Pretty Dead

by Francesca Lia Block

  Still, I do think about coffins. Not the rotting, rat-infested boxes of Nosferatu. Long cherrywood caskets lined with pink satin. Golden hinges and locks, a golden key. How I would look laid out that way with my hair spread about my shoulders, over my breasts, in the sheer white Victorian lace.

  How did Emily look in her coffin under the earth? I tried not to imagine it. I was so alone without her, my only companion. I kept thinking I heard her laughing in my house. I dreamed of chasing her down the corridors at school, touching her warm, bony shoulder. The girl with the brown curls turned around, but just as in the films it was never her. She was gone, and I had no one left to turn to unless Jared Pierce became my friend.

  No, I do not sleep in a coffin. The night he made me, William Stone Eliot showed me the huge, black, shiny one he slept in. He told me that alchemists used to call coffins “the philosophical egg.” “A place of transmutation,” he said. “Entrapment and rebirth. In what way, my darling, will you be transformed?”

  I wondered why I was transforming now, after the death of my best and only friend. Was there some kind of connection? I thought of the broken nail, the pimple that had started to heal, the five days of blood. All this change and no coffin to speak of, though perhaps one awaited me at last.

  The Fires

  It was October, but the air was hot. The Santa Anas were sweeping wildfire through the hills of Malibu. Thousands of people had evacuated. Every morning the city advised us to hose down our roofs. Movie stars and diet gurus had already lost their mansions. The air was black with smoke, and strangely even I could feel it in my newly vulnerable throat.

  A few days after William’s return, Jared Pierce came to my door. He stood there on the porch with his hands in his pockets. His back was slumped. His pupils looked large and glazed.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  And I let him in.

  We sat on the velvet couch where I used to sit with Emily. She always tucked her feet up under her. She reminded me of a little bird perched on a nest. Quick, bright eyes, quick shoulders like wings.

  I offered Jared some wine, but he refused. He sat tensely upright, looking suspiciously around the room.

  “Why were you following me?”

  “What?” I widened my eyes innocently.

  “Don’t act like you don’t know. I saw you following me. I want to know why.” He moved closer to me. His gaze was menacing, but I saw that really he was just afraid.

  “I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  He stared at me for a long time. I felt heat rising to my cheeks again. How strange.

  “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “What I was going to do?”

  “So you were going to…”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Jared…” I wanted to reach out and touch his arm, but I kept my hands still.

  He took my hand as if it were a piece of sculpture or a scientific experiment, turned it, examined the skin, ran a finger along one visible vein.

  “I know what you are,” he finally said.

  I pulled my hand away and stood up.

  The warmth continued to move through my body. I couldn’t have explained it then, but instead of anxiety I felt a sense of relief. No one had ever understood before. Somehow it seemed that Jared had figured it out. I felt less alone in that moment. Even Emily hadn’t known what I was. Only Jared. But how could he know? In any case, I couldn’t let him see how his accusation was affecting me.

  “Oh, really? And who is that? I mean, what is that? I’m noticing you called me a what,” I bantered, trying to gather myself.

  He looked away, and for a moment I felt I had gained the upper hand in spite of what he had charged me with.

  “Don’t make me say it,” he mumbled.

  “Why? Are you afraid to sound ridiculous?” I poured myself more wine and sat in a chair across from him.

  “All I know is that I don’t want to be here this way. Without her. It sucked enough before. This whole fucking planet. Without her I can’t do it. I need your help. No one else can help me.”

  “How?” I asked softly.

  “I know what you are,” he said again.

  I took a long sip of wine. It was real wine, not the cow blood I usually drank.

  “Just say it, then.”

  “Fuck! Okay. You want me to say it? The walking dead? Child of the night? Night angel? Bloodsucker? Daughter of Dracula? You choose.”

  “I actually prefer the V word,” I said. “It sounds awful, but it has a lot of power. Come to think of it, that applies to both V words.”

  Jared’s body jolted forward as if someone had jerked his invisible marionette strings. “Make me one!”

  I knew better than to make a joke about the second V word at that moment. But I honestly wished he was asking me for that instead. Human girls don’t have it easy in a culture that makes their beautiful burgeoning sexuality sound ugly and taboo, but at least they don’t have to go through this. I finished my wine to the dregs. A queer dizziness came over me.

  “Let’s just say I am one. Why would you want me to change you? You’d have to live without Emily forever.” I looked out the windows. Fires were raging in the distance. Just a few weeks before, I would have felt the heat and heard the crackle as if I had been standing in the center of the flames, but I would have been immune to even the sensation of smoke in my lungs and throat.

  “So it’s true.”

  “I never said that.”

  “I know it’s true. Emily told me things.”

  “Like what?” I wanted more wine.

  “She said you had about a million bottles of sunscreen, that you were fanatic about using it.”

  “I have sensitive skin. Besides, I heard that V words can’t be out in the sun at all.”

  “She said you talked about death all the time. And you had clothes, old clothes that fit you perfectly, like they’d been made for you a hundred years ago.”

  “What can I say? I have a good tailor. This is ridiculous.”

  “Then once she sipped that wine you kept for yourself. You’d never let her have any; you said it wasn’t as good as what you gave her. And it tasted thick and salty and not like wine at all.”

  “See?” I said. “I was telling the truth. It wasn’t as good. It sucks, actually. Not even human blood; it’s from cows. I get it from a black market dealer named Tolstoy, and he knows he can charge me whatever he wants.”

  Jared jumped to his feet. He looked as if he’d lost weight in the last few days, so that his body seemed to dangle from his broad shoulders like the plastic skeleton decorating my neighbor’s door. His face was as pale as mine.

  “So it is true!”

  “I was just joking.” (I wasn’t. Tolstoy is a thief, but I hadn’t called him since Emily died over a week ago. I had less and less appetite for his contraband now, though I wasn’t sure why.)

  “Stop acting like this is funny! You are fucked-up.”

  “So are you.”

  “That’s right. I want you to fuck me up even more.”

  “That’s not an escape. You can never escape this planet that way.”

  “But it won’t matter anymore what happens. Nothing will matter.”

  Suddenly I wanted to hold him in my arms, comfort him like a child. I wanted to share my secret. It had been hard to hide it for so long.

  Instead, I pushed him away with my words. “Just admit it. You want the power, don’t you? What you think is power. It’s not. And it’s not true that things stop mattering. That’s the piece you don’t hear about. You still care. You still want. You’re still lonely. More lonely. And you still weep, or you would weep if you could—you wish you could weep for some relief—when you live long enough to see the planet you once wanted to escape from burning like a patch of grass under a magnifying glass in the sun.”

  I thought for a moment that he would drop to his knees and beg me.
There were tears in his eyes. They weren’t hollow anymore. He had come to life, realizing there was one thing left he still wanted now that Emily was gone.

  But it wasn’t an option.

  “I’m sorry, Jared,” I said, as softly as I could. “I want to help you, but I can’t do that to you. I mean, I wouldn’t. If I were one.”

  I wasn’t really lying. I was no longer sure if I was a V word or if it was possible for me to change him at all. Perhaps the story of Mariette and Camille was not just a fairy tale.

  Before I could say anything more, Jared turned and fled from my house into the smoky night.

  Need

  Jared came back to see me the next evening, hunched in my doorway with that black hair hiding his green eyes. My heart surged in my chest, but I feigned calm. Once again, I let him in.

  “What do you want? I told you…”

  “I came for something else.”

  “Why should I talk to you? You made some terrible accusations.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

  I hesitated for a moment. “Accepted.”

  “I want her back,” he said, and my heart sank like the stones Charles and I used to toss into the lake when we were so very young.

  I beckoned him to follow me into the kitchen. I poured him wine, this time without asking, and he took the large glass. I sliced fresh tuna into thin strips with the sharp blade of my kitchen knife. I laid the fish out on a plate with ginger and wasabi. Then we went into the garden and sat by the pool where I first swam with Emily. I imagined her stepping out of the water, naked and laughing, so pretty, so in love with Jared Pierce.

  He didn’t eat with me, but he drank his wine, and I filled a second glass for him. In the distance we could see the fires flaring along the horizon like a second sunset, like the devil’s barbecue.

  “Are you coming back to school?” he asked me.

  “I don’t think so. I’m sick of it, anyway.”

  “Why did you go at all?”

  “It was a lark. I wanted to see what it was like for all of you.”

  “That’s how I feel,” he said. “I want to understand you. How it works. What you are.”

  “Why?”

  “Since Emily…I started thinking about death. And how to escape it. If there had been a way for her to escape it. You have the answer.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I see that you do. I see it in you. But I want to understand it better.” He paused, and I saw his mouth twitch with concentration. “I want to paint you.”

  And then he had me.

  I wanted to be seen the way he had seen Emily in those portraits he did of her. Not as a body but as a soul. Jared could do that. But maybe only with someone he loved. Maybe I would only look like the monster I was inside.

  We sat in silence for a while. It was as if this subject he had broached had frightened both of us but also linked us somehow, like some kind of oath sealed in blood. After the sun set, we went into the house. Jared went out to his car and came back with a sketch pad. I sat on the red sofa with my feet tucked under me, the way Emily always sat, and stared at him.

  “Take your hair down,” he said.

  I reached up and undid the tortoiseshell pins. My hair tumbled over my shoulders.

  “Do you think you can understand things by drawing them?” I asked him.

  “Yes. If you really look.”

  “Tell me what you can understand from looking at me.”

  He paused for a moment. “You are beautiful, that’s the first thing. It’s almost too much. It keeps most people from seeing anything beyond that. It’s the perfect disguise for you. It blinds us. But you’re more than that.”

  He was squinting at my mouth, dashing lines on the page.

  “You are incredibly lonely. That’s why your eyes look so hungry, and your mouth, it’s almost…what’s the word?…depraved, the way your lip droops.”

  I flinched a little under his gaze.

  “You aren’t just hungry in a bloodthirsty way. You’re hungry for something inside. And you look young, but you move like someone tired who doesn’t want to be here, who’s trapped in this graceful body but isn’t graceful anymore.”

  It was hard for me to sit so still, hearing those words, feeling those eyes. He kept sketching.

  “You’re savage. But there’s another part of you that’s really sweet. And that’s the problem….”

  He didn’t stop sketching. With every mark he made on the page then, I felt a scratch on my skin. There was nothing I could say in reply to his words.

  “Am I right?”

  “I can’t decide if you are cruel or the kindest person I’ve ever met.”

  “How is that kind?” he said, but his voice was soft.

  “Everyone wants to be seen and understood.”

  “Emily understood me,” he said. “She was the only one.”

  “You are lucky,” I told him. “I couldn’t let her get that close to me. I wanted to protect her from that understanding.”

  “You don’t need to protect me,” he said. “I’ve never needed protection.”

  “I see that. Never before. Now you do.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I do, actually. I can tell a lot by looking, too. I’ve been observing things for a long time.”

  “Okay. Go ahead. Tell me.”

  I closed my eyes. I saw a little boy with black hair and catlike eyes sitting at a table with a family of blonds. They were all laughing, and he wasn’t. There was a little blond girl next to him. She took the last roll out and handed him the basket, empty, shrugging her shoulders and smirking.

  “Stupid pig,” he said.

  The man at the head of the table stood up, grabbed the boy, and dragged him away. The boy was crying and screaming, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  I could see the visions of Jared just as I had been able to see my Charles, the boy I had loved most. It seemed as if these visions were reserved for only my most potent relationships, and they were returning.

  “You felt left out when you were growing up,” I said. “The outsider. The black sheep. You still are. You lost your real family just as I lost mine. You want revenge. Even being here with me now feels like revenge.”

  Jared was quiet. I knew I was right.

  I kept talking. My eyes were still closed. “You started painting because it was the only way to feel all right. Painting and playing guitar and writing songs. And then you met Emily.”

  I saw Jared and Emily lying on her bed. Her virginal twin bed with the stuffed animals on it. Purple bears and pink unicorns and lambs with wings. Jared’s body was long and lean, wrapped around her from behind. His hands were on her breasts. Her head was thrust back to reach his mouth.

  I opened my eyes.

  “You know a lot about me,” he said. “Tell me something else about you, to make it fair.”

  I surprised myself with the words I spoke next. “I’ve wanted a baby for a long time,” I said. “But I thought it was impossible.”

  “You want a baby? That’s one thing I couldn’t see.”

  Jared looked into my eyes. He didn’t seem shocked. He didn’t look as if he might run away. From my years of experience, I think that, as a general rule, babies frighten young men much more than vampires.

  “Take off your shirt,” he said.

  I looked down at my chiffon blouse. My breasts were tingling with an unfamiliar sensation. I unbuttoned the tiny pearls and took off the blouse to reveal my ivory lace bra. The tingling in my nipples intensified. I hadn’t felt this for years.

  “Take off your bra.” He was looking in my eyes now, harder, as if challenging me not to look away.

  I met his gaze defiantly, reached around, and unhooked the bra. My breasts fell out, full and pale, a little too big, out of proportion to my narrow rib cage and waist.

  “You loved Emily more than anyone. Because you never felt loved by your parents, you thought it was impossible for
you to feel any kind of love for anyone at all. Let alone this much love for one small girl on a bed covered with stuffed toys.”

  Jared lowered his eyes and kept sketching. I noticed that his hands were shaking. He worked for a long time, more slowly than before. The night seemed to be gathering itself around us like clouds of black smoke. After a while he stood up and walked over to me. He showed me what he had made.

  The portrait looked exactly like me. But not as I thought of myself looking now. In Jared’s picture I was the girl who had cantered through the fields with her twin brother and collapsed with him by the fireplace at twilight, cheeks flushed and love flickering in her eyes.

  Jared fell to his knees before me.

  “Please, Char,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse. “This isn’t only about Emily. Or wanting to escape.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He took my hand, but not to examine it this time. He pressed my open palm to his chest.

  “It’s about you.”

  “But you loved Emily.”

  With his other hand, Jared reached up and stroked my face. I closed my eyes and turned my cheek into his hand. It fit perfectly there. I felt as if he were cradling a fragile shell.

  “I did love her,” he said. “And I tried not to think about you, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted you from the first time I saw you. Didn’t you know that?”

  I pulled away from him as if he had scratched me. “Why? Because of my tits? Because of my hair? I’m sick of all you boys thinking beauty is the only thing.”

  “No. It wasn’t how you look. Emily was beautiful, even though she didn’t believe it. You’re way too much.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know what I mean. The reason I wanted you…it was all the things you’ve been through. I could see them in your face even though it’s so pretty. A century of things. I want to get inside. I want to understand them.”

  He sat beside me on the couch and ran the back of his hand up and down my arm. It was as if every hair that stood up was a tiny bolt of electricity.