by Brian Meehl
Penny gave him an enigmatic smile. “Writing the first page in the playbook.”
He stared out the window and thought about the other playbook. The one between him and Birnam that Penny knew nothing about. This book was also blank, except for the first page: to CD in front of Penny. Last night had been the wrong moment to come out. He would have to bide his time until the right moment presented itself.
The cab turned off Delancey Street’s crowded boulevard and nosed down a narrow canyon of tenement buildings.
Seeing his old street stirred up a riptide of feelings. It was the place he thought of when people asked him where he was from. And it was a prison. A prison he had thought he’d escaped from so many times, but each time he’d looked at it for the “last time,” he had been returned after flunking out of another family.
The cab pulled to a stop in front of a small stoop. The building that housed St. Giles looked the same as the other six-story brick tenements on the block. The big difference was the occupants: nuns and an unruly bunch of boys ranging from infants to teenagers short of their eighteenth birthday, when they “aged out” of the foster care system.
As Morning followed Penny onto the stoop, he glanced up at the wire web above the door. It protected a half-moon window with ST. GILES GROUP HOME FOR BOYS stenciled on the glass. A black handball was still wedged in the wire where one of the Mallozzi twins had thrown it while trying to break the window. Morning wondered if the Mallozzi twins had finally found a real life version of their perfect foster family: the Sopranos.
Penny pushed open the door. “Wait here a sec,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back.” She stepped inside the entryway and rang a buzzer.
He didn’t mind waiting. If Sister Flora wasn’t there, it wasn’t like there was anyone else he wanted to see. And if the Mallozzi twins had not been successfully placed in a crime family, he didn’t want to run into them. Even though they were two years younger than him, they were much bigger and the neighborhood bullies.
He surveyed the tenements on the other side of the street. The bright splatter of fall flowers in windowboxes took him back to a day he had tried to imagine countless times. It was a summer morning, sixteen years earlier, when he had been stranded on the stoop for the first time. As Sister Flora told it, his mother, or someone, left him on the stoop in one of those plastic handbaskets used in grocery stores. A note was pinned to his baby blanket: “Please take care of me.” When Sister Flora opened the door and discovered the baby, she said, “Good morning.” The baby responded with a happy smile, so she started calling him Good Morning. She dropped “Good” during his terrible twos. McCobb became his last name in the St. Giles tradition of assigning surnames from the orphanage’s founders.
Morning’s time travel was interrupted by the gun of an engine. He spotted a white van speeding down the street. A satellite dish rode on top. As it jerked to a stop in front of the stoop, he read the big logo on the side. HOUND TV. His eyes darted around the street looking for the slashes of yellow tape he’d probably missed. But there was no police tape cordoning off a crime scene. Hound TV, a local all-news channel, was famous for its crime reporting, and for showing grisly footage none of the other channels would show. “We report, you recoil” was how one New York comedian put it.
The driver of the van hopped out and disappeared around the back. A handsome man with a helmet of blond hair emerged from the passenger side. His face was tan-in-a-can orange. Morning recognized him as one of Hound TV’s star reporters, Drake Sanders.
“Is this St. Giles Group Home?” Drake asked.
“Yeah,” Morning said. “Did someone die?”
“Nah, we’re doing a three-hankie piece, backup for the day there’s a corpse shortage.” Drake stopped at the bottom of the stoop and struck a dramatic pose. “‘With no red gold flowing anew, tears of silver will have to do.’” Then he hit Morning with his megawatt smile. “Tele-journalism is what I do, poetry is who I am.”
The driver, now with a camera on his shoulder, joined Drake, followed by a woman carrying a microphone with a big “H” on it. “Where’s the princess of PR?” the camera guy asked.
Drake glanced down the street. “Must be running late.”
Penny came out the door and onto the stoop. “Hey, Drake. Ready to go?”
“This better be good, Penster,” Drake said as he grabbed the mic from the soundwoman. “But I can’t promise airtime. You know how it works. Gory bumps gooey every time.”
Surprised that Drake seemed to know her, Morning glanced at Penny. “What’s going on?”
“We’re doing a press conference about your miraculous return to St. Giles.” Before Morning could object, Penny grabbed his arm. “Gimme a sec,” she told Drake as she pushed her client into the entryway. “Morning, this is New York. Everyone dressed in black with purple hair claims to be a vampire. I had to go with a different angle to get the media outlets here.”
He waved outside. “You mean all one of ’em.”
She held his shoulders like a steering wheel. “Listen, I trusted you enough to let you stay in my house last night. Will you trust me enough to do this interview? I promise you, it’s a lot bigger than it looks.”
“I know it’s a lot bigger. I’m a vampire. If you want, I’ll prove it to you right now.”
Penny gripped his shoulders. “Please, don’t use the V-word on camera. If you do, our little media play will go up in a cloud of BOWGAS. You know what BOWGAS is? It’s short for the Book of Who Gives a Shit.”
Morning remembered Birnam’s warning about another stage Lifers might go through in their first encounter with a vampire. Total dismissal. There was only one cure for it. His own version of gas. He shut his eyes and laser-focused on a gray mist. As he dove into a mental wormhole, a loud sound snatched him back.
Drake’s head poked through the opening door. “Penster, every nine minutes there’s a death by unnatural causes in the city of sob stories.” He tapped his watch. “You got three minutes before my police scanner starts to wail.”
“We’re good to go,” Penny said, guiding Morning outside.
He wondered if he was ever going to get the chance to come out.
The cameraman started shooting as Drake joined them on the stoop. Drake began with a transition to an absent anchorwoman. “Thanks, Kristin. I’m here on the Lower East Side, at the St. Giles Group Home for Boys, for an incredible moment in the life of this young man, Morning McCobb. This is his friend Penny, and she’s going to fill us in. Penny.”
Penny talked to the camera. “Last November, Morning McCobb left St. Giles for a Thanksgiving meal in a real home, and then mysteriously disappeared for ten months. Unlike so many stories about missing children that end tragically, this one is about to end happily. In fact, we’ve arranged a surprise reunion with the nun who raised Morning since he was a baby.”
As Morning realized he’d been set up, Penny reached back and opened the door. “Sister.”
A stout old nun wearing a gray pantsuit barreled outside and wrapped Morning in a bear hug. Tears streamed down her face as she alternated between laughter and thanking God. Morning answered her joyous embrace with his own. It felt like he hadn’t seen her in years. He tried not to cry in front of the camera. But Sister Flora squeezed a couple of tears out of him anyway.
Drake pushed the mike toward her. “Sister, what was your first thought when you saw Morning?”
“It’s a miracle!” she exclaimed as she finally let go of him. “Seeing his face again is the wondrous work of God.”
“Do you have anything special you’d like to say to him?”
“Besides wanting to take my ruler to him for not writing or calling?” Everyone laughed at her joke, including the dozen onlookers gathered on the sidewalk. “Yes, I do have something to say.” She took Morning’s hand and beamed at him. “My dear boy, today the pigeons took back the Williams Bird Bridge.”
“What’s that mean?” Drake asked.
“A little secret
between me and Morning,” Sister Flora said with a chuckle. “But I’ve got a question.”
“Go ahead,” Drake urged.
She wiped away her tears and held Morning with somber eyes. “We heard a terrible rumor about your disappearance.”
“Really?” Drake perked up. “What was that?”
Flora cleared her throat. “We heard, and I pray it’s not true, that you were turned into a vampire.”
The question stunned Morning. As far as he knew, a Leaguer Rescue Squad had swept into the house where he’d been turned, and had removed all evidence that he’d ever been there. The only thing Sister Flora had been told was that he had disappeared without a trace.
Penny jumped in. “All right, let’s wrap this up.”
“No, no.” Drake shot a mischievous glance at the camera. “I think our viewers would love to hear the answer. Is it true, Morning? Did you become a vampire?”
Morning half-heard the question. He was staring at the face he had spotted at the back of the small crowd. Luther Birnam. With a reassuring smile, Birnam gave him a thumbs-up. Morning had no doubt what the gesture meant. It was time. A private exhibition for Penny was no longer in the cards. He leaned into Drake’s microphone. “Yes, I am a vampire.”
Snickering laughter darted among the onlookers.
Sister Flora crossed herself. “Dear God.”
A high thin voice announced, “If you’re a vampire, then we’re Batman and Robin.”
All eyes snapped to the voice.
Morning recognized the newest onlookers bulldozing to the front of the crowd. John and Paul Mallozzi had gotten bigger. They had also gotten tattoos on their huge arms. Their arms read, from left to right:
“Yeah, and besides,” Paul added in a thin voice like his brother’s, “vampires can’t go out in the sun.”
“That’s a myth,” Morning said.
“Listen to him,” John snickered. “He disappears, and comes back with a listhp.”
“A vampire with a listhp?” Paul said in mock horror. “That musth mean he’th a bloodthucking fiend!”
Morning didn’t see the twins double over in laughter, or hear the crowd join in. He had dived into the inky labyrinth of his mind, where he chased a serpentine swirl of mist. For his first outing, he had chosen the least threatening form of all: the Drifter.
As the Mallozzi twins straightened up, Morning’s shirt and jeans tumbled to the ground. Everyone on the stoop jumped away from the pillar of fog where a skinny teenager had just stood.
The cameraman almost tripped, steadied himself, and kept shooting the ribbon of mist as it drifted toward the twins.
Drake and Penny gaped as the terrified onlookers edged away. Except for the Mallozzi twins. They were frozen in slack-jawed dunderment, riveted to the band of mist as it rose up and tilted into a flat cloud over their heads.
Inside the haze, Morning kept his dim shadow-conscious focused on the most important thing while doing the flimsy and dangerous Drifter: not blacking out. If he did, the story of the first vampire to out himself would end in the H2O equivalent of autoimmolation: autoprecipitation. A watery grave indeed.
Luckily, holding the Drifter for any length of time was not Morning’s forte.
As the Mallozzi twins gaped up at the oval mist like extras in The War of the Worlds, the cloud thickened. A split second later, it rematerialized into Morning and crashed down on the twins, knocking them to the pavement.
Morning disentangled himself from the screaming boys, popped up, and brushed off his Epidex. It wasn’t graceful, but it was convincing. He was out.
10
Spin City
Morning’s version of crowd surfing on the Mallozzi twins had numerous effects on the dozen witnesses.
Sister Flora fainted and was caught by Drake Sanders, which was just as well because she covered up the dark spot on his pants where he had wet himself.
Penny finally closed her mouth, opened her mind, and understood why Birnam’s playbook had been empty. It was no joke, Morning was uncharted territory. And he was her client.
While the terrified onlookers backed away from the monster who had turned into mist and back again, the Mallozzi twins scrambled to their feet and performed a rarity. They ran in opposite directions. “Dont X” and “R Path” were now a divided highway.
What follows after smooth-sailing reality is abruptly capsized in a freak accident is profound confusion. For some, the chaotic scramble to right the mental ship can take a minute. For others, it can take a lifetime. For Penny, it took seconds. She picked up Morning’s shirt, pants, and shoes and hurried into the street. Before Drake could reboot the part of his brain that held terms like “exclusive interview,” Penny hustled Morning away from the scene.
Morning looked back to find Birnam, but he was gone.
When they reached Delancey, Morning scrambled into his pants and shirt as Penny hailed a cab. Popping his head through his shirt, he spotted the Williamsburg Bridge rising at the end of the street. He wanted to run out onto the bridge and celebrate his historic outing, but Penny pushed him toward a cab as it screeched to a stop. They jumped in.
Morning vented the rush of adrenaline charging through him in an explosion of laughter.
Penny eyed him with a mixture of fear and bewilderment. “What’s so funny?”
“The Mallozzi twins,” he managed between snorts. “You should have seen their faces.” A thought shut down his laughter. “Oh man, now they’re going to be gunning for me.”
“Don’t you mean, staking for you?”
He glanced at Penny. She was pressed against the door on the other side of the seat. His best-laid plans of not scaring her, or anyone else, during his first outing hadn’t exactly worked out. And if Penny looked like she wanted to melt into the car door, when Portia found out she was going to totally freak. So much for “mi crib es su crib.” But it wasn’t his fault, he told himself, it was Birnam who’d given him the green light. He gave Penny a sheepish smile. “I guess you believe me now, huh?”
She nodded decisively. “Oh yeah.”
The first chords from the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme sounded from her purse, making her jump. She dug out a cell phone and thrust it across the seat. “It’s yours. It fell out of your pocket when I grabbed your clothes.”
He’d totally forgotten about the cell. The four chords sounded again. He took it, flipped it open. “Hello.” He handed the phone to Penny. “Mr. Birnam wants to talk to you.”
She took it and put it to her ear.
Birnam heard her suck in a breath. “Cards on the table, Ms. Dredful. Morning and I are from the International Vampire League.”
Penny was still getting her bearings. “Vampires have their own league?”
“Not as in baseball,” he offered. “We’re like a big family.”
“And what do you want from me, Mr. Birnam? To play Marilyn Munster, the normal one in a house of monsters?”
Birnam laughed. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes, that’s what we need. A talented woman with big ideas, big skills, and big hair.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure that’s all you need?”
“Penny, we don’t drink human blood anymore.”
“Don’t PR a PR person.”
“It’s true. But the rest of the world isn’t going to believe it.”
“So you want me to make Morning the harmless poster boy for, what did you call it, the International Vampire League?”
“Exactly. If you’re successful, we’d be happy to make you an honorary member. That’s a nonbiting offer,” Birnam said with a chuckle. “So what do you say, Penny? Are you up to the job?”
Penny did a quick pros and cons list.
Cons:
(1) The client, Birnam, was another smug, ego-riddled powerbroker, the Donald Trump of vampires, whom she would have to suck up to—which was better than the other way around.
(2) The product, Morning, was about as sexy as chicken soup.
(3)
The clientele, vampires, had a habit of leaving behind corpses.
Pros:
(1) Birnam seemed to have deep pockets, and the story of the first vampire was a gold rush waiting to happen.
(2) Representing a real vampire might make her daughter use the words “mother” and “cool” in the same sentence for the first time ever.
(3) Repping Morning would make her famous, even put her in the history books. There weren’t many PR people in the history books. She owed it to the profession.
This reminded Penny of one more item on the con side.
(4) If she didn’t take the gig, one of her competitors would.
That sealed the deal. “Mr. Birnam—”
“Luther, please.”
“Mr. Birnam,” she insisted, “as long as it remains safe for my daughter and me to associate with you and your kind, you won’t be disappointed.”
“Excellent.”
“But the second your boy pops his fangs and gets glassy-eyed over Portia or me,” she growled like a mother lion, “I promise, you’re the one who will be disappointed. Do you get my meaning?”
“Point taken,” Birnam replied with a chortle. “We’re playing high-stakes poker. And you’re holding the stakes.”
The phone went dead. She handed it back to Morning and scrutinized him. “Is the world ready for you? Are you ready for it?”
He looked past her, at the passing street and the bustle of New York. It felt good to be home. But this time he wasn’t a nobody. His suck-it-up days were over. Now he was going to lay it down, vampire style. Okay, Leaguer style. “Yeah,” he said with a wide grin. “I’m ready.”
By the time Drake Sanders procured a new pair of pants, interviewed several of the eyewitnesses, and got back to the studio to edit the story, it was midafternoon. The only eyewitnesses he didn’t interview were Penny, who wasn’t returning his phone calls, the Mallozzi twins, who were nowhere to be found, and Sister Flora, who had retreated inside St. Giles. The group home’s spokessister claimed Sister Flora was too busy praying for Morning’s soul to talk to the press.