by Molly Harper
“Oh, this is Jane, from the PTA. We’ve got the Pumpkin Patch Party coming up, lots to plan,” I explained airily. It seemed that once you had no pulse or blood pressure, lying came a lot easier. Yay for me and my already slippery morality.
“School hasn’t even started yet,” Les noted. “And you haven’t been able to help at the school in months.”
“PTA business never stops,” Jane supplied helpfully. “And Libby has been feeling better lately. I’ll bet in the next few weeks, you’ll see a real turnaround. Right, Libby?”
I stared at Jane, who was smiling as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—which, given her lower body temperature, was plausible. She seemed to be enjoying this just a little too much.
“It’s not fair to give her false hope,” Marge admonished Jane.
“I am feeling better,” I told Marge, and before she could object, I called after Danny. “Honey, come tell Mamaw and Papa good-bye, and then it’s time for bed!”
“I can stay, give him a bath and help put my baby down to sleep,” Marge offered, still eyeing Jane.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “I need to get used to doing things on my own again.”
My mother-in-law edged toward the truck, wearing her suspicious face, but for once in our relationship, she chose discretion over interrogation. Vampirism might have some benefits I hadn’t even considered yet.
“You know, it’s at times like these that I’m grateful my in-laws died a century before I met their son,” Jane said, waving cheerfully as the truck backed out of my driveway. “Next time, marry an orphan, sweetie.”
“No one likes a gloater, Jane.”
3
Vampirism adds an additional layer of challenge to parenting, an already challenging prospect. As your child develops from a baby to a toddler to the child who makes you cringe when he gets near a microphone in public places, so you must develop, too.
—My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting
It’s going to sound super-creepy, but I spent my first night with Danny watching him curled up on his bed in his Spider-Man pajamas. I sat on the floor with my hand on his chest, watching it rise and fall. It was as if I’d never seen my son before, and I couldn’t stop looking at him.
Jane was just down the hall, going over some inventory reports for her shop, keeping one ear open for any suspicious “bite-y” sounds. But really, sitting there in the dark, quiet home, listening to my son breathe, it felt like any night before I died. It felt strange to me that my life had changed in such a major way, but Danny hadn’t noticed a difference. I wondered if it was the blessing of being so young or if I had managed to cling to the most stubborn parts of my humanity. I hoped that was it.
What if no one else saw the change in me, either? Part of me wanted that, like somehow I could pretend nothing had happened and keep people from finding out that I was a vampire now. That was reasonable, right?
OK, no, no, it wasn’t. I knew that I was going to have to tell them eventually. But I wanted to get Danny settled into our new routine, get him in school, and demonstrate that I could take care of him even with my new “condition.” So when my maternal fitness inevitably came into question, I would have some parental street cred built up. My son was never going to have a normal life. First he was poor Danny whose father had died. And now he was poor Danny whose mother was a monster. I contemplated starting a savings account for his therapy as soon as there was some extra money in the budget.
Besides, I knew how Half-Moon Hollow residents talked about their neighbors who’d been turned. Like it was something the new vampires brought on themselves. Like it was something that could never happen to them. Frankly, it was the same way my classmates whispered about girls who got pregnant in high school. I didn’t want the whispers to affect Danny. I didn’t want people to stop talking when I walked into the same Walmart aisle.
I supposed there was some advantage to gaining a reputation as a creature of the night. There wasn’t much about my appearance that was intimidating to vampires or humans. My wardrobe consisted mostly of jeans, weather-appropriate cardigans, and Keds. Would it damage my position if the other vampires saw me dressing that way? Would they not take me seriously? I mean, Jane wore pretty dresses, but she was still somehow quite intimidating. And Dick dressed in jeans and smartass T-shirts, but there was still this edge of menace, as if no matter the time of night, he would know exactly how and where to hide your body.
Should I go out and buy leather pants and boots? I didn’t want to be picked off because other vampires perceived me as weak.
No. Moms should not wear leather pants, even when they had a good reason.
I watched my son’s chest rise and fall. Our usual babysitter, Kaylee Dickson, would come over early in the morning as planned to keep Danny all day. I’d left her a note stating that I’d had a particularly bad reaction to a treatment and would probably sleep most of the day. That was the story I planned to stick with for most of the first week. There was no reason to freak her out.
Kaylee was a sweet girl, sixteen and possessed of all the scatterbrained, optimistic charm that involved her not asking a lot of detailed questions about why I only needed her during the day. But she was also fiercely protective of Danny, was an excellent storyteller, and had gone on a vegan health-food kick after reading The Jungle for her advanced English class, so Danny couldn’t con so much as a Fruit Roll-Up out of her. He’d survived the whole summer on Tofurky and carob cookies.
I’d timed my turning carefully, just as summer was ending but before Danny started school, so I would have some time to adjust before his classes began. Kaylee was already coming over in the mornings to help him with breakfast and getting dressed. She’d agreed to keep doing that after school started and then drive Danny to the elementary school.
Wait.
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, ignoring the multitude of missed calls and e-mails that had come in while I was underground, and checked the calendar. I opened my Internet browser and pulled up the school’s Web site.
I had to register Danny for first grade in two nights. It was inevitable, I supposed, that when you made a change like this, something would slip through the cracks, but I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about school registration—the annual refiling of paperwork that I’d already filled out the previous year, just so the school district had updated parent signatures. It was my belief that this practice was a conspiracy by notary publics to keep their industry afloat.
School registration—a big, crowded school building full of people and their smells and their noise and their tempting blood. And kids running around. And people who would try to recruit me into volunteering for stuff. This did not bode well, in terms of what sort of vampire parent I was going to be.
I rubbed Danny’s back and gave myself a cross between a pep talk and a “come to Jesus” scolding. I knew this sort of thing was coming. It was all part of raising a child. Dang it.
Danny ran ahead of me in the hallway, his lime-green T-shirt disappearing into the crowd of people milling around in the school’s maze of classrooms. The school staff had gone all out with the decorations this year, festooning the hallway in blue, gold, and white streamers, balloons, and tissue puffs. A huge mural of Happy the Half-Moon Howler Pup had been added to the entrance over the summer, his blue sweater stretching over a chest puffed up with Howler pride. Beyond that, not much about the building had changed since I was a student here.
I could only be grateful that my illness had gotten me off of the PTA’s social committee the previous spring, so I wasn’t obligated to organize this insanity. I’d tried to come up with several different scenarios in which I could register Danny for school without leaving the house before sunset—calling the school and claiming I was too sick to come in and asking the administrators to just fax all of the permission slips and registration documents over for a signature, or asking Les and Marge to take him and sign the documents for me. But those didn’t
paint me as a very good parent, and I didn’t want Les and Marge to gain any foothold as potential legal guardians. Frankly, I was surprised they hadn’t shown up for registration just to make sure they made contact with Danny’s new teacher . . . who wasn’t in the classroom or anywhere that I could see.
So far, I’d managed to duck my in-laws’ calls for two days. I texted to assure them that I was fine. Danny was fine. We were both resting up for the beginning of the school year.
Danny, a social bumblebee by nature (he refused to be called a butterfly, too girlie), was in heaven, darting back and forth between his kindergarten classrooms to talk to his former teachers. Every former classmate he saw was treated to a big hug and an interrogation about his or her summer. I hung back, pleased to watch him play tiny politician while I wrestled with my senses. This was a considerable development from the skirt-hugging kid who had only started morning preschool a few months before Rob died.
I was not in top shape for this little outing. For days, I’d been having recurring dreams about my blurry-faced sire. At first, it was just a repeat of my turning, the same sweet nothings he’d whispered to me while I was dying. And then it progressed to new, more intimate scenarios. Sitting on my kitchen counter while he stood between my thighs. Cuddled up on the swing on my front porch. Sprawled across a large, unfamiliar bed while he traced every vertebra of my spine with his fingertips and spoke soft nonsense to me. But I never saw his face. It was like I was compelled not to look him in the eye. Even while he held me, he kept his face tucked into the crook of my neck or buried in my hair. It was warm and lovely and made me so happy, knowing that there was someone who cherished me this much. And naked. We were usually naked.
It was confusing, feeling that much for someone who was a virtual stranger. I knew that it wasn’t real. I didn’t know this man. He didn’t know me, much less love me. But to be yanked out of that sweet illusion every sunset into a world where I was unsteady and uncertain was disorienting. At least, that was the rationalization I used for being so damned late for Danny’s school registration.
We were coming in late, driving in Jane’s sunproof vampire-mobile she called “Big Bertha, Jr.,” during the final (increasingly sunless) minutes of the registration window. At this point, most of the parents had finished their paperwork and were standing around socializing while their kids ran around like feral cats. As usual, the sight of all those complete family units, mothers and fathers herding their kids around in tandem, made my chest a little tight for Danny’s sake. Danny had never seen his dad put up a tent in the backyard for a campout. He would never know what it was like to have his dad coach his Little League team. He would never be a big brother. While I’d survived being a fatherless only child, I’d hoped for something better for my son. Now I simply hoped that having one parent who whole-assed it was better than one absent parent and another who less-than-half-assed it.
Considering that this was my first crowd situation since I’d been turned, I thought I was doing pretty well. While the combination of sights, smells, and sounds was overwhelming, I distracted myself by cataloguing all of the odors in my head. Paste and new crayons and floor wax and kid sweat. I’d glutted myself on bottled blood as soon as I rose for the night. I even swigged a sample of HemoBoost on the drive over. (Definitely not a repeat purchase. It tasted like a combination of old dirty pennies and that stuff you find dried on the corners of your mouth in the morning.) Thanks to that vurpy experience, I was more nauseated than hungry. My fellow parents were safe.
Jane was trailing behind me at a casual pace. And when people questioned the presence of a childless vampire at a school event, she simply responded that the Council was looking into opportunities to partner with the county’s schools and provide support. It seemed plausible enough, and Jane was generally known as a reasonable, non-murdery citizen, so they accepted the explanation.
Miss Steele hadn’t put a lot of effort into decorating like the other teachers had, but the room was clean and organized and chock-full of informational posters about addition, subtraction, nouns, and verbs. Miss Steele herself was nowhere to be found, but that wasn’t unusual. There were so many different parents with so many different needs, and teachers spent a good deal of registration night running around the building, chasing down paperwork.
Dorothy Steele had been a first-grade teacher when I attended Half-Moon Hollow Elementary School. Approaching ancient even then, she hadn’t been a cuddly nap-time and handprint-turkey sort of teacher. She’d been stern, no-nonsense. But I left her class with impeccable penmanship and a thorough knowledge of my times tables, material far above my grade level. Without her, I might never have achieved the math proficiency I needed for accounting. But telling her so probably would have irritated her. Miss Steele had never been one for emotional displays.
I settled into the tiny child-sized chair in front of the desk marked “Danny” on a cheerful fire-engine-shaped name tag and marveled at the sheer number of labeled folders waiting for me. Basic information forms asking for address, phone number, e-mail, Social Security number, Twitter handle, and shampoo preference. Forms to authorize Danny’s lunchtime food choices and put money in his account. Forms to approve his use of the school’s Internet. Forms to enroll him on the bus route. Forms that promised that I would not hold the school responsible if one of his classmates pushed him off the top of the monkey bars and broke his collarbone. (It was a pretty specific form, in terms of liability.)
I spent thirty minutes filling out the papers, signing my name over and over again as Danny’s sole legal guardian. Instead of putting Marge’s and Les’s names down as Danny’s emergency contacts, I wrote down the name of the local Council office daytime liaison. It felt wrong, but considering my uncertainty about my in-laws, I couldn’t risk them being able to come retrieve Danny from school while I was out for the day.
This had been so much easier last year, when all I had to worry about was keeping Danny occupied while I tried to fill out his mountain of kindergarten paperwork. I still hadn’t explained to Danny that I’d been turned. I just couldn’t seem to gather my nerve. There was no good time to work that into a conversation. Hey, sweetie, could you turn off Ninja Turtles long enough for Mommy to tell you that she’s one of the undead and your life has changed forever?
For right now, I was in a holding pattern, adjusting to my new life, and it was working for me. I felt like I was balancing a house of cards on my palm and any movement would bring it down.
“Mom, look what we got!”
I turned to find a blue-frosted “HMHES” cupcake being shoved into my face. Now, under normal preturning circumstances, my main concern would be getting blue frosting out of my sweater. But since human food smells absolutely repellent to vampires, I was far more focused on the fact that Danny was waving what smelled like a freshly deposited cow pie directly in front of my face. I gasped, whipping my head back away from the treat. The overreaction merited a few curious looks from other parents, so I worked to maintain control over my gag reflex.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Danny asked. “Don’t you want a bite?”
I would rather watch one of those “eyebrow waxing gone wrong” videos on YouTube than take a bite of that thing. I wheezed, “It’s all yours, sweetie.”
“You’re not on a diet, are you?” Danny said, shaking his head. “Katie Hannan’s mom is always on a diet, and Katie says she never smiles anymore.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t repeat the things your friends say about their families,” I told him.
Breathing through my mouth, I finally noticed the little boy in a camo hoodie and scuffed sneakers standing behind Danny.
“Who’s this?”
“This is my new best friend, Charlie,” Danny said, slinging his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Charlie kept his cupcake-free hand tucked into his pocket but seemed pleased by Danny’s show of bro-fection. Charlie had wide, mischievous brown eyes and sharp features, the sort of impish face that would get him labeled the
class troublemaker for years to come. He had an admirable blue frosting mustache on his upper lip.
“It’s nice to meet you, hon. Are you new here?”
Charlie shook his head. “No, ma’am. We moved here after my birthday. My birthday’s in February. Dad says I can have a party at the Knight’s Castle this year.”
Well, that explained why I’d never met Charlie. I hadn’t been able to volunteer at the school since the early spring semester. It also revealed that Charlie’s father was a very brave man. The Knight’s Castle was a medieval-themed indoor play complex with inflatable bouncy houses, video games, a snack bar, and, for that extra level of noise and stink, pony rides.
I pulled a wet wipe from my purse and dabbed at his frosting facial hair. I’d expected him to object, or at least wriggle a little, but again, he seemed pleased by the attention, tilting his face from side to side to make sure I’d cleaned away everything.
Danny was bouncing on his toes, though I couldn’t tell whether it was from excitement or in an attempt to hide the fact that Charlie towered a full head over him. “Charlie says I’m invited to his party this year, Mom. Can I go?”
“You’re handing out invitations already?” I asked Charlie, who shrugged and dug his toe into the floor.
“Danny already invited me to his party,” Charlie said.
“Of course he did.” Danny issued invitations to his next birthday party all year round. He planned his cake, theme, and color scheme at least nine months in advance. “And I hope you can come.”
“Mom, Miss Lisa is doing story time in the library. Can I go?”
God bless Lisa Stewart, the school librarian. With her endless patience and carefully organized arsenal of distracting stories, she’d taken pity on us all. She was the one who’d recognized Danny’s above-average reading level and encouraged him to find authors like Aaron Reynolds and Chris Gall to appeal to his sense of humor. Those books had helped Danny stay entertained during the worst nights of my treatment. I would be forever grateful.