They think you’re stuck up. That you like being alone, when really you’re barely hanging on. You’re muffling tears at night with your pillow. If you could get rid of your softness as easily as they put their expectations on you, you would.
And those very friends abandoned me, after. So now I don’t try. I have books and therapy and Prozac. I’d rather be a loner than hate myself again.
Vampires get it. There’s no place for them in our world, either. So they make a place, they create their own families. In a world that would hunt them down, they survive—they thrive.
I placed the books on my bedside table and closed my door. I took in the Twilight Saga movie posters to my right. Bella looks so uninterested in Edward. Let’s be honest, she would’ve been better off alone—or with Alice. A collection of Blade DVDs I “borrowed” from my dad years ago are on the bookshelves to the left of the door.
Romantic leads. Detectives. Best friends taking on evil. The safe haven I built myself.
The facade faded as the argument began like clockwork.
“Her problem is all of those books,” said Mama, snapping at Daddy in that hushed tone parents use when they think you can’t hear or they don’t want you to hear. But the walls of this old house are thin, and the sounds wafted up until they reached my ears.
“Well, she got it from your side of the family,” Daddy retorted. I cringed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mama asked, even though we all knew. Mama’s brother died by suicide. She never said so, but I knew she blamed herself. Just as she thought my depression was her fault, too. She wore guilt I didn’t ask her to put on.
Dr. Freeman said that healing is a process. I only wished my parents could work on themselves, too, so I didn’t feel like I was carrying my problems and theirs.
Their argument continued, each blaming the other for how I “ended up this way.” Each word was a slap until I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped in my earbuds, turned up the music until Brendon Urie’s vocals were all I heard. I drowned myself in dreams of the girl I’d just met. The girl who was graceful yet clumsy. Gorgeous, irresistibly cute. Who loved vampires, whose touch was ice cold, and who didn’t have a reflection. It could’ve just been a trick of the light, I told myself. But I shook reason aside.
As impossible as it sounded, I’d just met a vampire.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The next morning, I found a note on the living room table. Dad had gone into town. Mama, to church.
I breathed a sigh of relief. She’d stopped dragging me to church a year ago, after our old pastor did a sermon about how it’s Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve and I walked out the door.
I made eggs and turkey bacon. Slapped some jam on bread, then headed back upstairs. Time to enact my plan I’d spent all night considering.
Using paper and pen, I browsed through all my books, my collection of films and TV shows on DVD and on my laptop. I threw out outliers like sparkling during the daytime, because it was a sunny day when we met, and turning into a bat, because as much as I love Dracula, the obsession with bats is a bit much and not consistent when it comes to world vampire mythologies.
Fangs (duh).
Sleeping in coffins (ugh, just ew).
Wooden stakes. (A bit difficult to test . . . I’m not trying to kill her. I want to, uhh, well, I’m not sure yet.)
Aversion to sunlight. (Which, given the sunny day, is probably a no . . . are Black vampires more resistant to sunlight??? Hm. Fledgling makes a great case for this.)
By the time I was done, the sun was just starting to set. I grabbed my things, then I wrote Mama a note of my own: Going to a study group. Be back for dinner.
A lie, yes. But a necessary one. I needed an excuse she would want to believe, and the library was closed on Sundays.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Mainville is a small Louisiana town, where the railroad tracks that used to separate Black and white are now just remnants of an era long gone, but never forgotten. In every park there are monuments of some famed soldier or general who fought on the wrong side of the Civil War. It’s near enough to Baton Rouge to not be completely remote but far enough to not attract regular visitors, aside from, according to Dad, the occasional camera crew hoping to use the small town as a backdrop for some scene or another in a story set in “the American South.”
Well, and one cemetery where every slave owner turned Confederate war hero is buried right next to several local distinguished members of the town’s civil rights movement. The irony clearly escaped the town as it crawled and then leapt into the twenty-first century.
Nighttime fell like a shroud and settled over the misty cemetery as I pushed open the creaking gate.
I stepped right into a puddle as soon as I entered. The muddy water soaked my toes through the mesh of my sneakers. I should’ve worn better shoes. Not that I was used to this sort of thing. I mean, what did you wear to creep into a cemetery? What if there were grave robbers? Were those still a thing?
Stone angels were scattered throughout. Hovering over graves, watching over them, I supposed. Some had eroded over the years and now had moss growing where eyes had been and vines encircling their wings and necks.
If the girl from the library was a vampire, this was where she would be, right? Mainville has no abandoned houses, no warehouses to squat in. The cemetery seemed like the next best option.
I wandered through the tombstones, looking for some sort of hint—an opened aboveground tomb, an unearthed coffin—until something grabbed me.
I screamed. It yanked me back. I pulled away only to trip on a tombstone. Without a glance back at my attacker, I scrambled up and didn’t stop running until I passed through the cemetery gates.
“Uh, hey. Are you okay?” called a voice. A girl emerged from the shadows of the dimly lit sidewalk.
I jumped back. It was her—the girl from the library. The maybe-vampire, her dark skin flawless in the moonlight. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
She eyed me suspiciously, then glanced around the moonlit road outside the cemetery. “Walking down the street?”
“Right,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“You have a tree branch stuck in your hair.”
I touched the back of my head. Sure enough, a tree branch. Then it dawned on me—I was attacked by a tree. I started to laugh, doubling over on the sidewalk.
She lifted a brow. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I straightened up and imagined how I must look to her. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Oh my god, you’re bleeding.” She pointed to my left leg. My jeans were ripped, and blood soaked the fabric just below my knee.