by Molly Harper
“Gigi, I get it, it’s gone.”
“Ben is a friend. He will always be my friend.”
Jamie stretched out on the bed next to me. “Yep, every guy wants a girl to get all wild and friendly on him.”
“I will stake you.” I smacked his shoulder.
“Coward.”
“I know.”
“I thought you were going to tell him when you were home for Thanksgiving.”
“What kind of person breaks up with someone who just brought them home for a holiday with his family?” I grumped.
“OK, I thought you were going to tell him during finals week.”
“He had a really big environmental chemistry test. It seemed wrong to distract him with the ‘let’s still be friends’ talk.”
“You’re just looking for excuses to delay the inevitable, aren’t you?”
I smooshed my face into my pillow and nodded. “Yes, I am.”
“Nice.”
I flopped onto my back. “What is wrong with me? What kind of person couldn’t love Ben? He’s adorable and smart and sweet and considerate. Of every relationship in our weird little family, mine should be the simplest and the easiest. But somehow your weird-ass train wreck of a courtship with Ophelia freaking Lambert is more functional than mine.”
“First of all, there is not enough time tonight for me to list all the things that are wrong with you. And second, Ophelia and I work. She may not be exactly what I expected, but she’s what I need. And she needs me, too.”
“Gross. I don’t want to hear about your perfect teenage vampire relationship when I’m wallowing in emotionally impotent misery. You suck.”
“Well, you might have had some unrealistic role models. Happily ever after isn’t a guarantee, even with vampires and werewolves and other mate-for-life types. Add to that the fact that you picked the blandest person on the planet to start a relationship with— Ow!” He yelped when I bashed him in the face with my pillow.
“Ben is not bland!” I exclaimed. “He’s sweet and nice and . . . he’s just non-supernatural. Your perspective is all wonky.”
A faint knock sounded at the door. Iris poked her head inside my room. “Hey, Geeg.”
She stopped in her tracks, eyebrows raised, at the sight of Jamie lying next to me on my bed. “Jamie, can I speak to my sister for a second? There’s still some blood in the kitchen.”
“I can take a hint.” Jamie ruffled my hair, making me huff in annoyance.
Iris gave Jamie her politest smile as he passed. But the moment he cleared the door, she turned on me. “So you’ve decided that having conversations behind a closed bedroom door with the future bloodmate of one of the highest-ranking, least emotionally stable vampire officials in the area is a good idea?”
“Jamie and I are just friends, Iris.”
“So you’ve said for years, but I don’t see you inviting any of your other friends into your bedroom for closed-door chats.” She hovered near the open door as if she needed an escape hatch in case the smell of my blood became too much for her. I glared at her, making her add, “I’m just saying that unless you want to provoke Ophelia, I would keep Jamie at a more platonic distance.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” I sat up and motioned toward her yoga pants. “So, of all the postvampirism makeovers you could have gone with, you went from ‘efficient librarian’ to ‘woman who pretends to do yoga’?”
“What, you expected leather pants and exaggerated eyeliner? Because that’s not a cliché. So.” Iris pulled my desk chair out so she could sit . . . still very close to the door. “What have I missed?”
I gave Iris what could only be described as the most awkward smile in the world. I could not tell Iris about my foundering relationship with Ben. Iris adored Ben, which was only natural when you considered that Ben had saved both of us from the clutches of a megalomaniacal vampire who resembled Colonel Sanders, not to mention said vampire’s evil gropey henchman, whom I’d dated. It was all very complicated.
I couldn’t tell Iris that I’d fallen out of love with the world’s most perfect boyfriend. I couldn’t tell her I was bored and didn’t feel challenged by Ben’s happy-go-luckiness. That sounded so selfish and silly. So instead, I focused on something Iris would fall on like a starving lion with a zebra carcass. My grades.
“Five As and a C-plus.”
“A C?”
“C-plus.”
“What are you making the C in?”
“Logical thinking skills.”
She burst out laughing and clapped her hand over her mouth. Because that would offend me less, I supposed. “You made a C in logic?”
“The class was not what I thought it would be. Our final project was creating a board game using olives as play pieces.”
“Please tell me this was an elective,” she said.
“It was. But I don’t think I should take any crap from someone who took a bowling class for a PE credit.”
“Fair enough. What about your roommate? Is she still meeting boys for ‘coffee’ at three A.M.?”
“Complete with flat-ironing her hair,” I said. “She is fooling no one.”
“Well, maybe she won’t come back next semester,” Iris suggested. “That’s what happened with at least two of your roommates.”
“You make it sound like I’m the problem here,” I grumbled. “I’m a dream roommate. I’m just misunderstood.”
“All I’m saying is, you’ve been in school five semesters, and you’ve had six roommates.”
“A kleptomaniac, a control freak who woke me screaming in the wee hours if I left the remote controls out of alignment, two religious zealots, a hoarder, and, most recently, a nympho,” I muttered.
Iris covered her face with her hands, but she laughed. “I remember those simpler days when you were just a young, naive girl who didn’t use the term ‘nympho.’ ”
“Please, I’m the one who taught you the term ‘UNF.’ ” I giggled, sitting up and propping myself against my pillow.
“I blocked that out.”
“Really? You blocked out your baby sister teaching you the phrase ‘universal noises of fu—’ ”
“No!” she cried, covering her ears. “You are an innocent flower! A sweet girl whom I in no way ruined with my poor parenting skills!”
I cackled, tossing a pillow at her. Instead of taking it to the face, she deftly caught it a few inches from her nose and slung it back.
“Oof!” I huffed, tossing the pillow aside. “You didn’t ruin me with your parenting skills. I probably would have turned out this way no matter what you did.”
“You’re probably right,” she admitted, raking her hands through her hair.
“You do realize that you don’t have to do the full Martha Stewart Christmas extravaganza, right?”
“I know I don’t. Part of me wants to make up for the fact that I couldn’t see you for months. And the other part just really misses the way Christmases used to be around the house when Mom and Dad were still with us.”
I leaned over far enough that I could pat her hand, ignoring the way she flinched at my unexpected contact.
The truth was, I could remember way more Christmases with Iris than I could with our parents. But telling Iris that sort of thing usually made her feel weird and guilty, like she had somehow selfishly sucked up all of the quality time with our parents by virtue of being born first.
“Iris, every year, you do everything the way Mom and Dad did, from making the weird soda-cracker candy Mom used to make to taking Dad’s ‘one bite’ out of the cookies left out for Santa. I’m almost twenty years old, and you’re still leaving cookies out for Santa. That’s commitment.”
Iris finally relaxed enough to scoot onto the bed and sit next to me. “No, I mean a house full of people, lots of talking and music, taking special time out to watch Chr
istmas movies and make candy. Those big holiday parties they used to throw, remember? Mom’s gardening club buddies and Dad’s coworkers. I miss it.”
I could actually see Iris’s eyes getting all misty, which, given the pink tinge in the tears, was more than a little disturbing. While missing our parents was a key factor in my sister’s holiday funk, this year, there was the added complication of Iris being a vampire. Cal had told me that the few living relatives we had left—uncles and aunts and second cousins in distant states whom we rarely saw—hadn’t exactly cut Iris off, but they weren’t reciprocating her Christmas cards, either. They were pulling away from her, hurting her with their silent disapproval, which may have had something to do with this manic holiday extravaganza. Frankly, I wasn’t surprised by the “family’s” response. After all, these were the same people who had told Iris to call if she needed anything after our parents died but then couldn’t be bothered to help Iris with the task of raising me.
Yeah, I was a little bitter.
“OK, those Christmases were great,” I assured her. “But I think you’re forgetting some less stellar moments, like the year Aunt Jenna drank an entire gallon jug of zinfandel before dinner, fell off the porch, and broke her pelvis. Or when Dad got Mom a Weight Watchers membership as a gift, and she didn’t talk to him until New Year’s.”
Iris winced. “Yeah, I had forgotten the Cold War Christmas. But those holidays were still great!”
“Of course they were,” I agreed. “I’m just saying you should try to keep this all in perspective. There’s no such thing as a perfect holiday, especially with this bunch around. And I’m afraid that if you try to make one, you’re going to miss all of the fun and drive yourself crazy . . . er.”
Iris’s full, rose-tinted lips quirked. “Trust me, I know I can’t make this Christmas perfect, but I can try to make it as normal and human as possible for you.”
“It doesn’t have to be human,” I assured her. “Because most of the guests are creatures from the underworld! And it will never be normal. We’re not normal, Iris. We never have been. And I think that’s awesome.”
Iris laughed, leaning until her forehead bumped against mine. “Thanks, Gigi.”
I sighed, enjoying my sister’s tension-free closeness, and simply rested against her for a long moment. “You’re going to do the full Martha Stewart thing anyway, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to try,” Iris swore. “Besides, I have to take advantage of this opportunity while I can. I don’t know when Jane’s going to let me take over a holiday like this again. She’s a little possessive when it comes to hosting.”
“So you’re using me as a means to loosen Jane’s choke hold on Halloween and Thanksgiving?”
“No!” she exclaimed, before adding, “A little bit.”
“So are we watching Mary’s Wish List this year?”
Iris looked honestly insulted. “Of course we are. It is the most solemn of our traditions. Things have changed, but we will always find a way to indulge in schmaltzy cable-movie-of-the-week sentimentality.”
I opened the Internet browser on my phone and searched for the broadcast time for Mary’s Wish List, a low-budget holiday movie about a woman who writes a Christmas list to a department-store Santa, but instead of asking for a pony or new shoes, she asks for big things like a new job and a nicer boyfriend. Over the course of the movie, her Christmas wishes come true but with disastrous, somehow hilarious consequences. We discovered the movie when Iris was still in high school, and it held some sort of weird charm over us that A Charlie Brown Christmas or even It’s a Wonderful Life couldn’t manage. It wasn’t available on DVD, and it only came on the Family Life cable channel once a year during their Christmas movie marathon. Mary’s Wish List was like the Sasquatch of Christmas movies.
And because we were stubborn and watching a version taped from the broadcast just wasn’t the same, we always put everything else aside to watch it, no matter when it came on. Of course, that was before one of us went strictly nocturnal.
“Gah, it comes on at eight A.M. December 24,” I told Iris, who shrugged as if she’d expected this news. “How the heck are you going to stay up after sunrise to watch a movie? I thought baby vampires pretty much conked out at first light, what with the undeniable pull of the sun and all that.”
“Jane says it’s possible through a combination of caffeine and sheer willpower. We’ll make it work, Gigi. Don’t worry.”
“So is being a vampire everything you thought it would be?”
“I kind of had that whole ‘capes and castles’ fantasy blown for me when I started working for them,” she said. “I saw the ugly side of things. The brutality, the self-centeredness that comes from centuries of taking care of number one first, the impossible-to-remove stains. But now it’s everything I hoped for but nothing I expected. I can see more, smell more, hear more. Everything feels different and better: feeding, music, sex.”
I held up my hand. “Ew, mental pictures of parental figures doing the dirty. Please stop.”
“There are some drawbacks. The whole ‘sunlight makes me burst into flames’ thing. I’m always afraid I’m going to lose control and hurt someone. Every once in a while, I completely underestimate my strength and rip a handle off my car door. The tally is three so far.”
“And what about the candy thing?” My sister used to have a notorious sweet tooth. She’d had candy stashed in little hidey holes all around the house. Before she was turned, she binged on peanut butter cups, lemon drops, chocolate-covered marshmallows. From what I’d heard, as Cal was getting ready to turn her, Iris was downing a limited-edition Godiva truffle like it was her preexecution last meal.
“Don’t remind me,” she moaned. “Tess tries her best to come up with experimental dessert bloods, but it’s not the same as sinking your teeth into a KitKat.”
“So I probably shouldn’t mention that Sam has a great big container of Tess’s macaroni and cheese downstairs in the fridge waiting for me?”
“The kind with the bacon?”
I nodded. “The kind with the bacon.”
Iris’s eyes narrowed at me. “You’re the devil.”
After we had established that although my sister was somewhat resentful of my ability to digest delicious cheese-covered carbs, she was not going to rip my throat out, the vampires finally relaxed a little and threw the sad, middle-aged, undead version of a rager: drinking carefully warmed donor blood while playing Phase 10. I could only remember a few phases before the evening stretched into one long blur of being cheated at card games by vampires with unfair supernatural advantages. Jane was pretty unrepentant about reading our minds to see our cards. And even Collin was willing to abuse his ability to get an edge.
Sometime around four, I passed out. Clearly, the late hours and the stress of finals and, well, everything else caught up with me, because it was almost twelve hours later when I was just crawling out of bed. It was strange, waking up in my childhood bed again, to a completely quiet house. Knowing that Iris wouldn’t be up waiting for me in the kitchen, ready to go over the details of our day, left me feeling sort of hollow and sad. But to every season and all that. Life had to change. Life had changed the moment Iris tripped over Cal. If she could turn her whole life upside down to take care of me, I could adjust my waking hours a little bit to accommodate her schedule.
With the sunproof shades in place, every inch of the house besides my room was completely dark. I stumbled down the stairs, making a mental note to start carrying a flashlight in my robe pocket. I punched my personal security code—3024, the number of a check I bounced for a gym membership I never took advantage of, because Cal and Iris would never let that go—into the security pad and found that I was only approved to open some downstairs windows—well, one small window over the kitchen sink—because my Ancient Greek brother-in-law was a paranoid freak convinced that the solar system was out to kill his
family.
Considering my role models, I should get some sort of special medal for not needing serious therapy.
Guzzling coffee just as black as my resident adviser’s soul, I was contemplating this disturbing, though somehow endearing, aspect of Cal’s personality when a large dark shape came sweeping down the stairs and stopped just short of my face.
“Gak!” I shrieked, nearly tumbling off my stool. My face was saved from sudden introduction to the floor when a pair of cool hands circled around my upper arms and jerked me upright.
“Good morning,” Cal said calmly, as if he hadn’t just scared ten years off my life. “I see that your taste in sleepwear has not improved.”
I scowled at him, because no one should be that coordinated, really, but I refused to defend my choice of ratty flannel pants and a pink robe with holes worn in the elbows. He ruffled my hair and opened the blood warmer to take out his breakfast.
“Why did you do that?” I yelled, tossing a Pop-Tart box at his back.
With an almost bored expression, he caught the box before it hit him and put it on the counter. One day I would throw an object at a vampire and actually hit him or her. One day.
“To test your reflexes. I thought I taught you better than this,” he said, frowning at me, clearly disappointed with said reflexes. “Why did we spend all of that time doing judo drills if you were going to let your guard down?”
“Yes, I let my guard down . . . in my kitchen . . . in my home. I’m a hazard to myself.”
“You never know when you might be attacked.”
“Yes, yes, constant vigilance, I get it,” I muttered.
“It’s hard to be vigilant when you’re sitting in the dark.”
“I can’t figure out how to turn the lights on,” I told him. “Apparently, my security clearance isn’t high enough to use an illuminated bathroom.”