and sharp-toothed but not really so different from anyone else. Usually alone, but not often lonely. Mikhail pities her for her solitary nature and she pities him for needing his herd—his pack—as deeply as he does. Amanda doesn’t pity anybody, and Kate isn’t so stupid as to trust any soft feelings of her own to a heart so pitiless.
It’s a sparse web, as far as a person’s connections go. There’s Nicole as well, of course, who always keeps an eye on Kate and Amy from afar and occasionally persuades them to come stay with her. Kate is never sure what impulse of affection or obligation motivates Nicole to those offers of hospitality, and she doesn’t ask. Perhaps it’s part of the vampiric pack instinct that Katherine has failed to inherit, a language of loyalty and kinship that makes no sense to her.
Still, it’s hard to feel like she’s missing out on anything vital, not where there’s so much in the world that she does understand, so many places yet to see and books to read and nights to wander through. As fates go, being a solitary monster seems among the best on offer, and the future feels as limitless and strange as an old pulp novel.
BECAUSE
When she was little and sick, Jenny loved watching the movie ‘Spaceballs’ over and over. She didn’t understand most of the jokes and hadn’t seen half the movies it was parodying, but she still loved it.
One of the lines that always made her giggle the most was the one that the villain says right near the end, about how evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
And then one day Will was doing his homework in the same room as the TV while Jenny was watching it, and when the line came up he gave this sad little laugh that sounded much, much older than he was.
“Most depressing fucking line in any movie ever made, right there,” he said to her, even though their dad had rules about not swearing in the house.
It hadn’t made sense to Jenny, then. It sort of makes sense to her now, in a roll-her-eyes kind of way. A lot of things about her brother make her want to roll her eyes sometimes. Same with Sofie. It isn’t that Jenny doesn’t love them both dearly, just that she thinks they’re both kind of ridiculous lots of the time.
Sometimes she’ll remember the line, and Will’s reaction to it, at the most unexpected moments. Like right now, they’re giving thermos flasks to a kid who looks like he’s been sleeping rough for a little while. He’s probably about sixteen or seventeen, but like Sofie he’s small and young-looking for his age, and he’s skinny and has big brown eyes and basically doesn’t look a single damn thing like eighties comedy superstar Rick Moranis, who’d played the villain in Spaceballs.
But this boy has a wheezy, pained-sounding way of breathing, like the villain had, and so suddenly out of nowhere Jenny’s thinking “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
One of the thermos flasks has chicken soup in it. Will’s friend Lily calls it ‘Jewish penicillin’, which just makes Jenny want to roll her eyes again, because Lily likes to consider herself way more of an asshole than she actually is, and thinks she’s being amusingly insensitive when she says shit like that. Whatever. Jenny’s mother always calls it that too, and Jenny’s mother actually is Jewish, so obviously Lily is going to have to try way harder to say something that’s going to make Jenny bristle.
The other flask has the smoothie drink that Sofie and Will and Lily all use. Jenny wonders if she should start calling it ‘Vampire penicillin’, just to see if it gets a rise out of Lily. But Sofie or Will would probably be hurt if Jenny did that.
There are some old-looking scars on the boy’s wrists, still vivid-red despite their age. Jenny thinks that’s probably one of the saddest parts about how kids like this boy and Sofie stay younger-looking than they are. Being frozen in time means their scars never fade properly.
Ugh, she’s starting to sound like her sad-sack brother.
“I hear this shit’s really disgusting,” the boy grumbles in a mild voice, gesturing at the second flask.
“Methadone’s not known for being awesome either,” Sofie retorts icily. Jenny knows that this is what passes for joking around among kids like this, so she doesn’t intervene and tell them to lighten up, but it still makes her sad.
They leave the boy alone after that, heading off to run errands— even when the world is full of monsters and broken children and various other horrors, Jenny still needs to buy milk and bread and toilet paper. Maybe those small normalcies are even more important, when the rest seems like it’s going to hell. Somebody has to remember to do the ordinary things.
Sofie always wants to buy awful things, like Red Pop soda and those frozen pizzas with hot dogs in the crust. Jenny never knows how to respond to that. What’s the point in telling someone that their eating habits are appalling, when the fact that they’re choosing, buying and eating ordinary human food— however crappy— at all is as close to a miracle as anything Jenny’s ever heard? Why say ‘that soda’s bad for you’ to somebody whose body treats puberty like a pattern interrupt it can’t deal with, whose teeth are more likely to fall out because of descending fangs than because of cavities?
And so shitty fizzy drinks and gross junk food have done to Jenny what nothing, not her parents’ divorce or her mother’s illness or any of the other things she has taken in her stride have ever been able to do: they leave her feeling too sad to know what to do.
Instead she just smiles and adds a bag of frozen mixed vegetables to their basket and makes a joke about warding off scurvy.
Walking back to the train station leads them past the spot where they’d seen the boy earlier. They’re half a block away when Sofie stills mid-stride and clamps a hand on Jenny’s forearm. “Wait.”
Jenny’s eyes aren’t good even by normal standards, let alone the preternatural sharpness that Sofie can lay claim to. But even from here she can see that the two other teens now standing with the boy aren’t human. Vampires don’t move the same way, or even hold themselves the same way when stilled. Humans are omnivores, hunter-gatherers. Vampires are predators.
“I’m not scared of them,” Jenny bristles. It’s true, or at least she’s determined enough about it that it might as well be. Vampires don’t win when they kill you. They win when they stop you living.
As Sofie and Jenny walk closer to the others, steps measured and even and determinedly not any faster than a normal walking pace, Jenny can hear Sofie’s breathing get sharper and faster. L
ike she’s having a panic attack, or like she’s trying not to inhale too deeply.
The vampires are both teenage girls. One of them is somehow vaguely familiar-looking to Jenny, like she’s someone Jenny knew when they were both in pre-school or something stupid like that. She wonders if vampires end up looking like the other ones in their bloodline, if the familiarity she sees is actually similarity, if this girl was turned by one of the vampires Jenny’s met— Cora, maybe.
Maybe this girl just reminds her of Cora because of the ruthless gleam in her eyes, though. The nasty smile she gives them.
The other vampire is crouched on the sidewalk next to the boy, her face buried in the crook of his neck as she sucks greedily at his carotid artery.
The boy’s eyes are half-closed and his mouth is half-open, everything stuck halfway because vampires never let you get anywhere with anything, they leave you stuck and suspended in the middle, in the void, and Jenny feels sick. He’s making little whimpering moans that might be ‘stop, don’t’ or might be ‘don’t stop’, and his skin is grimy and going ashen-pale under the grime and his fingers with their cracked and bitten nails are scrabbling against the cement underneath him.
Sofie’s barely breathing at all, now, and when Jenny glances at her there is a thin ring of white visible all the way around her irises, a wide-eyed animal expression of overstimulation, of fear.
The vampire feeding off the boy raises her own fingernails to her throat and there is a wet, violent sound as she slices the skin open and lets her own blood flow. The boy makes a broken, helpless noise like he’s in pain and buries his face in her stringy, greasy hair, suckling at the wound.
Vampires hold themselves differently. Move differently. They’re predators, and people are their prey. But… when Jenny looks at the pair on the ground (she can’t tear her eyes away, no matter how even she keeps her steps or how tightly she grips Sofie’s hand with her own) she doesn’t see a monster and a victim, she doesn’t see two completely different parts of the food chain. She just sees two grubby, abandoned kids, in faded clothes too big for their malnourished frames, starving and desperate and trying to stay alive.
And suddenly Jenny understands just how wrong that stupid line from Spaceballs has always been.
Evil is the one that’s dumb. Evil is blunt and heavy and indiscriminate, a bully without finesse. Evil is too stupid to see how wasteful and arrogant it is.
And evil can never triumph, if good never concedes defeat.
So, a few steps past the trio, Jenny stops and turns back to face them. “Hey,” she says. Sofie’s hand is gripping hers so hard that Jenny knows there are bruises in her future.
The vampire who’s standing, the one who gave them a nasty smile as they approached, looks confused. “What?” she asks.
“One of those flasks there. It’s smoothie.” Jenny knows the vampire will know just what kind of smoothie she’s talking about. “I guess he won’t want that now.”
“Guess not,” the vampire answers, obviously trying to give another gloating grin but looking even more puzzled by the second.
“Can I have it back, then? Those thermos things aren’t cheap, and what’s inside shouldn’t go to waste.”
The vampire blinks in surprise at the request. “Um. Sure. I guess.”
Jenny extricates her hand from Sofie’s iron grip and steps forward, crouching down and collecting the flask. Neither the second vampire nor the boy pay her any mind at all. Jenny knows she should probably be terrified, but instead she just feels very young and very tired.
“The other one is chicken soup. He might want that. Keep it,” Jenny says as she straightens up again, moving back over to where Sofie is still standing like a deer caught by headlights.
They’re all just kids. Or, well, Jenny can’t be certain that the vampires are kids. They might be forty years old, or a hundred and forty years old, or even older than that. But once upon a time, they were kids, and a terrible thing happened to them.
And in the real world, outside the movies, nothing is really about good and evil, it’s just about trying to survive, and about being lost or being found, and whether or not you give up. And people who fuck up at all the on one day, still get to try again on the next.
“I guess we’ll see you around,” Jenny says. “I’m Jenny, by the way.”
“A… Amanda. Amy,” the vampire stutters. “That’s Kate. Don’t know the guy’s name yet.”
Yet.
It’s one little word that maybe doesn’t mean anything, but it’s enough for Jenny. They don’t know his name, yet. But they might later, because they aren’t planning to kill him tonight.
Evil can’t triumph when there’s still ‘yet’ left in the world.
“Make sure he has that soup,” Jenny says, and takes Sofie’s hand in her own.
Maybe when they get home she can get Sofie to have some too, as well as her junk food.
Stranger things have happened, and Jenny’s in an optimistic mood.
EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL
THE DEVIL'S MIXTAPE
ELLA
Dear Nattie,
There’s a general perception that spree shooters are boys and men. I’m the anomaly, too famous to ignore but considered a glitch in the program. Fuck, if I didn’t exist, I imagine that some dreamy fucked-up girlbrain would have had to invent me.
In a way, that’s just what happened in the end. Ella Vrenna dreamed up ellavrenna, and the rest is history. Or the rest is silence, if you prefer to get your linguistic clichés from Shakespeare.
But I’m not an anomaly. Just like female scientists, female politicians, and female musicians get shafted by history, the violent women of the world only get remembered in snatches. (Pun not intended but apt enough that I’ll leave it there.)
Jennifer San Marco killed seven people in 2006. Shot them all in a day in late January. One was black, one was Chinese-American, one was Filipino, one was Hispanic, and one was a white neighbor whom Jennifer personally disliked. According to co-workers, Jennifer had a history of being a racist dickbag.
When we were in the library, right after Stacey died, Chris started giving this kid Martin a bunch of shit. Calling him nigger and stuff like that. Then he shot him in the arm and in the chest and in the heart. Martin died, and Chris called him nigger again and kicked the body.
“Don’t say that shit,” Dean scolded him. “People will say we were racist if you do.”
I started laughing. I thought I was gonna pass out from lack of air, I was laughing so hard. I doubled over. My hair falling around my face smelled like my shampoo and the smoke from Darcy’s cigarette and guns and fireworks.
“You’re a mass murderer,” I gasped out eventually. “But you’re scared people will think you’re an asshole if they find out you used racist language.”
That made Chris laugh too. He aimed his gun under one of the other tables and shot the two white kids hiding there.
“There. Equal opportunity. Happy now?”
His broken nose muffled his consonants, and I thought of you, tucked up at home in bed with the babysitter checking your temperature and one of your cartoon tapes on the TV. I felt glad it was a tape because if it had been on broadcast, then the breaking news might’ve interrupted you.
xE
---
Dear Nattie,
You won’t read these for a long time, I hope. If you ever read them at all. Sam thinks I’m using the idea of writing to you as a literary conceit, and the real intended audience is nobody but my own eyes. Sam’s smart about things like that. He knows a lot about doing things for their own value — about integrity. So maybe Sam’s right. Maybe I’m writing this for myself, and nobody else will ever read it. But maybe someday, someone will. Stranger things have happened, as the saying goes.
I fucking hate sayings. They’re the suburbia of talking, the same beige stucco words that all the neighbors use, and so people copy them to fit in and never say anything that means anything.
Anyway
.
One thing you obviously know as well as I do is that you gotta get the iconography right if you wanna be an icon. I took suggestions from everyone in Cobweb, but the final say was mine. If someone didn’t like it… well, then, they could be a sad little story on the evening news with a single-digit body count and a footnote in the true crime section to be remembered by.
I made a scrapbook of ideas, stuff I tore out of magazines at the library or copied down from books. I think it’s fucked to tear up books, but magazines don’t count the same way. I had pictures of Carrie in her sleek pink gown from the prom scene in Carrie, her skinny body splattered slick with bright red blood. I had a picture photocopied from the back of this video that Chris had just gotten from Japan, this amazing horror movie about this ghost woman who could climb out of your TV and kill you just by glaring at you. She had long, long, black hair that covered her face and white robes, and she moved like a puppet on tangled strings.
Chris — do you remember him and Dean? Really remember them, from when you knew them, not just from the newspaper and documentary photos? Chris with his fair hair and summer freckles, thin face and slightly secretive smiles. Dean was taller than me, taller than Chris. His hair was brown and curly. He was goofy, but we liked him even if he was a dork. We were all dorks. Misfits.
Anyway, Chris said her look was based on ancient ghost stories in Japanese culture, which just goes to prove my point: the right iconography endures. Who knows how many other horror movies got made the same year Carrie , but that’s the one you remember because she burned herself onto everyone’s retinas.
Girls are better at it than guys, lots of the time. I bet you can’t remember shit about the suit Kennedy wore when he got shot, but you sure as hell remember Jackie’s pink Verdun with the pillbox hat, the nubby tweed splattered with the blood and brains of her husband. You remember Mia Farrow’s little pixie hair in Rosemary’s Baby, her wild terror as she carries Satan’s child to term inside her birdlike frame.
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