“Dude, how do you know that stuff?”
I shook my abused noggin. “I’ve read books, several of them. So, to sum up, me jumping off the roof—not your best idea.”
“Yeah.” Zeb made a noncommittal face. “But you survived, and it looked really cool…Hey, let’s get the chainsaw.”
“Children, this is becoming disturbing,” Jettie said, materializing on the porch.
“It’s OK,” I told her. “We’re just trying out all of my new tricks.”
“Yeah, I know. Are you sure you’re OK?” Zeb asked.
“Um, yeah, I was talking to—” I gestured to the porch. I sighed, rubbing my palms over my newly repaired forehead. “Zeb, I was just talking to my Aunt Jettie.”
“Of course you were.” Zeb laughed. Clearly, he thought the head wound had knocked something loose. “It’s only natural. Of course, you’re completely nuts, but that’s natural, too.”
“I’m nuts because I talk to ghosts?”
“Because I’ve met your mama.” He grinned.
“I’m serious, Zeb, my Aunt Jettie is standing right there on the porch. She’s wearing her favorite UK T-shirt and rolling her eyes at our stupid attempts to kill me.
Aunt Jettie, could you move the rocking chair or give Zeb goosebumps or something?”
“He’s not going to be able to see me or hear me,” Jettie said.
“Be creative.”
Zeb’s eyes darted around as if I’d told him there was a spider in his hair. “Jane, this is kind of creepy.”
“Oh, come on, vampires you can handle but not septuagenarian phantoms?” I sneered. “No offense, Aunt Jettie.”
“None taken,” Aunt Jettie said as she made her way over to Zeb’s car. She motioned for me to bring Zeb closer.
In the dust coating the dented red paint, she wrote “Hi Zeb” with her fingertip. Zeb gasped. “What the—” He watched as the words “WASH ME” formed under her greeting.
“Oh, very funny!” Zeb grumbled. Jettie cackled.
“She’s laughing at you,” I told him. “At least you can’t hear it.”
New vampires are discouraged from trying to return to their normal human routines. Especially if those routines include tanning or working as a fireman. Your day will not end well. (From The Guide for the Newly Undead).
Unless wrapped up in a good book, I was usually in bed at ten-thirty. I know, even I have a hard time separating my life from Paris Hilton’s.
So, imagine my shock after a very busy vampire day when I was still raring to go at two A.M. and bored out of my ever-loving skull. I hadn’t been unemployed since I started working at the Dairy Freeze when I was sixteen.
I’d always seen my week as a long hallway, a door opening on every new day.
Doors leading to work, doctor’s appointments, housework, errands. Now that hallway seemed empty and dark. And since I would probably never die, it was stretching out forever.
In a rather manic effort to prove that I could entertain myself through eternity, I filled that first night by reorganizing the books in my collection, beating Zeb in three Scrabble games, bleaching every surface in my home, and rearranging my furniture.
(Moving a couch is much easier when you can lift it with one arm.)
I spent about an hour carefully painting my toenails a glossy candy-apple red. I kept my fingernails short and naked for typing and shelving, but my toes were treated to an ever-changing rainbow of polishes. A woman puts on a new dress, eyeliner, lip gloss to please others. A woman paints her toes to please herself. And if there was one thing I was familiar with, it was pleasing…There’s no way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself.
Zeb went home at around one A.M., when he nodded off and I threatened to paint his toes, too. He hates it when I do that. He reminded me that he still had to work in the morning but immediately realized that was a pretty insensitive thing to say. Zeb was a kindergarten teacher—a good one. I always thought it was because he was the same emotional age as his students. Plus, he had always loved working with construction paper and paste.
“Janie, you’ve got to find a job,” he told me as he hovered near the door. I think he was afraid to leave me unchaperoned. “Or one of us is going to go crazy. And it probably won’t be you.”
“I know,” I groaned. “I’ll have to find something before my savings and the good graces of Visa run out. But there are some financial advantages to all this. I don’t need to pay health or life insurance anymore. My grocery bills and medical expenses are practically nothing, even though my monthly sunscreen budget has increased astronomically.” Zeb did not seem convinced. “I’m trying, Zeb, really. I’ve looked in the want ads, online, and there’s nothing around here for me. Everything that I’m qualified for with night hours involves a paper hat or pasties.”
“And technically, you’re not qualified for the jobs with pasties, either,” Zeb said, dodging when I reached out to smack him.
After Zeb went home, the remaining sensible-librarian portion of my brain told me to put on some PJs, hide under the covers, and read the Guide for the Newly Undead. But the idea seemed so confining. Surely my night life wasn’t supposed to get more boring after becoming a vampire. I knew I would just sit there twitching, unable to concentrate. I didn’t want to stay home, but I didn’t know where I could go. I wasn’t comfortable going to any of the known vamp clubs and bars in our end of the state. I wouldn’t have been able to make it home by sunrise, anyway. And besides Gabriel and Missy, I didn’t know any vampires. Knowing my luck, I’d offend someone with some archaic undead etiquette issue and end up staked.
So I did what any other rational person does at two A.M. I went to Wal-Mart. If nothing else, I wanted to check out the “special dietary needs” aisle, which translates into vampire products.
There are three things vampires need to know about grocery shopping just after they’re turned. One, the smell of freshly cut meat is far more appealing. Two, the ice cream aisle is not fun anymore. And the cheesy glow of fluorescent lights is even more unbearable with super senses.
Even at this hour, I was nervous to be venturing out into public for the first time as a vampire. Despite living there for most of my life, I’d never felt I was part of the Hollow. I was accepted, but I didn’t belong. I loved the people there, but I knew I wasn’t like them. From high school on, I knew I’d never be happy following in my mama’s footsteps, marrying some nice boy she picked for me, hauling our kids to basketball practice after school and church every Sunday, making Velveeta-based casseroles for potluck barbecues with his fishing buddies. I was different. Not better, just different. I read books that didn’t have Danielle Steele’s airbrushed face smiling out from the back cover.
I didn’t consider Panda Express to be exotic cuisine. I honestly did not care whether the Half-Moon Howlers made it to the regional championships.
I briefly entertained the idea of moving after college, but it seemed wrong somehow. Every time I looked at jobs in other states, I got this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if the planet were tilting off its axis. So I stayed, because this was my place in the world.
My weird tendencies were lovingly tolerated by kith and kin, who—with the exception of Aunt Jettie—figured I’d eventually “grow out of it.” And when I didn’t, they made a hobby of worrying about me. When would I meet a nice boy and settle down?
When would I stop working so much? Why did I seem so uninterested in the things that mattered so much to them? I ended up a permanent fixture on the prayer list of the HalfMoon Hollow Baptist Church, where Mama had simply written “Jane Jameson—Needs guidance.” Every time a member of Mama’s congregation saw me at the library, she pinched my cheeks and told me she was praying for me.
It was a little vexing, certainly annoying, but I knew it came from a loving place.
These were people who saw me play a sheep in the Christmas pageant for five years running. They sent me care packages when I was taking college exams. They stood by me and helped me through Aunt Jettie’s funeral. Now, for the first time, I was afraid of seeing my neighbors, my family. It was only a matter of time before they found out about me. I couldn’t survive on sunscreen and my wits, such as they were.
In Half-Moon Hollow, vampires still occasionally died in “accidental” fires or falls on handy wooden objects. That’s why few local vampires had come out of the coffin, so to speak. People stopped talking when the new vampire’s parents walked into the room.
Their families were frozen out of their churches, their clubs. Friends stopped calling. And eventually, the vampire either left town or succumbed to injuries sustained during a tragic
“drapery malfunction.” But I wasn’t going to leave the Hollow. I didn’t care if Grandma Ruthie got kicked out of her bridge club. I didn’t care if I got funny looks at the grocery store. I wasn’t leaving my home, the only place I knew. I could only hope my friends and neighbors were rational enough not to go the pitchfork-and-torch route. But even if they did, I was pretty sure I could outrun them.
I wandered the food aisles out of habit and got a little depressed at all the foods I couldn’t eat anymore. I had the store to myself, apart from the lethargic stockers replenishing the shelves. They didn’t make eye contact, but I think that was more of an
“I’m pissed off at the world because I’m stacking cases of adult diapers at two A.M.”
thing than anything to do with me.
I forced myself to walk away from the food when I found myself tearing up over a box of Moon Pies. Fixating on delicious regional snack cakes that you can’t digest anymore cannot be good for one’s mental health.