Bite Me

by Donaya Haymond

  In order to make room for us Matt was forced to push some of the junk into the hall. “Sorry about this, it’s a little cluttered,” he apologized as he heaved the door closed.

  Now that my senses had become accustomed to this kaleidoscope of confusion, I could pick out the grace notes of my crush’s sanctuary: his violin, his arty photographs, and his hockey trophies. I suppose it was a sanctuary for him, even if it was dominated by a chaos that would make Dad scream. Poking through the jumbled hills and valleys was a desk creaking under the weight of science fiction novels and the cage of his Mexican red-kneed tarantula, Shelob, who seemed to be contemplating whether or not to eat the insect trying to hop away from her. On a special little stand I could see Matt’s model of. . . what was it a model of?

  “Minneapolis,” he told me, smiling. “Back when we lived there I used to go through the dumpster behind the nearby computer store, and I unscrewed all these old computer parts. At first it was just mindless destruction, but one day I thought, hey, that looks kind of like a little digital city.”

  I grinned. “You have way too much time on your hands.”

  “I like having a full life. Would you like to hold Shelob? She doesn’t bite.” He carefully scooped up the fuzzy arachnid, which seemed used to being handled. I sat cross-legged on the bed and cradled her in my hands like a little living jewel. Her eight glittering eyes surveyed me benignly.

  Matt leveled out a spot to recline on the floor. “I think we need to talk,” he said, almost regretfully, as if he would have much preferred light chitchat.

  The spider was climbing up my arm. I hardly dared to breathe, a cauldron of wonder, hormones, sadness, anxiety, and tension boiling inside of me. “So now you know why I couldn’t tell you more about where the rumors came from.”

  He laughed. “Definitely. I don’t blame you.”

  “Um. . . is she going to climb on my head?”

  “Maybe. I used to feed her crickets on my shoulder, so she likes sitting there.”

  “You are evil.”

  “Said the wolf-girl.” Matt thought for a moment, then added, “If you don’t find that hurtful, of course.”

  True to his prediction, Shelob came to rest on my shoulder, tapping me with her forelegs. “It was great of you to let Dad in when your uncle was telling you not to.”

  Scratching his head, Matt replied, “I still don’t know if that was what I should have done. Is your father’s name Ferdinand?”

  “Yes. Mom calls him Andy.”

  “Well, he’s kind of the demon of all the campfire and Halloween stories Uncle Shawn ever told us.”

  If the situation hadn’t been such a tangle I would have chuckled. “Your uncle is the villain of my bedtime stories. I used to have nightmares about him.”

  Matt sat up. “I used to not be able to sleep for thinking that a vampire was going to get me.”

  “A very thin English Major vampire who likes gardening,” I amended.

  “Somehow that detail never quite made it into the bloodcurdling tales of horror and the macabre. Though English teachers do scare me quite a bit.”

  I suddenly had a mental image of Matt running away screaming from English class. At the same time, my ears caught the H.P. Lovecraft reference–Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre was one of his anthologies–and I filed it away for Christmas gift possibilities. “Are you freaked out by all this? I would understand if you were, and I won’t bite you. Even though, as far as we know, what I have can’t be passed on through biting.”

  “Oh, nothing serious. My world view has turned upside down and inside out, but I think I can handle it.” Our eyes met, and my resulting shiver nearly made Shelob fall off.

  “Is it worse than when you found out that your uncle was a werewolf?”

  “Not as bad, no. Even though it’s complicated because of. . . well. . . you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, not daring to hope.

  He turned pink. “Just because Uncle Shawn seemed such a werewolftype person. Aggressive, conflicted, having a tough time holding a job. You are an interesting girl, and fun, someone that I met less than three weeks ago, not a nasty bone in your body.”

  “You are obviously not a very good judge of character,” I said, opting for bluntness. “We first found out about my morphing ability when I meant to slap Tammy and ended up clawing her.” I explained the circumstances of that confrontation to him, occasionally giggling at inappropriate points because Shelob’s hairs were tickling my neck.

  Matt cocked his head to one side, doing his best to look sympathetic but ending up looking queasy. “I’m sorry,” he interjected at one point, “I don’t like hearing about blood.”

  “That’s pretty strange for a hockey player.”

  He shrugged. “My nickname in the locker room is ‘The Fainter’. Besides, in our high school team, it’s more bruises than bleeding. I still don’t think you’re a violent person. I’d call you violent if you sent her to intensive care. Go on with the story.”

  “Not much else to tell, really. I got detention and a huge drop in social status. You and Taylor are my only good friends left.”

  “Thanks for the big responsibility,” Matt joked, pulling himself up beside me. He took the sleeping Shelob off my shoulder and put her back in her tank. “So your mom is a werewolf and she’s got AIDS?”

  “It’s on the border between HIV infection and AIDS right now. She’ll have the full-blown thing in a few months.” I slumped backwards, feeling like a balloon with all the air let out of it.

  “I don’t know how you bear it all.”

  “Good question. I don’t either.”

  We sat still for a while, listening to the urgent cheeping of one of the crickets from Shelob’s food supply. The door creaked open, and a small blond head poked in. “Matthew’s got a girlfriend!” it gasped.

  “Luke, aren’t you kind of in trouble?” Matt asked lightly.

  His brother shook his head. “Nope.” Giggles from the other two boys came from behind him as they all stared at me. I felt like diving under the bed.

  “Let’s check.” He sat up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “DAD! MARK, LUKE, AND JOHN ARE OUT!”

  “Ma-a-att, no!” protested John.

  Mark added, “You’re so mean.”

  The three slammed the door and ran back into their room, yelling. We heard a distant, singsong chorus of “Matthew loves a monster, Matthew loves a monster” to the tune of the ubiquitous “naah-nah-nah-nahnaah.” My vocal chords were shifting, and I had to take some deep breaths to keep them from making me growl. Several heavy footsteps followed, then a door being forced open, and several more screams.

  Matt sighed. “Please, oh please ignore The Three Shrieketeers.”

  “That’s a very apt name, I think. Don’t worry,” I reassured him.

  Interruptions were coming thick and fast. Matt had just barely begun to ask me questions about Dad’s side of the last year of college story and how we dealt with the family secrets when his mother called up. “Honey, don’t forget to practice for the school concert!”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Are you being nice to Dianne?”

  Before he said anything, I answered, “Don’t worry, ma’am, he’s a very good host!” I turned to Matt. “You’re in the concert on Wednesday? I know Taylor is.”

  He climbed over the wreckage strewn around his desk to retrieve his violin and set up his music stand. “I have a solo, actually, but I’m really slacking off and not rehearsing as much as I should. You probably shouldn’t hear it. . . right now the music resembles a train crash more than anything else. I’ll play after you’re gone.”

  “Are you sure? I really would like to listen.”

  “It’ll be better at the performance. I hope you don’t think I have a crude mind if I ask you this, but I really want to know: does your dad go to the bathroom?”

  I shook my head. “If he drinks any water or coffee he does, but if he sticks to bl
ood, he doesn’t.”

  “That is pretty cool.”

  “But extremely annoying on road trips if he’s driving. He never thinks to stop at a gas station unless Mom and I tell him five or six times. Dad’s really absent-minded.”

  There was a knock on the door, and I heard Dad’s voice. “Dianne, there’s ice cream. Do you want any?”

  Matt and I sprang up and left the room. Matt took a long, hard look at Dad as we went down the stairs, making mental notes of what a real vampire looked like. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Mr. Anghel, but do you miss having ice cream?”

  Dad said quietly, “Yes, I do miss liking ice cream. Though I actually miss green bell peppers the most.”

  The three of us stopped our descent. “Green bell peppers?” we two teens chorused.

  Instead of responding, Dad just gave one of his tight, sad smiles. Then he edged a little closer to Matt and whispered, “Matthew, if your uncle tries to kill me, I want you to call the police. Vampires don’t turn ashy when they die until the sunlight hits the corpses, so you’ll have evidence.”

  Matt winced. “The tension is that bad? I really don’t think Uncle Shawn would do that. Beat you up, yes, but not murder.”

  “He wouldn’t consider it murder. He doesn’t consider me human.” We were now on the ground floor, alone, since Matt’s parents were busy lecturing Matt’s brothers, who had neglected to lock the door properly after they had taunted us, a development that made me think there might be a tiny bit of justice in the world after all.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Matt asked.

  “Because if it did happen, Dianne and Selene would need to be restrained from mauling Shawn–something which I think would upset you–and someone needs to get the phone while your parents are dealing with them. If Dianne can’t change back by the time the police are here, hide her until they’re gone.” He sounded deadly serious.

  I sighed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad. Where’s Mom?”

  “Down in the den. With him.”

  What? “Do you mean that Mom’s alone in a room with her exboyfriend?”

  “Well, your mother asked me to go with her, but, no offense to any present, but I would much rather not be in a confined space with someone who ruined any possibility of my attending college reunions. I’ll be in the attic if you want me.” Dad adjusted his sunglasses, and then shrank into his bat form.

  Matt watched him flutter up the stairs with an open mouth, which remained open as he headed into the kitchen and I followed him. “Correction to my earlier statement: your dad isn’t cool, he’s amazing. Do you like vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry?” He opened up the fridge.

  “Bats?”

  “Ice cream, Dianne, ice cream. Not everything is fangs and blood, you know.”

  “I have suddenly lost my appetite.” That was an understatement. Not only was I a deflated balloon, I was a deflated balloon being pulled and stretched by a three-year-old.

  Scooping out enough ice cream to feed a Third World country, Matt asked, “Why? Something wrong? I mean, plenty is wrong, but is something else wrong?”

  I leaned against the wall, hands holding my head. “Before your uncle and my mom broke up, their relationship was really, really intense. Like, what would have been marriage prospect intense if Mom didn’t dare stay at his house or have him come meet her family for fear of him figuring out her secret. So, break-up equaled big deal. Throw in lots of guilt about an accidental bite, and his subsequent attempts to make Mom’s next relationship a failure, and she’s got a lot of emotion tied up in him.”

  Matt froze in mid-chew, chocolate smears around his mouth. I had to admit that he was not a gracious eater. “Sho shi mah be hur’ing hi’?”

  I couldn’t help but giggle. “English, please?”

  He swallowed and took a quick gulp of water. “So she might be hurting him?”

  “Possibly. But she’s been fighting with Dad a lot for the past week, and here comes her old boyfriend, who’s being all polite to her now that he knows that she’s dying, and she’s very emotionally fragile and needy right now. . .”

  “I don’t get it. Wait, don’t tell me–I’ll figure it out.” Matt took another bite of ice cream to assist his thought, pondering with knitted brows. I smiled despite my troubles, thinking about how sweet and funny this boy was. I imagined kissing him and tasting that chocolate. How nice it would be to feel safe inside his arms, safe as I had never been since Nat called with bad news.

  With his final spoon of dessert came inspiration. “Oh, you meant. . . ew. No. My uncle is not as evil as your dad thinks he is, and he is not into adultery.”

  “Gutter mind! I just meant holding hands or something! Besides, have you forgotten that she has HIV?”

  He waved his spoon at me. “Prude.”

  I tossed my head. “Crude.”

  “Touché, Miss talks-about-blood-without-a-flinch.”

  “So? You are a. . .” I stopped with the sudden realization that we were flirting. Flirting! Then my mind returned to the more urgent subject. “The point is; they could be up to something. I can’t go find out, though, because the last time I eavesdropped the consequences were pretty bad.” Oh, but I wanted to hear! I wanted it desperately. I wanted it so badly that. . . uh oh.

  “Dianne, your ears are. . .”

  “I know.” My new, shaggy wolf-ears twitched. I hit them, one after the other. “Bad ears! Bad ears! Go be human!” Matt just stared. After a few more futile swats, I sighed again, and said, “Oh well. I’m going to be stuck like this until my Id gets what it wants, so we might as well find out what’s going on.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Listen to Me

  “Could you not breathe so loud?” I asked Matt.

  “So-rry. Can you hear what they’re saying?” We were sitting on the

  steps downstairs, facing the closed door. The moment I heard Mom and

  Shawn walk towards us I would alert him, and we would bolt. My ears twitched, and I listened hard. Shawn was scratching his head

  and letting out a long sigh. “I’m not sure what to say, Sel.”

  Mom wasn’t bitter or angry, just tired. “So it’s Sel again after wolfbitch?”

  “I want to apologize for that. For all of what I did that year. You still

  got your. . . boyfriend. . . to get me out of jail when the cops grabbed me,

  and I wasn’t grateful at all.”

  “You’re saying this just because I’m dying,” Mom said.

  Shawn sat down–I could tell because the sofa creaked. “Don’t say

  that, please. In the eighteen years since I last saw you, I did a lot of

  thinking, and I realized that I had behaved inexcusably.”

  “Inexcusably doesn’t even reach it. I won’t mince words with you,

  Shawn; you were malicious. The following-us-around-for-monthscollecting-evidence-on-Andy was restraining order material.” I heard the

  rustle of clothes as Mom edged away from him.

  “Wait–no, look, I’m sincerely repenting now. I’ve grown since I’ve

  last seen you, Selene.”

  “Well, I can see that—thirty pounds or forty?”

  I stifled a giggle, and Matt stared at me. Shawn sounded irritated. “I didn’t mean physically. I mean that I shouldn’t have been so cruel to you about you accidentally biting me. In fact, there was a time when being a

  werewolf saved my life.”

  “Really? When?”

  Matt poked me. “What are they saying?” he hissed–which to my

  wolf-senses sounded like a shout.

  “Ssh! He’s apologizing for treating her badly.”

  “Ohh.” Matt nodded, looking wise. I didn’t tell him that he still had

  some ice cream stains on his cheeks.

  I cocked my head towards the door again, and listened to Shawn tell

  his story. “. . . I’m not really proud of my alcoholic phase, but to tell the

>   truth I was quite drunk, walking alone through the alleyways. Then out

  of the shadows comes a young woman, very thin, blonde, and pale. I

  tried to shake hands with her but fell over. She was smoking a cigarette

  and was holding a bottle of vodka and offered it to me. I drank some of

  it, and, inebriated as I was, it pushed me over the edge. When I woke up

  the next morning I had no idea what had happened next, but I could

  taste blood in my mouth, and there were deep scratches in the walls of

  the buildings surrounding us. There was no sign of the woman, only a

  pile of ashes. There were also two little scabs on my neck.”

  I listened to Mom, Shawn, Matt, and myself breathe, along with the

  distant sounds of Matt’s parents still scolding his little brothers upstairs. “So she was an unscrupulous vampire?” Mom asked, putting an extra

  stress on ‘unscrupulous’, to differentiate that woman from Dad and Nat. “It certainly seemed like it. And had I not changed into a wolf, she

  would have either killed me or made me a were-vampire. What’s the

  difference in the process, anyway?”

  “According to Andy, once your blood has been nearly all drained you

  have an immense craving for it, and will fight to drink from the vampire

  who has just bitten you. It’s stronger than any craving for nicotine or

  heroin could be. If they want you to be a vampire, they will give you a

  sip, but if they don’t, they fight you off, which isn’t too hard because you

  tend to be very weak. If a few minutes have passed and you haven’t

  sucked any blood, you simply die of exsanguination. The fiction writers