YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP!
There was a ratty little dog loose on the path. He must have sneaked out of his yard. I tried approaching him. I like dogs, so I figured maybe I could calm this one down.
“Shhhhhh…” I soothed.
YIP YIP YIP YIP!
“Come on, doggy, come on, shhh.” I patted his furry head. It still didn’t work.
“Shut up!” I whispered.
I tried walking away to see if he would just give up, but he just followed at a semi-safe distance, yipping his annoying little brains out.
I saw a light come on in a window two houses down. I could have just disappeared—sped off into my room without another glance, but something was keeping me there. I wish I’d just left. Instead, I let go. I let go of myself for as long as it takes you to blink.
Suddenly the dog was quiet…because its neck was in my mouth. And through his gross tufts of fur, I was viciously draining the life from the dog’s little body. I couldn’t stop. It shuddered and died as the blood flowed freely into my mouth, down my throat, into my being. It was disgusting. It was satisfying.
The whole act lasted about ten seconds before I was full and feeling my energy restored and my strength regenerated. Then I looked down at the limp puffball in my hands and I wanted to throw up. I wanted to cry. I had never felt more ashamed of myself. I had truly become a monster.
In a panic, I shook the dog a little in an utterly futile attempt to revive it. I knew there was no hope. My cold, hard instincts kicked in. Despite myself (and my gag reflex), I proceeded to bite the dog in a couple different places, making it look as though it had lost a fight with a wild animal. I then tossed it into the woods and raced home.
Safe in the confines of my house, I ran straight to the bathroom to clean the blood off my face. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a virulent, shockingly handsome animal.
An animal. A monster. A vampire. Not to be trusted. Not to be trifled with. I felt powerful and horrible at the same time. Above all, I was helpless. I couldn’t imagine how I could live like this for the rest of my life.
Even though I had the ability to do things at incredible speeds, I took solace in generally maintaining a human pace. It was one of the few things that helped me feel like I wasn’t totally lost. As a result, it took me forever to pick that stupid fur out of my mouth. It was everywhere. I was coughing up hairballs for half an hour. Which, of course, woke up my ever-worried mother.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine, Mom.”
I gagged a little as I was reaching my finger around the back of my mouth for a particularly troublesome clump of fur. “Noah, what are you doing to yourself?”
“Nothing, it’s fine. I’ve just got something in my mouth.”
Suddenly she burst in the door, abandoning any shred of trepidation, and stared at me wild-eyed, arms wrapped tightly around her body in its pink satin robe.
“Did you kill someone?!” she hissed.
I spun around to face her.
“No! What kind of freak do you think I am?”
She sighed and glanced around the bathroom. This was the first time we hadn’t been separated by a solid panel of wood since the Bathroom Incident. Although her eyes were puffy from crying and her forehead was marked by worrylines, she appeared a little more at ease around me, which was comforting. When your mother looks at you like you’re a venomous snake about to strike, well, let’s just say it can give a guy a complex.
“So what did you do?” she asked. I shrugged and tried to force a laugh. “What makes you think I did anything?” She just raised her eyebrow. I’m a terrible liar and she knows it.
I exhaled and hung my head. “I ate a dog,” I mumbled.
“You ate the whole dog?” she asked, as if it were the schematics of consuming an entire pet that were the troubling thing.
“Well, I drained a dog. And then it was dead.”
“What did you do with it?”
She was taking this surprisingly well.
“I made it look like it got in a fight and died. Then I tossed it into the woods.”
She slowly nodded her head and pursed her lips.
“You are being very nonchalant about all this,” I said.
It was weird. While not on par with the birds-and-the-bees talk, discussing how you covered up your supernatural bloodlust with your mother was pretty awkward.
“I’m considering…” she started.
“Considering what?” Did I even want to know?
“How to go about this…” I hated when she started sentences without finishing them. I waited for a second for her thought to resolve itself. It didn’t.
“How to go about what?”
She looked at me straight. “You can’t go on like this,” she said flatly.
“No kidding.”
Silence. She covered her face gently with her hands and breathed out. She mumbled something unintelligible into her hands.
“Huh?” I asked.
She pulled her hands from her face, her eyes glassy, and shook her head.
“What am I going to do?” I implored like a child in despair.
“Hold yourself together for now,” she responded.
She was done being frightened-helpless-mother-of-devil-spawn. She’d switched over to mother-bear mode. “We need to find a steady supply of blood.”
****
Having nowhere else to turn (and lots of time to kill), I once again ventured onto the World Wide Web, hoping this particular Internet exploration would be more productive. This time I stayed away from the chat rooms and went back to Wikipedia. My first search of “vampire butterfly” turned up a solid little paragraph on Slavic vampires. According to the folklore, Slavic vampires were able to appear as butterflies. Okay. So…what did that mean? That I was now somehow a Slavic vampire? According to the same paragraph, people who talked to themselves were at risk of becoming a vampire.
Chapter 4
It had been a week. It was time. I could only play the “sick” card for so long before people got suspicious. And when people get suspicious, they get nosy. The last thing I needed was some guidance counselor on a self-righteous mission digging into my life. So Mom and I went into Def Con One getting me ready to go back to school.
The first challenge? I out-paled Marilyn Manson with ease. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if I was naturally pale, but I wasn’t. At least, I didn’t used to be. The sun was my friend, and I spent a lot of time outside. So it would be both shocking and curious how I’d suddenly lost all color.
The solution? Makeup. Yet another thing to add to my list of great things about being a bloodsucker. I knew it was a small thing on the list of things to deal with, but come on. Talk about emasculating.
The second challenge? School tends to happen during the day. Granted, I’d be inside most of the time, and I could do my best to avoid sitting next to windows. Still, we had to take precautions to make sure I wasn’t going to spontaneously combust. I could wear a baseball cap to and from school, which would help, but they made you take it off in class. I never liked that rule.
The solution? Industrial-strength sunscreen. We ordered a giant shipment online from a supplier in Canada. I was pretty sure it wasn’t FDA-approved, but just going out on a limb, I assumed it didn’t really matter because I was undead. The stuff smelled like industrial-strength manure. So not only was I going to be greasy, I was also going to smell really bad. Worse than teenage-male bad. Then again, I was going to have a hard enough time not feeding off everyone in my path, so maybe a little distance would do some good. That got me thinking about…the third challenge: Blood.
How on earth was I going to get by without killing my classmates? I had to be totally full. And I wasn’t planning to feed on any more puppies. I felt terrible enough about the neighbor’s dog. They found him in the woods a day later. I had to listen to the sound of poor little four-year-old Lila’s heart breaking. Let’s just say I hated myself sufficiently. Mom hadn’t come up w
ith a solution for that one yet, so I would just have to do my best not to kill anyone at school. That’s a big challenge, especially when you’re a vampire in a school swarming with warm-blooded people.
So on the first day back, Mom decided it would be best to drive me to school. That would mean she’d have to work out something with her boss at the hospital, but seeing as she’d been a nurse there for so many years, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. When she dropped me off at the front of the school, she bit her lip and looked at me anxiously, her eyes glistening with the promise of tears.
“It’ll be okay,” I said quietly.
Mom quickly wiped her eyes as I got out of the car.
Armed with my trusty Steelers hat, aviators, an unseasonably dark hoodie, and jeans, I faced the day. Literally.
The front of W. T. Whitehaven High was bustling as usual. The air buzzed with adolescent anticipation. I’d always assumed that the early morning meander was heavyset with drowsiness and a suffocating sense of boredom, but I was surprised at how much activity there actually was in the morning. Because of my newly heightened senses, I was privy to all kinds of juicy conversations that I didn’t care about.
Malcolm was waiting for me in our usual spot to the left of the doors, leaning against the brick wall, doing his best James Dean. He had the sunglasses and everything.
And Paige. Paige was there, of course. She was walking toward the entrance with Celia, her best friend since second grade. Paige laughed at something Celia said, and her rich brown hair briefly flashed crimson in the sun. She’s really cute.
“Hey, Noah!” I heard Malcolm’s voice ring clear over the general din.
I raised my head ever so slightly to register Malcolm tunneling through the crowd. His shoulder-slung backpack kept hitting people as he moved past them, but he was oblivious. His sandy blond hair was kind of a mess as usual. He stopped almost uncomfortably close in front of me, trying to make room for people to go around us. I was having a hard enough time keeping my hunger under control; I didn’t want to get close enough to start craving my best friend.
“Dude, thanks for returning my calls!” He shook his head and smiled.
“Sorry, man, I was just really a mess. Couldn’t even get out of bed; I was asleep most of the time. My mom took my phone so I wouldn’t waste my energy.”
It was such a pathetic lie, I just hoped my face was obscured enough to prevent him from reading it.
“Wow, that sucks,” he offered.
I laughed a little. Maybe I was getting a little better at lying. Or maybe I looked so horrible, he just felt bad for me.
“You’re not contagious, are you?” He took a half step back.
“Not that I know of.”
He gave me a weird little once-over.
“Um, what’s with the goth getup?”
In an effort to achieve maximum protection from the sun, I had ended up dressing in all black. A vampire. Dressed in black. How original.
“It was an accident.” I shrugged.
“Are you feeling okay?” Malcolm asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Lies.
“Good, ’cause we’re late to homeroom.”
The crowd had generally cleared out around us, so we rushed through the halls to homeroom. Malcolm had this wonderfully unassuming way of getting what he wanted most of the time. The one time he and I didn’t have homeroom together was in tenth grade, and Malcolm just started skipping his to come to mine. At first the teachers tried sending him back, but every week, he just kept showing up at my homeroom until eventually the principal decided it wasn’t worth the regular visits. So he got reassigned.
Once we settled in at our desks near the back, the inevitable moment arrived—the removal of the hat. I was exceptionally nervous. Before the teacher had a chance to call me out, I slowly, subtly removed my hat. Okay, so I thought I was being subtle but I was actually acting strange, which, of course, Malcolm picked up on in a second. He leaned over to me.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, just kind of weak, you know?”
He tried to mask the look of disgust that swept across his face. It was the sunscreen. “Ugh, do you smell that?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that you?”
“Yeah.”
Malcolm laughed. “What is that?”
I had to improvise. “It’s this nasty smelling stuff that my mom got for me to make sure to keep my um, rash away…part of the sickness,” I shrugged. I’m so lame!
Malcolm was willing to buy it though. “Sucks for you. Hopefully you don’t have to wear it too much longer.”
“Amen to that.”
“Because, wow, do you stink!” He started chuckling again. It was infectious.
“Easy!” I couldn’t help letting a few laughs out. I was just glad he didn’t seem to notice my makeup.
“Hey did you hear about Brad?”
My fists clenched involuntarily, and a chill ran down my spine. “What about him?”
“He’s got three broken ribs! Said it happened when some whacko attacked him. He managed to fight the guy off but he was like six feet tall and had a tire iron! How crazy is that?”
Not as crazy as a bloodthirsty, newborn vampire with supernatural powers who stalks the playground at night, intervening in lovers’ spats, I thought. “Pretty crazy.”
“It’s good to have you back,” Malcolm said, “but next time, return my freaking calls, okay?”
“Done and done.”
I felt a little weight lift off my undead shoulders. It seemed like Malcolm was buying my lies. Maybe becoming a vampire had made me a better liar. Whatever it was, I was relieved. So far so good.
****
Periods one and two came and went without much of note. Fortunately, people were generally too wrapped up in their own personal dramas to pay much attention to me. I got a couple of double-takes at my outfit, but that was about it.
Then third period arrived. World History. With Paige.
Paige and I have been running in similar circles since fifth grade, when her family moved to Whitehaven. She’s an only child, like me.
On the first day of class in fifth grade, she got into an argument with a kid on the playground because he said The Beatles were dumb, then she proceeded to sing a loud medley of Beatles songs until he gave up and left. Three days later, by the monkey bars at recess, I told her I was going to marry her. She just laughed and walked away. Over the years, I tried to get her attention. Nothing ever seemed to work. Then, in eighth grade Malcolm befriended her on my behalf, so we could all start hanging out together. We became friends, but I was always too scared to say or do anything whenever we managed to get a moment alone. I didn’t want to do anything dumb.
Cut to twelfth grade. Paige and her dumb boyfriend finally broke up a month ago. As soon as I got the news I headed straight for Paige’s locker to ask her to prom (I’d been thinking about it nonstop) but when I got there she was crying. A lot. I didn’t know what to do, so I just hugged her and told her it would be all right. Then I waited patiently for an entire month, which I figured was plenty of time to get over a bad breakup. Two weeks ago, she thanked me for being a good friend to her. Friend. At that point, it was the dirtiest word she could have said to me. I realized I needed to make things happen soon, or I would be stuck in the dreaded Friend Zone forever.
I’ve been building up my nerve for years. And just as I was about to make my move, I went and got myself bitten by a vampire (I think—if that was how it actually worked). There was no way she’d want to date me now.
My heart sank. I looked around the room. Paige sat next to the window as usual. Normally I would strategically position myself two seats away, but that was too much of a risk. Plus, I didn’t want her to smell me.
Mr. Halstead took his swivel seat at the front of the class and waited for the students’ attention. Somehow, this always worked, but he was the only teacher I ever knew who could pull it off. “All right, slackers
,” he began.
I stole a glance at Paige. She was hanging eagerly on our teacher’s every word. He was, without a doubt, the best teacher at this school. He had a reputation as a tough teacher, but he was passionate about history, as was Paige.
“We’re going to try something a little different today,” Mr. Halstead continued. “Instead of taking a lengthy and boring exam that’s going to cost you many lengthy and boring hours of study only so you can forget everything as soon as your papers are handed in, and many more lengthy and boring hours for me grading them, we’re going to do a project.”
I liked the sound of this, even though I had enough lengthy and boring hours to rebuild Rome, brick by brick, now that I didn’t sleep at all.
“First, I want you all to pick a partner. You’ll be working in twos.”
I peeked out of the corner of my eye at Paige. She was looking straight at me, with a slightly equivocal expression.
So I turned and faced her, smiling, waiting for her to say something, figuring that was the smooth thing to do. She swept up her backpack in one arm and plopped down in the seat right next to mine.
“Feeling a little Gothic today, are we?” she teased.
I automatically glanced down at my clothes, even though I knew what I was going to see, and shrugged. “Oh, you know…” I trailed off. I panicked.
“You know, what?” she urged.
Uh, say something clever. Something really funny. Reference Napoleon. I don’t know. Come on, Noah, this is getting awkward! Just speak!
“You know…the traditional Gothic look, minus the bells and whistles of Hot Topic and commercial teen angst, is pretty underrated.”
I watched a smile spread slowly across her face. “Touché,” she said.
Victory!
She quickly scanned the room for potential partners. Then she looked at me. “So,” she continued, “do you want to be my partner?”
She had just asked me to be her partner. She asked me. This was fantastic. “Yeah, sure,” I said, acting totally cool, of course.
I Heart Vampires Page 4