by Molly Harper
“Why are you so nervous?” I asked Ben now. “You know a lot of these people. This should be a cakewalk for you.”
“Yes, if the cake was made of misjudged relationship cues and regret.”
“That would be some bitter cake,” I said. He grimaced and nodded. “You’re seriously not going to explain that last comment?”
But before Ben could respond, a young vampire—also dressed in khakis and a navy polo—showed up to take him to the IT department. Ben turned back to Jane, pointed to his outfit and his coworker’s matching clothes, and made what could only be described as a murder face. As the office door shut behind them, I started giggling.
“Is my clone going to come escort me to my desk, too?”
“Yeah, he’s not going to let that twinsies thing go for a while.” After a moment of grim contemplation, Jane turned a bright smile on me. “Let’s get you started!”
She showed me her schedule on her computer, assigned me a username on the network, made me a secondary on her e-mail account, and did various techie chores to get me set up as her full-time minion. I searched through the drawers, finding a wealth of binder clips and Sharpies. There was also a laser pointer, which Jane immediately snatched out of my hand.
“What is this?”
“A correction laser. Margaret didn’t think Wite-Out was enough of a statement when she made a mistake.”
“What?”
Jane pulled out a piece of paper, aimed the laser pointer at it, and clicked the switch. A jet of red light shot out of the tip, burning a hole through the paper.
“Wow.”
“Margaret wasn’t much fun to work with.”
I pulled a face, which Jane ignored.
“Your most important task is protecting this.” Jane opened a document on my computer called “nopelist.xls.” It was an Excel spreadsheet of names, phone numbers, and “reasons for calling.” One column ranked each of the names with a one-to-ten “PITA Factor.”
“What’s the PITA Factor?” I asked. “Their ranking of favorite Mediterranean foods?”
“Their ranking as a ‘pain in the ass’ on a scale of one to ten,” Jane told me.
“Wow again.”
“Before you make an appointment for someone to see me, you check this list. If their name is on the list, they don’t get an appointment. Make any excuse you have to. You have to check my schedule. I’m booked up with meetings. I’m traveling. I’m having an emergency dental crown installed on a chipped fang. Whatever. Just make it believable, and shield me from the crazy. I deal with enough of it in the business I’m supposed to handle.”
“I will do my best.”
“And I’ll give you weekly updates, because the list grows like shower mold.”
“Ew. And that’s awful.”
“Heavy is the ass that sits in the big chair,” she said, shrugging.
“I am ninety percent sure that is not the expression.”
Jane waved me off as she walked back into her office. “Agree to disagree.”
From what I could see, the administrative job focused on keeping Jane on task and on schedule and preventing her from being annoyed. Also, I provided her with a chocolate-based coffee-blood concoction every night at two A.M. That was very important. To humanity.
Ben and I were still on a pretty short leash. We weren’t allowed to leave the building, for fear that he would attempt to contact his parents. We weren’t allowed in the few departments with human employees. And it was more than a little embarrassing that Jane insisted on driving us to and from work.
But still, I had a desk, a real grown-up desk at a real grown-up job. All of my previous jobs had involved name tags and grease traps, so this was definitely a step up. I stood at my dignified-though-less-ornate-than-Jane’s desk marveling at everything the Council was trusting me with—a computer, drawers full of pens, mailing supplies, Post-its, and petty cash. It was like gathering all of your school supplies together when you were in elementary school, to survey your bounty. And you always swore that everything would stay organized in your little backpack. But it never did, just like I was sure that my desk would be covered in paper-clip chains and discarded Faux Type O lids within a week.
But for right now, it was mine, and it was clean, and it was pretty awesome.
My computer didn’t send messages to nonapproved e-mail addresses, log on to nonapproved Web sites, or upload files to anything, and when I tried to get on Facebook, a red banner appeared on my screen that read “LOL, NO.”
But I could do word processing, which was fun.
It was eerily quiet, sitting outside of Jane’s office by myself, basically waiting for someone to walk down the hall and beg for an audience with her, but at least I didn’t have to share a wall in some cubicle farm, like the poor bastards in the accounting department. According to old episodes of The Office, that could lead to hostile Jell-O-based pranks.
Jane didn’t seem to have much for me to do on my first day, other than learning how not to electrocute myself while using the intercom system. I buried myself in first-day tasks. Organizing my desk. Figuring out the shockingly complicated phone system. Finding the break room. Learning the name of Sammy, the delightful Samoan coffee-blood mixologist. I was just coming back from my lunch break, catered by said delightful coffee guy, when I saw Ben walking down the hall with a tall brunette.
And he was more animated and cheerful than he had been in the entire time since he’d been turned. I recognized the brunette as the pretty girl he’d had his arm around in the picture in Jane’s office. This was clearly Gigi, the infamous ex. They were chatting and laughing, probably remembering all of the awesome times they’d had together.
She was even prettier in person. Big bright-blue eyes with long, sooty lashes. Plump, naturally pink lips. Dark hair that fell in waves around her shoulders. She had that effortless beauty that lit up any room when she walked into it.
I kind of hated her more now.
“This is Gigi,” Ben said. “She’s my boss over in programming. I’m going to be working on her project.”
It took all of my special vampire superpowers to control the muscles in my face.
Ben’s ex-girlfriend was his boss?
Ben was talking to me? Directly? With a smile on his face?
What the what?
“Hi!” she said brightly. “Nice to meet you!”
Did Jane put Ben in Gigi’s department on purpose? Did she want Ben to get back together with Gigi? Should I take that personally somehow?
And I still hadn’t spoken.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, stretching my hand forward to shake hers.
She smiled sweetly and shook my hand. At least she didn’t try to pull some weird territorial move where she squeezed my hand until the bones buckled. Did vampires do that? That seemed like a vampire thing to do.
And unlike Jolene, Gigi didn’t have a crazy nasal twang to balance out her incredibly above-average hotness. Her voice sounded like angels whispering to fluffy kittens.
“I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be to have someone my own age around at the family get-togethers. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Jane, Gabriel, Dick, everybody. But after a while, I just want to talk to someone who knows that Tumblr isn’t for sipping scotch, you know?”
My brows drew together in what I was sure was a “skeptical Meagan is skeptical” face. Why was she being so nice to me? Did Ben not tell her that I was the one who turned him? So far, that hadn’t inspired warm, fuzzy feelings among his friends and family. I mean, at the very least, she should see me as some sort of threat just because I was a hot girl living in the same house as her ex.
My eyes narrowed a bit. Wait, was this because she was, like, a nine and a half, and I was circling around a nine-point-three? Because I hadn’t even tried wearing makeup over my new luminescent vampire skin. I
could be a nine-point-eight. Easy.
And all this crazy-person math was preventing me from speaking.
“Oh, yeah, Jane’s friends are really nice,” I said, and then quickly added, “Old! I mean, they’re super-old. But nice.”
Oh, come on, why was I still speaking? Why?
Even Ben seemed to sense something was off, because he said, “OK, well, we’d better get to our lunch break if we’re going to finish that coding by the end of the night.”
God bless Ben Overby, conversational lifeguard.
Gigi gave an awkward little smile. “OK, well, we’d better get to it.”
I waved my fingers without actually moving my hand, because I was paralyzed by mortification. And off they went. I rolled my head back to scream silently at the ceiling tiles, Whyyyyyyyy?
Rubbing my hand over my face, searching for the embarrassment that should have been scorching my cheeks, I slumped back to my desk. And then tried to hide under it. Forever.
But because the space underneath my desk was too small for a leggy nine-point-three like myself, I had to be satisfied with hiding behind my monitor. Which I decided to use to e-mail Miranda, one of the few preapproved e-mail addresses listed in my contacts under “Transportation Contractors.” And one of the few people in Half-Moon Hollow I felt comfortable randomly e-mailing without a lot of How are you? preamble.
I opened the computer’s e-mail program, savoring the opportunity to message someone who was not one of my professors. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I wondered what would be the least intrusive way to ask.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Hey Miranda,
If I asked you a weird, random question about people you know better than I do, would you answer it?
—Meagan
Before I could spend too much time talking myself out of it, I hit send.
Well, that was super-cryptic and sure to set off all sorts of alarms.
I waited, for far longer than anyone of my generation was used to waiting for anything. Ugh, this was why I needed access to instant messaging. Because Miranda had better things to do with her time, so I probably wouldn’t get an answer for hours. Just enough time for me to regret sending it and try to come up with an alternative plausible question that could inspire such a weird message.
Sighing, I looked up Jane’s calendar for the next week to try to figure out which of her days would be busiest and therefore involve the most fetching of chocolate-based coffee-blood concoctions.
Ping.
Before I could even open the calendar app, a new message popped up at the bottom of my screen. Apparently, Miranda didn’t have better things to do, because she had immediately sent back a response with the footnote “Sent through a mobile device.”
Hey Meagan,
It depends on who it’s about and how personal the question is.
—Miranda
Well, that seemed reasonable. I typed a quick response.
You mentioned Gigi and Ben had an awkward breakup. How awkward? Like “we can still be friends” awkward? Or “voodoo doll and restraining order” awkward?
—M
Maybe if I could make her laugh, she would forget that I was data-mining her friends’ painful romantic history. A few seconds later, she shot back.
Meg—
That is personal. But considering that you’re working with both of them, you should probably know, just to prevent foot-in-mouth disease.
It was awkward because Ben proposed to Gigi, and she said, “No, let’s break up instead.” At Christmas, around people with superhearing and mind-reading powers. And those situations lead to difficulty making eye contact.
—Miranda
My jaw dropped. Ben proposed to Gigi? In front of her family? He must have been crazy about her! And she was so put together. So nice. And she hadn’t freaked out and turned him into a nontypical vampire. Oh, and now they were spending eight hours a day together in a small room.
I sent a “Thanks” back, which I’m sure, in Miranda’s head, sounded like a squeak.
Maybe this job thing was some strategy on Jane’s part to get Ben and Gigi back together. It would make Ben more stable to be in a relationship with an established vampire whom Jane trusted, with a huge support circle. I didn’t blame Jane. I couldn’t help but feel a little hurt by it, but she was doing what she thought was best for Ben. Maybe she could match me up with someone she thought would make me slightly less tragic.
Miranda sent me back an emoji that looked like a tiny yellow face pitying me.
No. I was surprised to find that I didn’t really want to be set up with someone who would make me slightly less tragic. I wasn’t sure there was someone out there who could make me slightly less tragic. I liked Ben. I wasn’t crazy about the guy I’d been hanging out with for the last couple of weeks. But I’d liked the side of Ben I saw when I first met him. I wasn’t saying he was my one true Disney love, but I didn’t like the idea of having all this unresolved emotional business between us while he rekindled his failed engagement and I moved on with some faceless rebound vampire.
No matter how it turned out, I needed to work through this weird distance with Ben. I just had to get him to talk to me directly when his ex-girlfriend wasn’t around so we could get some closure. That should be easy enough, right?
Right?
It was not easy.
After our initial training-wheels day as Council interns, we were basically launched into our full workload.
As part of perfect Gigi’s group, Ben was working on some sort of giant vampire family-tree database thing to help vampires track down their living descendants. And while Gigi’s team had been responsible for programming a successful portion of it, other teams—located in other regional offices around the world—were not so successful. And now those teams didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t ask what happened to them, and Jane didn’t tell me. But now Gigi’s team had taken over the missing teams’ assignments to keep the project on track.
I got hit with paperwork. So much paperwork. The question of why recycling didn’t seem to be making much of an environmental impact was answered by the sheer amount of backlogged paperwork in Jane’s filing cabinet of shame. It took two vampires to wheel the laundry cart full of files up to my desk.
“Jane!” I called into her office. “What is this madness?”
“Uh, I’m on the phone!” Jane called. “Just blindly do the filing without questioning how I got so far behind. It totally piled up like that while I was selflessly taking care of you for the last few weeks. Just so busy . . . on this phone call.”
I glanced at the phones and saw that both of her lines were free.
“You’re not on the phone!” I turned to find her lifting the receiver to her ear and dialing. I shook my head.
It seemed that every piece of paper in the Council’s regional office had to cross Jane’s desk at some point. Why did vampires need to document so much? There was a form for unintentional vampire turnings like mine. There were forms for planned vampire turnings. There was a form to document accidentally killing your vampire colleagues at the Council and a different form for intentionally killing your vampire colleagues. There was a form for requesting reimbursement for having someone murdered. They didn’t mind if you outsourced someone’s murder, they just insisted that you keep your receipts if you wanted to be reimbursed for it.
You would think vampires would have learned over the years that a paper trail created complications. Maybe they were trying to stockpile blackmail material on one another? Forever? Also, why did they rely on paper so much? Did they have something against digital records?
And the problem with storing those files in an industrial-sized laundry cart was that the papers in the files shifted around and got mixed together. So now I had to organ
ize and file, which had to be some sort of mental endurance test, like Psyche sorting through all those seeds to impress her hateful goddess mother-in-law.
Ha, and Morgan said that Greek mythology class would never apply in real life.
I rolled up the sleeves of my work-sensible cardigan and got to work sorting through my mega-hamper of files. The color-coding of the files made no sense, but I stacked them in colored piles on the floor anyway, just to move them out of the damn hamper.
This was still a better job than cleaning the dollar theater in my hometown. I couldn’t eat popcorn for years after that summer.
In the midst of all these files, I spotted a few familiar nuggets of information, like incident reports within Half-Moon Hollow involving Dick and his efforts to keep his former colleagues from selling counterfeit Beats by Dre headphones to innocent humans.
One file listed Ophelia’s progress in her “probationary period,” which I immediately tossed into the blue pile without skimming over it. “Nope. Nope. Nope.”
Another file listed all of the expenses paid to the University of Kentucky for services to undead students. As a semi-sort-of government agency, the Council subsidized counseling services, blood shipping and storage fees, sunproofing costs, and other expenses associated with housing undead students. I scanned the top sheet, and these fees seemed . . . excessive.
“So. Many. Zeros,” I muttered, blinking at the bottom “total” number.
I probably would have appreciated living in New Dawn more if I’d known how much that little social experiment was costing our undead taxpayers. Did we really have that many vampire students living in New Dawn?
I flipped through the pages, using my superhuman speed-reading. The numbers just didn’t seem right. There were eight student residence floors in the building and forty to fifty kids a floor, dead and undead, depending on the number of students who demanded a single room. But the reports listed services rendered to more than 235 vampires. That would only be possible if two-thirds of the building was occupied by vampire students. And trust me, as someone who walked around that noisy lobby during daylight hours, that was not possible.