And then there was lunch.
We had pretty decent food at St. Bartek’s, but even so, there wasn’t that much appealing about the school’s s version of a holiday feast except for their rolls. They made spectacular yeast rolls. And even though their mashed potatoes and stuffing and gravy were okay, most of my classmates would be dining on menus whipped up by their parents’ personal chefs or high-end takeout from Dean & Deluca or Williams-Sonoma or somewhere.
I tried not to be envious. My mother was a terrible cook and she insisted on preparing the whole meal herself in order to manage its nutritional content. Our Christmas dinner would be vegan, gluten-free, and low-carb. I’ve had plenty of delicious vegan meals. The pot pie at Modern Love in Williamsburg is addictive, and I could live on the white truffle-infused tofu and yuba from abcV.
Unfortunately, my mother’s repertoire runs to soupy, unseasoned quinoa, soggy flatbread, and asparagus sauteed until it’s crispy black. My poor stepbrother is too young to sneak out of the house for a pizza, so the only time he gets to eat real food is at school when his friends take pity on him and share their cheese sandwiches and Oreos with him since he brings all his lunches from home.
Not that I sneak out for pizza all that much. My mother is a fashion journalist and obsessed with weight. At five-eight, she only weighed a hundred and ten pounds, which would have been fine if that had been her natural weight. But it wasn’t. To maintain that weight she chain-smoked and lived on miso broth and roasted almonds with the occasional half-grapefruit thrown in.
Her breath smelled foul.
My stepfather didn’t seem to mind, though. He liked having her on his arm at functions. He loved that she was always dressed in the latest fashion, that her hair was cut just so, her makeup impeccable.
Paul was kind of shallow that way. He was a self-made millionaire—maybe even billionaire—and he was insecure about it. My mother was the ultimate trophy wife, the final proof that he was successful.
Their relationship was symbiotic, if not passionate. But they put on a good show in public.
Not that I could bust them for that. I wasn’t that much different when it came to my relationship with Connor.
Every high school has a Connor. He’s *that* guy all the girls want to sleep with and all the guys want to invite over to play Sea of Thieves or whatever. It’s not just that he’s handsome, though he is, Connor has “it.” When I first met him freshman year, I was bowled over by his interest. Connor Fishburne asking me out?
At the time, I thought that was a very big deal. My parents were newly divorced, My beloved grandmother had just died. And after six years of ballet lessons, I’d come to the crushing realization that my future did not include a career as a dancer when I’d been relegated to the chorus for my ballet school’s end-of-year recital for the sixth year in a row and all I had to show for endless hours of practice were really ugly feet.
If I couldn’t be a dancer, I figured, I could be the girlfriend of the cutest guy in school.
My infatuation with Connor lasted about a month.
He was interested in sex. and almost from the time we started going out—when he was still too young to drive—he was pressuring me to have sex with him. I was thirteen and so not ready for that. So we broke up.
“Connor’s a douche,” my best friend Sloane said at the time.
I agreed with her, which made it awkward when we reconnected junior year and started dating for real. “He’s still a douche,” Sloane said. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she added.
But of course I didn’t. Know what I was doing, I mean. I knew it was exciting being around him. He paid a lot of attention to me and even though I knew it was superficial of me to like that so much, I did. My mother was so wrapped up in her own career and her own messy love life that she kind of left me alone to figure things out for myself. And my dad? The less said about him the better, although when I was being honest with myself, I realized that I was dating a guy that was a lot like dear old dad. Charming. Cheating. And cocky.
I’d lost my virginity to him, and it hadn’t been horrible the way some girls had described it being. He liked being the one in charge and when I tried to assert myself, he pulled away.
That scared me a little bit, and I’d fall back into the submissive role he liked. We were going off to colleges in different states next year and I knew that he’d find a new girl the first day he moved in. I’d been accepted to Bryn Mawr, one of the last female-only universities in the country and I was looking forward to a learning environment that was divorced from the social dance I found so exhausting.
Plus, bonus, it was located on the outskirts of Philadelphia—close enough to go home for holidays, but far enough away I wouldn’t have to worry about my parents just dropping in on me at whim.
I knew there wouldn’t be any chance of maintaining a long-distance relationship with Connor after we graduated, but for some reason, I felt obligated to keep up appearances for the rest of the year.
Which meant I’d bought him a Christmas present.
A really nice Christmas present. Connor liked thins. Nice things. He was a bigger label whore than any girl I knew. I’d bought him a beautiful watch, a Tag Heuer Aquaracer that cost $1500. I’d bought it with my own personal platinum card and had been paying it off for nearly a year. But it was a beautiful piece of jewelry that would look good on his wrist.
Connor had beautiful hands.
I’d wrapped the box in red paper with a luxurious velvet finish, and tied it up with gauzy, glittery gold ribbon. I’d tucked in a little card with a corny quote about spending time with him that I meant to be cute rather than mushy but I was having second thoughts. In fact, I was thinking that maybe I should wait to give it to him on Boxing Day when his family had invited me over for what his mother called “tea.” She wasn’t British but she’d binge-watched Downton Abbey so many times she’d convinced herself she was.
I had the box in my tote so I could go either way, but it felt like it was sitting there glowing like it was radioactive.
“There you are,” my best friend Sloane said as she sat down on the bench beside me, already rummaging in her purse for her vape pen. She clicked it five times and took a hit.
Gah, Sloane,” I waved the nasty vapor away. It was going to be bad enough cooped up in the house with my mother’s second-hand smoke for two weeks, I didn’t want to smell like melon-flavored chemicals until I took my next shower..
“Sorry,” she said, exhaling like a 40s movie-star. “I’m just thinking about how much I do not want to go home and deal with the beginning of the Christmas from hell.”
“You don’t know it’ll be hell.”
She just gave me a look. “How long have you known my family?”
“Longer than you,” I said with a smirk because I was three months older than she was and our mothers had been best friends back in the day. Before my father slept with her mother and…
“How is my dad?” I said.
“Still a dick,” she said.
Not surprising.
“Speaking of dicks,” Sloane said, and pointed with her Juul toward the gym entrance
as Connor came out of the building with a bunch of his teammates. Basketball season was already half over and St. Bartek had a good chance of making it to all-state. Connor was excited about that.
His hair was damp, which meant he’d actually broken a sweat in his last-period gym class, even if team practice was suspended until the new year.
Even with wet hair he looked sexy.
And I apparently wasn’t the only person who thought so. Myka Wright, the captain of the cheerleading squad, was in animated conversation with him and she was doing all those things—touching her hair, touching his arm—that girls do when they’re flirting. He was grinning at her, clearly pleased to be the object of her attention.
I heard Sloane make a disgusted sound. Cheerleaders were the bane of her existence. Her mother had been one in both high school and col
lege, had taken part in cheer competitions at the national level and had wanted her only child to follow in her footsteps and take up the pompoms. Unfortunately for her, Sloane was not interested and despite how inclusive everyone at St. Bartek liked to pretend they were, cheer squads were still not really open to someone who was six feet tall and weighed two hundred and twenty-three pounds, no matter how pretty she was.
Sloane’s mother had changed tack after a disastrous cheer audition and suggested that Sloane refocus and try her luck at being a plus-size model. It had some as a nasty surprise to her mother that what Sloane really wanted to do was do something that combined her love of popular culture with an affinity for math. She’d been taking online classes from the University of Europe for almost two years. You were supposed to have a high school diploma to do that, but she’d sweet-talked the administration into accepting her after presenting a demo for a game she called “Igra,” which is the Croatian word for “game.” My little brother Tyler was crazy about computer games and she used him as a beta tester all the time. It made him feel important and that was something he needed. His dad wasn’t’ as big a douche as my dad, but he was what could charitably be called, “an absent father.” Tyler was a smart kid who needed a dad. It was kind of sad.
And then all thought of Tyler was forgotten when I saw Connor bend and kiss Myka on the mouth.
“Oh shit,” Sloan said.
Chapter 3
Jesula was from Haiti, her father a French plantation owner, her mother his black mistress. She was what Flaherty called “high yellow,” with a coppery cloud of sun-streaked hair and eyes the color of moss agates.
I knew she wasn’t for me.
I knew she was off-limits.
I knew even loving her was illegal but I couldn’t convince myself it was wrong.
All I knew was that when she smiled at me, I lost all reason.
All I knew is that when she touched me, I lost all will.
All I knew is that when she spoke to me, it was as if her voice was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard and I wanted to hear her say my name over and over and over again.
She wore a perfume that smelled like violets and after she left my bed, the bed linens would hold her scent for days. I would wrap myself in the sheets and pretend that she was still with me.
I’d met her at Jack Johnson’s Club Deluxe, the one that Owney Madden later bought and turned into the Cotton Club. She was there with an Italian fella who pawed her like an animal as he drank bootleg cocktails and smoked cigars imported from Cuba. By the end of the night he was so drunk it was easy enough to peel the shnook away from Jesula and escort her home myself. She wouldn’t even tell me her name that first night. I think she was testing me, seeing how hard I’d work to gain her favor.
She lived in a boarding house run by Mabel Johnson, whose younger brother Bumpy was right hand man to Madame Stephanie St. Clair, the numbers queen of Harlem. Jesula worked for the Queen, and Bumpy kept a real close eye on her.
A real close eye. But as close as he was watching, he still didn’t see what was going on right under his nose.
And neither did I.
See, Jesula was ambitious. She saw what her boss had and she wanted it for herself. The Queen ran the policy in Harlem, but Jesula saw a way around that. And that’s where I came in.
She wanted to meet Flaherty, wanted his help setting herself up to run a rival operation in the neighborhoods the Irish controlled. She knew Madame St. Clair and Bumpy planned on taking on Dutch Schultz and his boys, but they didn’t see the Irish as a threat. “We’ll come in like fog,” she said, “on little cat feet.” Jesula liked reading poetry and she was always quoting bits and scraps of verse to pretty up her conversation. I loved that about her, how she could express herself in words as beautiful as she was.
“They’ll never see us coming,” she said to Flaherty. And he believed her. Not just because he was greedy—he was—but because she was so beautiful that she turned him inside out, the same way she turned me.
So he went into business with her, her brains and his operation combining to form a numbers racket that churned out cash faster than the U.S. Mint. And she had runners everywhere, including dozens of Irish maids who worked for the rich people who thought they were lower than dirt.
It was a sweet deal.
Until Flaherty got greedy.
The numbers was a deal between him and Jesula and I wasn’t involved. She’d told me from the beginning that she wanted it that way. “I don’t want business to come between us,” she said.
I’d argued that I could be an asset to her, to her business. I wasn’t loud like Flaherty. I didn’t close out a bar every night and brawl at the drop of a hat. I didn’t need to shout to have my voice heard.
“That’s exactly why I need Liam,” she said. “It’s like the three-card monte dealers. He’s the one distracting everyone while I do the trick.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I was so in love with her. I asked her to marry me and bought her a ring from Tiffany’s so she’d know I was serious.
She told me I was sweet, and refused the ring.
She began to pull away from me, no longer accepting my invitations to dinner or to the movies.
I thought she might have taken another lover but the truth was something I never saw coming.
I was so worried she would think I was trying to manipulate her, it never occurred she was playing me.
Until the night Bumpy Johnson murdered Flaherty on orders from Madame St. Clair, who had heard about Flaherty running numbers and decided it was time to eliminate the competition.
So Bumpy killed Flaherty and made a big splash of it.
There wasn’t enough left of him to fill a bucket. The police called it an accident, said that Flaherty had strayed in front of a motorcar that had run over him.
I saw the body. It looked like he’d been trampled by the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
He was dead and Jesula had disappeared.
No one seemed to know where she’d gone, no one seemed to care.
But what they did care about was the money.
No one could find the money that should have been in Flaherty’s possession on the day he was killed. He was due to pay off the winners on Saturday so he should have been flush.
Only he wasn’t.
Which is why one night when I came home from doing a little business at Delmonico’s, I was confronted by a large Black man waiting for me in my parlor. My maid, a pretty Irish girl from County Kildare, was sitting on one of my wing chairs looking terrified. I looked at my uninvited guest. “Maggie’s up past her bedtime. May I send her home?”
I knew she wouldn’t say anything—even the Irish cops treated their own like shit, and if she was known to be a “troublemaker” it would go hard for her.
The man gave her a hard look. “Are you a good girl Maggie? Say your prayers at night?”
“Yes,” she said, belatedly adding, “sir.”
“Then go home and say a prayer tonight.” He looked at me. “And you might ask for special grace for Robbie here.”
Maggie gave me a frightened look but I just nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying to her.
When the door closed behind her, the man turned his attention back to me. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re Raymond Johnson,” I said, figuring he wouldn’t be too happy if I called him Bumpy.
“That’s right,” he said. He had a rich voice, smooth like cigar smoke and brandy. “Madame St. Clair asked me to pay you a social call.”
“It’s not really a convenient time,” I said. “Perhaps in the morning?”
He’d smiled then, showing his fangs. “The sunlight disagrees with me,” he said as I goggled. I’d thought the vampires were playing the Italians against the mobsters in Harlem. It had never occurred to me they’d have bestowed the sharp kiss on one of the most notorious gangsters in the city.
“I’ll draw the blinds,” I sa
id.
“It’s nothing personal, kid. You Irish might be the only white men who might know a little about what it’s like to be a Black man.
“But you crossed the Queen. You and Flaherty had no business horning in on her action.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to object, to say I had nothing to do with the enterprise, but suddenly I saw exactly what had happened. Jelusa hadn’t dropped me because there was another man in the picture—she needed a fall guy. She didn’t want anything that would connect her to Flaherty, not even me. And she’d taken her ill-gotten gains and skedaddled, leaving me holding the bag.
If it hadn’t hurt so much, I would have admired it.
She’d never loved me at all. She was just playing me for a sucker and I’d played right into her hands.
“I don’t know where the money is,” I said.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said and proceeded to give me the beating of my life before he was convinced I really didn’t know where the policy money was, that it was likely gone forever. I didn’t give Jelusa up. I didn’t rat on her. What I told Bumpy was that Flaherty was a superstitious man who’d probably buried the money somewhere it slowly decay like his own body.
That sounded likely to him so he finally let me go. I dropped into a heap at his feet as he wiped his bloody hands on a fine linen handkerchief.
I could tell by the way he was breathing that the sight of my blood excited him. I tried to crawl away from him but I couldn’t get my body to work. When he bent to bite into my neck, I was too weak to fight him off.
I could tell he intended to drain me, to leave me a husk on my own parlor floor. I could feel my heart slowing down as the beats got louder and louder in my ears. And then everything was silent.
One minute I was looking up and the next I woke up naked on a slab. I was blind and I panicked until I realized that someone had sewn my eyelids shut with rough stitches. I clawed at my eyes until I pulled them away and then I opened my eyes.
Holidays Bite: A Limited Edition Collection of Holiday Vampire Tales Page 15