Fat Vampire (17 page)

D
OUG PULLED UP
to the gates of Signora Polidori's estate in his father's Prius. It was his birthday, or the anniversary of his birthday. That afternoon he'd taken and passed his driver's test. Victor had driven him.

“This is nice of you and all,” Doug told him as they drove to the DMV, “but my dad would have taken me this weekend. You're just going to have to sit in a boring waiting room while I take the test in
your
car.”

“It's nothing,” said Victor, his eyes on the snaking road. “I wanted a chance to talk away from school.”

“Official club business?”

“Heh.” Victor laughed, but it sounded to Doug like no more than a polite social noise. Victor was in a serious mood.
“So how are things going with you? I've seen you around with Abby Dawes.”

“We're dating.”

“Dating…” Victor intoned, as if it wasn't the word he'd have used.

“What?”

“Nothing. And she's doing good? What does she think about it? I mean, how much do you think she understands—”

“She thinks we've been messing around. That's all. Boy, you think I've been blabbing to everyone, don't you?”

“No—”

“Abby knows nothing, Jay knows nothing. Everyone's safe.”

“I know. Forget it,” Victor said, waving his hand in the air. “That wasn't what I was getting at. I just wanted to know how things were going.”

“They're going good.”

Victor nodded, and then they were silent until the next red light. “You haven't been having any problems dealing with people?”

“You mean recently?” Problems Dealing with People had actually been sort of a major theme of Doug's life from the fourth through the tenth grades, but lately there had been nothing but improvement. Except with Sejal, he supposed. And Jay. “No. Have you?”

Victor frowned. “Everyone's saying I'm acting different. I think
they're
acting different. They're all being stupid. Fucker!” he shouted at a sedan that had merged a little too close. He tapped the brakes and the three lemon-yellow pine
trees hanging from the rearview mirror tangled their lines. “God, I hate being in cars now. Maybe while you're getting your license I can turn mine in.”

They parked in the DMV lot and walked up to that squat, joyless building.

“It's like…you know how people look at you when they know they've got more money than you?” asked Victor. Doug didn't, really, but he kept that to himself. “I catch myself looking at normal people like that, now. Like I know they're gonna be forgotten, and I'm not. We're gonna live forever—do you realize that?”

“Are you just figuring this out?” said Doug. “We're always going to be as we are, right now.”

Victor stared at his feet. “I guess I've
always
felt that way. But now it's true.”

Doug left him reading magazines in a room where all the stiff plastic chairs had been bolted in rows into the floor. He took his driving test, screwed up the parallel parking section a little, but the administrator let him retry it. He took his paperwork to the license photographer and felt a moment of panic. What if the license came back and he wasn't there? But a half hour later he left the DMV with a little rectangle of plastic with his picture on it, and it felt like he'd gotten away with something. He wasn't really a year older.

Nor a year wiser, maybe. Now, outside the gates of the Polidori estate, he thought about what Victor had been trying to tell him. Doug recently had two different people suggest he wasn't as nice a guy as he could be. You had to consider each source, of course. Jay was like a little kid—he didn't
understand how the world worked. It didn't do him any good to be so thin-skinned. And Sejal…Sejal hadn't been in America long. She'd learn.

He was just being funny. On television people insulted each other all the time. For laughs. Humor made the world a better place. Clever insults were the basis of all humor.

No, he realized with sudden clarity. Not insults.
Control.
Control was the basis of all humor. Even at its most innocent, what was a joke or a clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.

People like him—the unbeautiful, the less popular—were almost inhuman in some people's eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. You made eye contact only by accident and then you turned quickly away. The word “geek” had once only referred to a circus freak, hadn't it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bite the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover.

Wasn't this how they always tried to compensate? To overcome a girl's disgust or another boy's contempt and make them laugh despite themselves was to take some small measure of control. No wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny. They didn't have to be. Why else would people find it so hilarious to see some short kid's textbook stolen, held high above his head, out of reach? It wasn't funny—it was pure control. Insult comedy minus the comedy.

So humor is a kind of weakness,
Doug thought as he approached the house. He couldn't understand why he'd never
seen it before. Enough jokes, then. He was going to become the least funny person he knew.

The scent of cloves mixed with an oddly nostalgic smell of wet leaves. Absinthe was sitting on the front steps of the Polidori house, smoking a cigarette. She knit her brow at him as he approached.

“Hey,” said Doug.

“Oh,” said Absinthe. “It's you. Douglas.”

“Yeah.”

“You look different.”

“So I've been told.”

They studied each other for a second.

“It's fortunate I ran into you,” said Doug. “I was going to leave your clothes with Cassiopeia.” He held out the neat little pile.

“That
is
fortunate,” Absinthe agreed. “Mama Cass probably would have had Asa burn them in the backyard.”

Doug couldn't tell if he was supposed to laugh. He pushed a noncommittal little puff of air through his nose and sat down on the step. “Are you having…problems with the signora?”

“Problems?” said Absinthe. “No. No, we don't have any problems. I'm learning so much, thank god I can command rats now—that's going right on my college applications.”

“You can command rats?”

“Yeah. All I ever want to do is command them the hell away from me.”

Doug nodded, and looked out of the corner of his eyes at her breasts. Deep in his mind there was a space like a basement where he kept ideas he'd used once or twice but had mostly
forgotten. Self-improving ideas, like exercise equipment, gathering dust. One of these was the realization that sexy people were not always, themselves, hypersexual, that just because Doug could only think of sex—sexy, hot nude intercourse sex—when he looked at Absinthe didn't mean that it was on her mind at all. There was probably no clever conversational password that could get her making out with him at this moment. Probably.

“I can make fog,” he said.

“Hey, look, so can I,” said Absinthe. She took a drag and blew a plume through her plum lips. It smelled like Christmas.

Doug laughed. “That's not what I meant. I—”

“Do you like your tutor guy? Mr. David whatever?”

“Not really.”

“I can't stand this anymore,” said Absinthe. “I hate her! It's like, I get to hang out with this totally hot two hundred-year-old vamp and she's just like my mom. Worse, even—at least my mom will die someday.”

Doug managed to say, “What's wrong with—” before she started up again.

“I mean, what's the point of being a vampire if everything is ‘don't do this' and ‘I forbid you to do that'? She's even got the nerve to insult my clothes, like her
Masterpiece Theatre
wardrobe hasn't been out of fashion for, like,
ever
. I'm all, like, ‘You should talk. Nice empire waist. I bet you were the belle of the Industrial Revolution, bitch.'”

Absinthe sighed.

“I totally should have said that.”

“I like your clothes,” said Doug.

“Jesus. Of course you do. You're just another horndog boy. But Madam Polidori says I look like a hooker, and I say, no, I look like a vampire, so she says I look like a vampire hooker. Then she shows me a photo of this vampire hooker she knows in New Orleans and we're wearing the same top.”

Vampire hooker
, thought Doug.

“And all the time she—she wants me to…” Absinthe quailed, but recovered quickly. “Did you know that Asa really isn't a vampire? He's a…thrall. It's so fucked up.”

“She introduced him to me that way. As her thrall.”

“Yeah, but do you know what it means? It means she almost made him a vampire, but she didn't give him enough blood. She just gives him a tiny bit at a time, so he's addicted. It means he's her slave. He can never leave—he has to do whatever she says. What kind of person does that to someone?” Her face pruned. “Shit! I'm in such shit,” she said, and she folded up against her knees.

Doug put his arm around her as he'd seen people do on television, but she only seemed to stiffen and lean away. Like the way an unhappy baby could almost pitch herself backward out of your awkward clutches. He let her go as she got to her feet. She turned and hugged her arms, though Doug knew she could not possibly be cold.

“I told my boyfriend. Almost right away I told him. He was cool with it. Well, not so cool with the whole getting-ravished-by-a-vampire thing, but…I made it sound like I hadn't been into it. Like it was more of a…rape or whatever.”

“Uh-huh,” said Doug.
Where was this going?

“I guess he…I guess he really never was okay with it. He started making all these little comments, not much at first, but then all the time, and…I finally got tired of it and dumped him.”

She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with her toe.

“But then people started asking me these questions, everyone's looking at me different, and I know he's been talking about me…” She raised her face and pinched her eyes shut. “God, Travis! Don't you know I have to kill you? Don't you know you're making me?”

“Elizabeth?” said a voice behind Doug, and he turned to see Cassiopeia Polidori stepping onto the porch.

“Oh, perfect,” Absinthe said, her eyes shining. “Perfect timing.”

“Hello, Douglas,” said the signora. “You are welcome inside. Elizabeth, why don't you come back in—”

“Don't look at me,” said Absinthe, and then her whole body exhaled and was only mist, a lewd column that shed its clothes and lost its shape and rose into the sky.

Doug looked at the pile of clothes, next to the other pile of clothes.

“You can't keep transmogrifying away from your problems, young lady,” Cassiopeia called to the vapor as it drifted over the trees. She watched, for several beats after it had vanished from sight, then turned as if suddenly remembering that Doug was also there. “Douglas. This is a surprise. Leave the clothes. Asa will see to them.” Doug followed her inside.

They walked through the parched, candlelit hall. “You're
looking well,” said Cassiopeia. “I can't confess to agree with your recent flair for vigilantism, but I daresay it agrees with you.”

“You shouldn't believe everything you've been hearing about me,” said Doug.

“Hm. So I suppose you
don't
have an invisible motorcycle? What a disappointment—I was rather looking forward to not seeing it.”

They settled in the drawing room near the harpsichord, Doug on an uncomfortable chair and Signora Polidori on what Doug assumed was an uncomfortable sofa. He thought they should be drinking tea and remarking on the latest society gossip and news from London and whenever would Mr. Fucklesby settle down and marry? A moment later Asa arrived with the tea.

He glanced briefly at Doug with eyes that, while not exactly approving, no longer carried the hint that Doug was something to be scraped from his heel. So that was something. Doug thought about what Absinthe had said. If true, it was Doug who was the superior being—Asa probably wished he were him.

“Mr. David tells me that you did not attend your last appointment with him,” said Cassiopeia after Asa withdrew. “And that he's heard naught from you since. Milk?”

“Uh, no,” said Doug, looking down at the tea.

“Sugar?”

“No. Thanks. So…I didn't feel I was learning with him. And I didn't like his attitude, to be honest.”

“Mr. David, despite his many fine qualities, could have a more winning disposition,” Cassiopeia admitted.

“Right. Well, I heard from Victor that there was supposed
to be some big meeting a few weeks ago. Stephin forgot about it, or just blew it off. I dunno.”

“And I have not pursued the matter because I believe the issue at heart has been…settled? The television show?”

Doug allowed a beat to pass before speaking. “Let's just say I took care of it,” he said. It was something else that happened on TV a lot, these kinds of enigmatic statements.
They were probably a kind of story shorthand,
thought Doug. It was all that needed to be said, because the viewer already knew the details, or wasn't meant to yet.
It wasn't going to work in real life
, he reasoned.
Nobody just let you say a thing like that without explaining yourself
. But here, now, was Cassiopeia's curt nod, and then silence.
Don't you want to know what I did?
thought Doug.
Don't you want to know how I did it?
He had a sense that he was moments from being dismissed. That the signora would stand, and Doug would have to stand, and then Asa would come from wherever Asa came from to guide Doug through such uncharted territory as the stair hall and the foyer.