I closed my eyes and counted extra slowly, in Mississippis. Then I got distracted and started thinking about Mississippi. Were there vampires in Mississippi? Was there rain? For a brief second, I forgot what number came after 79.
After I had counted to a hundred ten times, starting over again every time Edwart shrieked, “Not ready yet,” I opened my eyes and shielded them against the sun, now significantly exposed in the clear sky. What I saw bewildered me. Edwart was standing in the middle of the field, glistening. His skin had transformed into a shade of fire-engine red, and the sweat dripping from his every pore intensified the illusion that his head was a shiny tomato.
In his hand was a shovel and at his feet was a hole.
“This is what I want to show you,” he said.
“I’m already familiar with beetles,” I said, expertly popping one into my mouth.
“Listen, Belle. This is a secret that I can only entrust to you.” He stooped down into the hole and wrestled out a man-sized android. “Are you scared yet?”
“No. It’s beautiful.” I took a step forwards to touch its arm. Edwart stiffened.
“Sorry,” he said.” I wasn’t prepared for your movement. When you’re around androids all day, you get used to controlling when and how people move. This whole human interaction thing, well … it’s going to take some getting used to.”
“That’s all right.” So I was the only human Edwart had contact with. I stepped towards it more slowly, trying to do humanity justice. “What is it, exactly?”
“It’s a solar-powered, anatomically correct android. I keep it in this bright, secluded meadow so it can charge openly without fearing that rivals in the annual Robotics Competition will kidnap it. After I turn it off, I bury it out of respect.”
“What does it do?”
“Allow me to demonstrate.” He turned it on and the robot’s eyes glowed red. It stood up slowly, each joint clicking into place. When it reached its full height, its head spun towards me. Then it collapsed back on the floor like a punctured soufflé before slowly beginning to rise again.
“That’s it? It just falls over and gets back up over and over?”
“Yep—look at it struggle. Look how many synthetic muscles it has to use. The human body is an extraordinary thing.” He took my hand. “Feel how smooth I’ve made its skin.”
As he pulled my hand, I leaned in, mesmerized by Edwart’s face. My lips drew closer to his heavily braced mouth.
“Ahhhhhhh!”
Edwart was rolling away on the ground, arms outstretched like a rolling pin. My fast actions had caught him off guard again.
“It’s my fault,” he yelped, still rolling. “I can’t kiss you until we’re officially going out. It’s part of ‘The Rules.’” He stopped rolling and sat up, his breath rattling in his chest as he heaved. “Isabelle. Isa. Izzy. Belly-Belle. Will you go out with me? I don’t mean physically go out—we can stay inside and work on a website that promotes this robot all you want. I mean hypothetically. Like, if you were to go outside with someone, to a place, that person would be me. And that place would be an arcade.”
I looked into his eyes and saw the one thing he couldn’t say: Every moment I look at you it takes all the discipline I can muster not to take you in my arms and drink from the fount of your throat.
“I’m not afraid of you, Isa-Edwart,” I said, speaking his full name as softly as he had said mine.
“Still? You’re still not afraid of me? I assure you—I am an incredibly scary guy!” He stood there for a minute, thinking, then jogged across the field.
“As if you could outrun me!” he shouted.
“As if you could outfight me!” He punched the air.
“As if you could outclimb me!” He hugged a tree and tried to wrap his legs around it before tumbling to the ground and trotting back to me, placing his hands on his head to maximize the inflow of oxygen.
“Now are you afraid? Now will you go out with me?”
That took me by surprise. Asking permission was something only knights from ancient centuries did. Then I remembered how old Edwart really was—that hundreds of years ago, he was living among Napoleon and Jesus.
“Yes, Edwart. Yes.” I was so attracted to him I could have peed myself right there on the spot, but I hadn’t done anything like that in a while. I was older now, and harnessed my feelings in moments like these by opening and closing my fists very rapidly.
“Great!” he said, and then stared at me. I stared at him. I lay down on the grass. He lay down next to me. We made grass angels in synchronized motions. The time flew by as if in a dream.
“Belle,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
“Already?”
“It’s been five hours. We’ve been lying on the grass staring at each other for five hours. Please … I really need to get home.”
I nodded sleepily. “Do you think you could carry me back to the car with your super-strength? Not everyone can speed through a dense forest at over a hundred mph, you know.”
“Over a hundred mph? Geez!” he muttered, but took a deep breath. “Okay, Belle. Over a hundred mph, here we go.” He pulled out a sleeping bag from his camping pack. “Close your eyes and put your arms around my neck.”
I did as he asked. At first, I felt us lowering to the ground, speedily. Then, a comforting feeling, of soft down beneath my shins. Edwart made a few scooching movements and we were off, speeding down the hill.
When I felt safe enough to open my eyes, my truck was in front of us. Edwart was standing up, brushing himself off. The sun had set, but I thought I noticed a faint glimmer of scorching crimson haunting his skin.
“Drive me to my car, please,” he said. “I need to be in bed by eight.” I started the car. The engine hummed gently, harmonizing with Edwart’s sudden onslaught of snores. I gazed at the sweet vampire drool dribbling down his cheek from his open mouth. It suddenly occurred to me that, after all that frolicking in the meadows, he hadn’t kissed me. Was it because of the mold that grew in my sinuses? Or the fact that the only way to treat the mold was to pour burning fat in my nose, massacring their colonies? Or was he disgusted that, deep in my heart, I considered the mold a part of me?
No. He couldn’t possibly know about that. The sinus mold was one secret I would carry with me to the grave.
The grave! It was inescapable. One day, I would die in a beautiful explosion, but Edwart would live on. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t kissed me. Maybe, he couldn’t afford to get attached to a person tragically bound to become a million glittering particles.
I looked at his tiny body curled up in the passenger seat. In a year, I would be eighteen, but Edwart would still be seventeen. He would still have the youthful frame of a twelve year-old, but I would have saggy, postpartum flesh and rheumatism. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to kiss me. Who would want to kiss a pair of lips that, at any moment, could turn into a wrinkled old pile of dust?
Unless I, too, became a vampire! Nothing would keep Edwart’s lips from mine if we were both immortal. All Edwart had to do was bite and he would never again have to worry about the beautiful memories I would lose to Alzheimer’s in college.
About three things I was absolutely certain. First, Edwart was most likely my soul mate, maybe. Second, there was a vampire part of him—which I assumed was wildly out of his control—that wanted me dead. And third, I unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, wished that he had kissed me.
7. THE MULLENS
THE EGGSHELL-COLORED DAWN WOKE ME WITH ITS gentleness. My right leg was in my left armpit. Stuffed Dracula was tucked under my arm comfortingly. Ah, the beginning of another chapter.
I groggily sat up and involuntarily let out a bloodcurdling scream. There was a vampire in my room! And he was screaming, too.
“What’s that on your face?” Edwart shrieked.
“What? What?” I put my fingers to my cheek and felt something sticky. “Oh, that’s just my night moisturizing mas
k.” The mask made me look like a warrior, bravely fighting facial dryness.
I could see from Edwart’s expression that he was trying to understand. So I wouldn’t be embarrassed, he bent down and took some mud from the bottom of his sneaker and smeared it on his face. He smiled at me. So sweet, I thought. He howled furiously, gnashing his teeth in anger as he wiped the mud out of his eyes. So romantic, I thought.
“How did you get in here?” I asked when he was done flailing.
“I told your dad we had to work on a science project,” he said.
“Now? In the morning?” “It’s one p.m., Belle.”
I remembered that last night I had slept with my head on the floor and my legs on the bed, to prepare for my inevitable life as a bat. At about five a.m. I gave up and slept in a position more fitting to my second career option: Vampire Yoga instructor.
I looked at him suspiciously, through my magnifying glass. “Have you been coming here in secret, night after night, to watch me sleep?”
“No! No! Of course not! That would be so weird! I’ve only been here a few minutes.” Then he added quietly, “You look pretty when you sleep.”
I blushed. My moisturizing mask came with beauty mark stickers, which I had arranged artfully on my face.
“Thanks. Did I … do or say anything?” I asked. I was a known sleep-biter, which was a problem at summer camp, and probably why I liked Edwart. I was also a known sleep-talker. I hoped I hadn’t revealed anything embarrassing, like the fact that sometimes I fall down.
“You said my name,” he said with a little smile.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Well, it was either that or ‘Edwin,’ but why would you say ‘Edwin?’” he laughed.
Suddenly last night’s dream came to me. It was about the one person I’d like to have dinner with, living or dead: U.S. Secretary of War under Lincoln, Edwin Stanton.
“Yeah … weird!” I said guiltily as I got out of bed and went over to the mirror above my desk. My hair looked like a tangled, puffy mess. I decided to leave it. Very Retro 80s chic. “So, what are we going to do today, Edwart?”
“After the science project, you mean?”
“But I thought you made that up so that you could bypass my dad’s background check into whether you are good enough to date me?”
“Oh, he still checked me,” Edwart said with a shiver. “First he washed me vertically with one side of his wiper. Then he dried me horizontally with the other side of his wiper.” He shrugged. “I’d do the same for my daughter. Anyway, you’re right, there is no science project,” he continued. “But have you ever made your own volcano? You build a mount of dirt with a hole in it and then you mix red food coloring, vinegar, and baking soda and pour it in the hole and it actually explodes! It’s so awesome.”
We made two volcanoes, so they could race each other. Edwart kept screaming “Oh my God so cool so cool!” even as we were gathering dirt. After we were finished cleaning up the kitchen, Edwart sat in Jim’s chair. It was weird to see him sitting where Jim had been sitting just a few hours earlier, and where, centuries earlier, Native American werewolves would have lived.
“So my mom really wants to meet you,” Edwart said. “We refer to you as ‘Bellerific.’ My mom and I have tons of inside jokes like that.”
“I’d love to! But … will she like me?” I asked, just for show, because parents always like me.
“Of course!” he said. “She just wants me to be happy. She wouldn’t care if you were in a coma, or even severely deformed.”
I thought of my tendency to sleep a lot and my right leg, which is slightly longer than my left. So, Edwart had noticed my inadequacies.
“Yes, well, take my right leg or leave it,” I said peevishly. “Many boys at school like me.”
He looked down at the ground, down towards my freak leg. I could tell by the way he was silent and rubbed his head that he accepted me and my leg just the way it was.
“Do you want to go over now?” he asked after a few minutes of silent contemplation, probably about how lucky he was to be dating a normal human.
I figured that if what Edwart said about his parents was true, they wouldn’t care if I was still wearing my onesie pajamas.
Edwart liked to drive my U-HAUL. I think this was because there was plenty of room for the large rolling backpack he carried around with him everywhere. We drove down to the end of my street, past Last Chance Batteries, past No Return Videos, and past This Is Absolutely The End Books. Edwart got on the highway and drove by several exits. I started getting impatient. I was finally about to ask him if he liked me for me or for my paper cuts when Edwart turned the truck around.
“This is such a fun car!” he exclaimed, honking at the drivers near us. Suddenly, a large Safeway truck came up in the next lane. It blew its horn in response.
“Uh oh,” Edwart said. “He’s too big for us.” Edwart put his foot down on the gas and we zoomed back towards Switchblade.
“That was dangerous, right?” Edwart asked me nervously. “I’m dangerous, right?”
“Of course, Edwart,” I said, thinking less about his driving and more about his teeth ripping through my skin.
A few minutes later we pulled into the driveway of a house a couple blocks from mine, but on the wealthy-vampire side of town.
“Well, we’re here,” Edwart said, getting out and slapping the side of the U-HAUL, “You and me,” he said, pressing his face to the truck at the level of the lumberjack’s ankle. “We’ll beat ‘em every time.”
As soon as we were inside, Edwart’s family rushed to greet me. What seemed like thirty people circled me, chattering away.
“Oh my god, you smell good.”
“Good smell, good smell.”
“(She really does smell good.)”
“Do you mind if I put my nose right on you? Right on your arm?”
“More smelly smelly please.”
“If I could destroy every part of my brain except the part that smelled your smell, I would do it. I would do it in a second.”
“Let’s go, Belle,” Edwart whispered and grabbed my hand. We pushed through the ravenous vampires and out the front door.
“So that went well!” I said outside in the U-HAUL. I sniffed my hair. I did smell good.
“No, no, that wasn’t my house,” Edwart said, starting the truck. “I don’t know even know those people! Sometimes I get addresses confused.”
We drove to a bigger mansion. As we walked up to its porch, I noticed that the house wasn’t cleverly camouflaged with the woods behind it, like I first thought—it was made entirely of glass. I looked around in shock. The walkway was glass, the mailbox was glass, and the welcome mat was glass. I decided not to wipe my feet.
“Our house is clear. We don’t keep any secrets,” Edwart explained. “Anyone can look in at any time and see what we’re doing.”
I imagined Edwart’s family sitting in the living room, drinking blood cocktails.
“Do your neighbors say anything?” I asked.
“Well, they keep their blinds down. They say it’s ‘indecent,’ but my dad is such a good plastic surgeon that no one really cares.”
Edwart’s dad, Dr. Claudius Mullen, opened the door when we rang. Claudius was well respected in Switchblade for his Angelina Jolie lips. People say he operated on himself for hours. I had to admit, the result was stunning.
Eva Mullen, Edwart’s mom, came running up behind him.
“Edwart, my darling!” she cried.
“Mom, meet Belle.”
“Oh you’re lovely! Much lovelier than I thought. Edwart’s so weird, you know.”
Trust me. I thought. I know.
“You look like a 1920s movie star!” I blurted. Early horror films were my favorite.
“Thank you, Belle,” Dr. Mullen said. “It’s my work. The eyes, of course, are hers. The heart is a transplant.”
So that’s why vampires are so beautiful. And cruel.
“Pleased to meet you
,” I said, imagining how good they’d all look in our wedding photos. For a minute I felt worried thinking of the joint-family pictures, but then I thought, it won’t be a problem; I’ll ask Jim to be the photographer.
“And that’s not all the work I’ve done on this family,” Dr. Mullen continued. “You see Edwart’s handsome forehead?”
“Dad!” Edwart whined.
The Mullens were silent.
I suddenly felt awkward, like I didn’t know what to do with my thumbs. So I took out my phone and texted “sup?” to Lucy. I wondered if she had my number, or if the random set of digits I guessed was her number.
When I looked up, Eva and Claudius were also texting.
I glanced around the room for something to compliment when it came time to communicate by speaking again. I was just about to remark on an exquisite electrical outlet in the corner, when I noticed the grand piano.
“Nice piano,” I said, imagining how good it would look in wedding photos, provided that Jim wasn’t lurking in the background. “Do you play?”
“Oh no,” Eva Mullen said, “But Edwart does!”
“A little,” Edwart said, sheepishly.
“Go ahead, play!” Eva said. She picked up the triangle that was lying on the piano and handed it to Edwart. He started banging on it. It sounded like construction work very early in the morning.
“Whoops. I messed up. Let me start over,” he said.
He started banging again.
“Wait. Uh. I haven’t practiced in a while. Let me start over.”
Edwart continued to bang the triangle. Eva closed her eyes and raised her arms, swaying rhythmically to Edwart’s music. Edwart held the triangle up high, in what appeared to be a grand finish, but then he brought it down hard, hitting the top of the piano. He continued to bang the piano, putting the entire force of his slim body into each smash. The piano shook. The room vibrated.
When he was finished I subtly removed my hands from my ears.
“I wrote that for you,” Edwart murmured, drawing me close. “It’s called Belle’s Lullaby.”
“I’ll listen to it every night!” I said. With the sound turned all the way down, it would be lovely. This was the third lullaby that had been written for me, counting the one by Carter Burwell.
Nightlight Page 7