Sixteen Going on Undead

by Yvette Ford

  “Mmm-hmm.” She rolled her eyes at Ronnie. “Okay, well whatever. We were on our way home anyway, ’cause Sharon got in a fight with her husband earlier, and he followed us down to the club like he expected to find her cheating. I need to find some new friends because, for real, I can’t take all the drama.” With that statement, she directed a look at Ronnie, and he looked like he was about to faint.

  I had pity on him, grabbed his shirt front and dragged him to the door. “Sorry about the scare, Ma. Me and Ronnie are going to the movies. Be back about eleven thirty. Is that good?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, okay, sweetie. Have fun.”

  Outside, Ronnie stopped me and made me face him. “Why did you lie?”

  “What was I going to say? You couldn’t explain what happened, and neither could I. Who’s to say it wasn’t just like you or I said. A cute boy got grab happy, and you ran him off. Case closed.”

  He seemed to think about it, looking up at the sky. “Yeah, okay.”

  I walked past him to Mrs. Knowles’ front door. Ronnie caught up to me.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “You said she wasn’t out there. I don’t know what happened, but I know I ran outside because she was in trouble. I need to be sure she’s okay.”

  I rang her doorbell. While I waited tapping my foot, I took in the surroundings of my neighborhood. In the summer, the older folks sat on their porches and talked to each other over the railings. Sometimes if a younger mother sat out, she’d let her kids run around after dark as long as she could see them. But that was usually the woman directly across from my house. I called them the ghetto family. They came home at all hours, blasted music from their car at like one a.m., and yelled so loud when they got into arguments on the front porch, that I could hear the fussing from my room at the back of my house. I wished they would move out of the neighborhood and give us all a break.

  While I stood there, all of a sudden this weird feeling came over me. I don’t know if it was dizziness or what. Maybe not dizziness, more like clarity. I couldn’t describe it if I tried. It might be better if I said what the results of the feeling were.

  I had scooted down Mrs. Knowles wall and was flicking at a spot of dirt on my sneakers I assumed I’d gotten when I fell down in her yard. Then I realized I could hear her flick the channels on her TV at the back of the house. That was weird, but I thought it might be my imagination. Either way, that old woman was ignoring the bell. I knew for a fact that she didn’t have hearing problems even at her age.

  Without getting up, I reached for the bell and pressed it again. With my body twisted to the side like that, one of my ears faced the road, and I was on a line with my neighbor’s house across the street, the ones I’d called ghetto. The part that almost had me hyperventilating was that I could hear them getting into an argument. My mind must be playing tricks on me, but I listened.

  “So you’re not going to cook anything tonight?” the husband said. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t want to know. I knew the kids even though they weren’t my age. They were several years younger.

  “No, I’m not cooking,” the wife responded. “You ain’t think of me when you was out with your boys last night. I’m not thinking about you tonight.”

  “You’re not going to cook?” he asked again.

  “Did I stutter?”

  “Rochelle! What I marry you for?” So that was her name.

  Her response embarrassed me when she told him why he had married her. Not that I hadn’t heard that kind of talk before, but the fact that I was hearing it inside their house made me start shaking. I got up and walked down Mrs. Knowles’ sidewalk toward the curb. I stared at their house and then looked up and down the street. I didn’t see the husband’s SUV. Maybe I was wrong, or this was my imagination. He probably wasn’t even home.

  But then the front door banged open, and he stomped out. I looked away pretending I hadn’t been staring just now. The man flew down the steps to the street so fast, he stumbled, and I winced. That side of the street was steeper than our side for some reason. My side was almost flat ground, where their front lawn was a hill.

  His wife barreled out of the house after him. “And you better not stay out all night. I mean that, Malik. You hear me? Malik!”

  “The whole neighborhood hears you,” Ronnie muttered at my side. “Hey, you ready to go? She’s not going to answer, probably absorbed in who gets kicked off the island this week or something.”

  I would have laughed at that, but was too shocked. “They were arguing.”

  “What else is new?”

  “No, but I heard them before they got loud, Ronnie.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. I looked around at the different houses and tried to hear on purpose what was going on inside them. Nothing. Ronnie was looking at me with that raised eyebrow again. “I know you don’t believe it, but I heard it. My hearing was...I don’t know...strong.”

  Ronnie grinned and dragged me toward his brother’s car. “Yeah, just like that guy was biting your neck out back, right? Whatever, let’s go, or we’ll miss the next showing of Transformers.”

  I let Ronnie get me in the car, but it wasn’t until much later when I was tucked in bed thinking about how good the movie was that I realized one important fact about the crazy night. I had never told Ronnie that that guy was biting my neck.

  Chapter Two

  I decided to be a responsible sixteen-year-old and get a job. Everybody I knew had applied to the movie theatre. It was a cakewalk. You go in there, serve a few customers, and get to see all the free movies you want while getting paid. Wouldn’t you know though, they didn’t call me in for an interview. The place that did call me was the grocery store. Great. Heft people’s bags to their cars and many times—at least in our area—get stiffed on the tip. On top of that, where were the perks? I couldn’t see any. Like I wanted to work all around the clock, get my schedule shifted constantly, and stand on my feet until they felt like blocks of painful pulsating flesh.

  Okay, the real story is that I didn’t have much of a choice. My mother decided that since I was sixteen now, it was time for me to take more responsibility, and she convinced my dad to cut the money he gave me every month in half. So now, if I wanted to get my hair done or buy new clothes, I couldn’t get it when I wanted. My life was hard sometimes. At least I thought so.

  I put the madness of what happened in Mrs. Knowles’ yard out of my mind. I’d seen her a couple days later strolling along to who knows where, so she looked fine. I told myself it was all an early Halloween prank and moved on.

  “Okay, Tanesha, I’ll teach you how to operate the cash register. We’ll do a live run through since I have to pick up a few things for home,” the girl, Jill, who was training me, said. I put her at about eighteen or nineteen, definitely not older than that.

  I tried to muster some enthusiasm and smiled. “All right.”

  I don’t know who she was training, but when she rolled the items through the scanner and punched in codes for produce, I blinked at the blur her fingers were. I wasn’t learning a thing. “Did you get that?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I shook my head. “No.”

  She sighed. “I’ll run through this stuff too. Watch closely.”

  At the same speed of light, she whipped through a few more items, and then launched into a spiel that had my head spinning and my gnat-sized attention span stretched to breaking. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a piece of gum which I had purchased earlier when I arrived. Juicy watermelon flavor burst over my tongue, and I prepared to practice popping while scanning my surroundings.

  Four in the afternoon on a Tuesday had been a good time for me to start my first day, but that had been spent in orientation, watching a movie on customer service, hygiene, and sexual harassment, followed by a year long lecture from the store manager. Now it was getting dark outside, and all I wanted to do was flop across my bed and listen to some music while flipping through my favorite magazine until something good came on TV.
I knew right away that this job was going to be excruciating, especially if I couldn’t catch on to using the cash register. And here I had thought I was hot stuff with a B average in school. “Lack of focus” was what my father always said when I screwed up. Everybody couldn’t be driven like him, being a big shot lawyer.

  “Did you get that?” Jill asked.

  I forced my attention back on her, zooming in on her nose ring and wondering if my mother would freak if I got mine pierced. “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good.” She gestured to a customer in the growing line at the next register. “You can come over here. We’re open.” A small crowd vied for position at register four where we stood, jostling the candy rack. “Okay, we’re training here, so please excuse the slow going.” Several people drifted back where they came from.

  Jill backed up and put a hand on my shoulder to propel me forward. I shot her a look of annoyance but went on and scanned through my first customer. I made sure to look over her stuff to be sure she didn’t have any produce I would have to key in a code to handle. All of this was probably brainless work, but since my brain was on summer vacation, it was harder than it needed to be.

  Joy came in the form of an item that wouldn’t scan. I could relax for a minute. While Jill shouted over the intercom for help on four, I glanced toward the exit, wondering how close I was to getting off. I had forgotten to charge my cell phone which lay dead in my jeans pocket.

  Anyway, being focused on the door, I was able to catch sight of him when he walked in, all casual like he was pure and innocent. He wore snug jeans that hugged his narrow hips, and his sneakers were named brand from what I could see. A messy tee hung over the front of his pants, making him look sexy rather than bummy. But what really caught my eye and gave me trouble breathing was the thick, dark hair, overlong but wavy, about his head. The locks that tumbled onto his forehead, covering one of those hypnotizing eyes made my fingers itch to shove it back into place.

  Then I remembered what he had done to me. If not bitten me, at least attacked me and had to be beaten off. My anger flamed to life like a rocket. I spun to face Jill and held up a finger. “I have an emergency! I’ll be back.”

  The way I danced around, eager to get at this boy, Jill must have thought I had to pee. She nodded and took over the register. I ran around to an empty one, did a leap that my gym teacher would have been proud of over the cord blocking the aisle, and ran toward the back of the store.

  He had disappeared down the bread aisle if I wasn’t mistaken, but I didn’t want Jill to see me heading that way because it was in the opposite direction from the bathroom. Once I reached the back though, I ducked low and shuffled toward aisle six. I hadn’t learned where everything was yet, so I was crouched low with my head thrown back so I could see the signs up on the ceiling. I imagined I looked like a duck, and confirmed it when customers glanced at me and quickly aimed their carts elsewhere.

  At the end of the aisle, I stood up straight and flattened my back to the stack of Captain Crunch on special, and peeked out around a box. There he was as calm as you please looking at a loaf of Wonder bread. I could have laughed but didn’t. Anger surged up inside of me, and I lost it. How many times did my mother tell me I would be in trouble one day if I kept letting my anger get the best of me? I didn’t know, but this wasn’t the time to think about it.

  I stormed up to him and poked him in the chest. “Hey! What the hell are you doing here?”

  His eyes widened, and he looked at me like he’d never seen me before. “Hey, yourself.” His eyebrow went up in a way that reminded me of Ronnie. “I’m shopping. Nothing in the cabinets at home, and I was hungry.”

  “Just when did vampires start eating regular food!” I almost shouted and then felt stupid.

  He burst out laughing, and so did the skinny thing beside him. That was the first time I had noticed her. My attention had been all on him. She clung to his arm like they were girlfriend and boyfriend. She had to be like fifteen, maybe sixteen from her young looking face, but she was dressed like the skanky girls Ronnie and I used to make fun of at school, until one of them gave him some play last year. He never admitted what happened between them, and I never asked because I didn’t want to have to start with my own confessions.

  The girl was white like Sexy Boy, but she had flaming red hair. And when I say flaming, I mean the strands were so bright, they looked like they were on fire, and it was long too, down to her butt. She had huge boobs, a tiny waist, and long bare legs under a way too short skirt. If I even tried to leave the house like that, my mother would have jumped me.

  “Who is this, Lorcan?” She sneered at me, wrinkling her cute little nose and widening big green eyes. I hated her right away.

  Lorcan. So that was Sexy Boy’s name. Nice.

  “I’m not sure,” he responded. “Do I know you?”

  He wasn’t serious. He couldn’t be serious. I didn’t dream him up. With a face like that, and a body like his? Okay, I could have, but I didn’t. That would be too freaky, too weird to dream of a guy and then there he was looking exactly like my imaginary one. But Ronnie had seen him. He’d hit him with the bat to run him off, he’d said. Then again, that didn’t prove anything. I mean, I could be remembering the wrong face, and because this boy was hot, I attacked him. Oh crap. I’d called him a vampire too. Loud so anybody nearby could hear. I must look like a maniac, and I could lose my job.

  All these emotions went flying through my head at the speed of light, and they must have shown on my face because Skanky and Lorcan stared at me in shock and doubt. She clung to him like I was about to jump her skinny butt. My anger melted just like that. I backed up, waving my hands in front of me, laughing with this half chuckle that Ronnie made fun of me for.

  “Wrong person. Sorry. Bye.” I spun away and high-tailed it toward the bathroom, but when I hit that door with the flat of my hands, I heard laughing inside, other employees who were either on break or ducking out for a few minutes.

  I looked to the left and saw this guy whose name I forgot because I was sure he’d forgotten mine or never heard it when we were introduced earlier. He’d looked right through me with glazed eyes. He was headed to the back exit with a trash bag in his hand. I raced toward him and snatched it away.

  “I’ll get that. Be back in a sec.” I ran out the door into the huge lot behind the grocery store and threw the trash into the Dumpster. When the store’s door banged shut on the guy’s shout of “hey,” I bent over and stooped to catch my breath.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Why had I acted like that? Why didn’t I just let it go? No big deal. He wasn’t the boy. I’ve heard people joking about other races like they all look alike, and black people get it a lot, and probably Asians. Some blacks felt the same about white people, but I could pick Lorcan out from a crowd. At least, I thought so after seeing him once. I mean the boy had been all in my face, cute. “Ugh! Stupid!” I screamed into the empty night.

  “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  I gasped and fell backward, landing on my butt. Just as I had thought, designer sneakers, the kind that cost at least a couple hundred. Licking my lips, I glanced up from his feet to his face. He was grinning down at me holding out a hand. I smacked it away and stood up on my own while wiping dirt from my jeans.

  “What do you want? Come to gloat at how I made a fool of myself?” I looked around, wondering how he had gotten out here since customers weren’t allowed in the back, and with that guy I’d snatched the trash from standing there, it wasn’t likely he’d let Lorcan get past. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

  He winked. “Are you jealous?”

  “Get real. I don’t know you.”

  “You acted like you did in the store.”

  “You attacked me!” I shouted and then forced myself to calm down. Come to think of it, he could do that again, right here where no one would see. I started backing up to the door, feeling behind me for the doorknob. For every step I took back, he came closer, les
sening the space between us.

  My heart beat hard enough to hurt. I swallowed over and over but couldn’t get my throat wet. Moisture started in my armpits, and I tried to remember if I had slapped on some deodorant when I took a shower this afternoon before my shift. I was pretty sure I did since I was a stickler for that sort of thing. I might never have been kissed but it wasn’t because I stunk, that’s for sure. Then I started wondering, why was I thinking about being kissed at a time like this? I should be worried that I was about to die or something.

  Lorcan tsked and shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. Not hungry. I’ve already sucked all the blood I need for the night.” He said the words, but the way he said them sounded like he was making fun of me. That didn’t change how I felt. I could tell myself all day and night vampires don’t exist and that I made it all up, but I was scared to death that it was true. I couldn’t make myself not believe it, no matter how hard I tried.