Fat Vampire (18 page)

He didn't want to leave. He was kin to women like this. Why had he ever thought vampires smelled bad to one another? Here he was in a vampire's chambers, and he couldn't smell a thing. The world outside smelled like a farm.

“Have you found out anything about the mystery vampire?” asked Doug quickly. “The one that made…all us guys.”

Cassiopeia shifted in her seat. “We are investigating. It's no fox hunt. It can be a long and delicate process, finding a fellow cousin.”

“Oh, right,” said Doug. “Obviously. I didn't expect you would have found her yet, it's just Stephin thought I ought to try to learn more—”

“I don't suppose you have any further details about your benefactor you may have neglected to mention…?”

“No. Like I said before, it was dark. I didn't get that good a look at her.”

Cassiopeia pursed her lips. “It would seem no one did. Douglas, may I be frank? When one considers young Victor and Evan and Danny, the inescapable conclusion one reaches is that our mysterious stranger has a…type. One positively leaps to this conclusion. Do you take my meaning?”

“I'm not sure. You're being awfully subtle.”

“Yes. Very good. Most of our kind develop ‘types,' Douglas. The older we get, the more distasteful we find the notion of supping on anything but our ideal. Like…a restaurant ‘regular' who always orders ‘the usual'. Yes?”

Doug didn't like where this was heading. He needed a change of subject.

“Perhaps we search out subjects that remind us of first loves. Or past enemies, punishing some former rival again and again,” Cassiopeia continued, though she made it clear by her tone that she found this latter habit offensive. “Others simply have a physical preference. I have known a hundred kinsmen, and we are all the same in this regard. All but our Mr. David, who has always claimed a more egalitarian lack of preference. But our Mr. David is given to invention.”

“You mean he's a liar?”

“A dreadful liar.” Cassiopeia smiled sweetly. “Quite
unapologetic about it. To hear him tell it, he has been in the night tide reborn so many different ways. Bitten by a despondent New York banker in October 1929. Or in Reconstruction South. During five distinct wars…at the culmination of the Boston Tea Party…whilst a cast member in the original touring production of
Faust
.”

Doug frowned at his hands. “He told me he'd been made in the Civil War.” He remembered Stephin's narrative and felt like a chump.
Tom North? Oh, and let me guess—he was shot by Dick South?

“It is a favorite of his. Mayhap it's even true! Something has to be. But to return to my earlier point, Douglas: it would be passing strange that our cousin should have ennobled the three boys and also you. And so soon after Victor!” She laughed airily. “Is this woman trying to assemble a baseball team?”

“We could play night games,” Doug said, because he was nervous.
I could be batboy.

“Is there anything you'd like to tell me about your benefactor, Douglas? Is there anything you'd like to tell me about Victor?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. Part of the reason…part of the reason I'm here is because Victor and I have been talking about the vampire who made us.” Doug saw Cassiopeia flinch at the word “vampire,” but he pressed on, seeing an opening. “I told Victor that I was going to try to find out more about her, and he wanted me to tell him everything I learned. He wants to find her.” This wasn't the least bit true. Doug and Victor had been talking more and more at school, even nodding to each other in the halls, but in fact the hot
mystery vampire never came up. “He keeps bugging me about it. Like…he knows I'm smarter, so he figures I'll have better luck figuring out who she is. It's like I'm doing his homework for him.” He forced himself to take a sip of his tea.
Wait for it,
thought Doug.
Don't be too obvious.

“Hm. I suppose we all want to discover her.”

“I guess. I mean, I'm curious, but it's all he talks about.”

“And has he indicated why he's so keen to make contact?”

It was just what Doug hoped she'd ask, and he nearly pounced out of his skin. “You know…I didn't think so, but…a while ago, like weeks ago, he mentioned this movie he'd seen where a vampire—an ennobled person, I mean—turned normal after killing his…ennobler.”

Cassiopeia put her teacup very firmly down on the table. Not on its saucer. Not on a coaster, even.

“I'm sure it's nothing,” Doug added. “I wouldn't want to get him in trouble or anything. It probably doesn't even work, right? Killing your maker? I told him you'd probably have to kill the head of the family or something—and, besides, don't do it. I said.”

Cassiopeia stood. So that was it. “I must beg your forgiveness, Douglas. There is a matter that needs attending.” Doug stood as she passed him, and he turned to see Asa suddenly at his shoulder like Droopy Dawg, like you'd only just wrapped him up in chains and nailed him inside a crate and shipped him to Albuquerque but, surprise! there was Asa.

“Does it work, though?” Doug asked Cassiopeia. “If it does, I won't tell Victor 'cause, hell, who wants to encourage
him, right? But if it doesn't, I can get the whole stupid idea out of his—”

“Of course it does not work. I bid you good night and good hunting.” With that Signora Polidori swept out of the room.

Doug looked at Asa. Asa looked back, not so much at Doug as at the empty Doug-shaped space he'd soon be leaving in their drawing room.

“If young master would—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

They walked the familiar path back to the front door, Doug all the while staring out of the corner of his eye at Asa's face, smelling his strange smell. He remembered, suddenly, the back lot of a café near Jay's house. It was one of those unwanted places, free from adult supervision, where you were permitted the pleasure of doing nothing. He and Jay and Stuart had spent a lot of time there in middle school. Asa smelled like the Dumpster in that back lot, the surprisingly sweet smell of pastries slowly melting into flies' nests and poison. It didn't seem like the sort of thing you told a person, but it made Doug feel kindly toward him.

“You know, um…Absinthe told me about your and Cassiopeia's…relationship,” Doug said, and Asa paused at the door. “I think it's really…Well. I wouldn't do that to a person, personally.”

Asa's long, bell face was absolutely still and silent.

“I just wanted you to know that I understand…It must be really hard, your…situation. And I just wanted to…say that.” Asa opened the great door and stood to one side.
Fine,
thought Doug. He stepped out onto the front stairs and into the night air.

“Young master,” said Asa behind him.

Doug turned. Asa was still standing in the doorframe, blue-skinned against the warm embers of the hall behind him. Silhouetted like this, Doug could just barely make out a jagged smile in the corner of Asa's lips, like a crack in his bell.

“My mistress misspoke. It works,” he said, and closed the door.

O
PHELIA HOSTED
a hair-dyeing party for all the girls playing Puerto Ricans. It was something of a magnanimous gesture, after fighting tooth and nail for the right to keep her brown-sugar hair and pink bangs. Her family had Puerto Rican friends in New York, she argued—real Puerto Rican New Yorkers—and they didn't all have black hair. But Samantha Todd, the theater director, was adamant—now that she'd cast Sejal in the leading role she wanted the other girls to match.

Mostly they watched the Natalie Wood
West Side Story
and ate. Ophelia, Sophie, Jenny Underwood, Emily Purvis, and Jordan Belledin needed to dye their hair, but of course Sejal didn't.
And Abby was playing a white girl, essentially an extra. And Cat was just there to assistant direct the whole thing.

“I can deal with the hair,” said Jordan as Cat picked across her scalp, “but are we really going to wear dark makeup? Isn't that supposed to be offensive or something?”

“Offensive?” said Sejal.

“I don't mean offensive to have dark skin,” Jordan assured her, though it hadn't occurred to Sejal to consider this until she was assured not to. “I mean, it's blackface, right? I think people get really upset if you wear blackface.”

“This'll be brown face,” said Sophie. “And brown neck.”

“And arms,” said Emily.

“You're so lucky,” Jordan told Sejal. “You don't have to change anything.”

“Good thing we're not doing
Grease.
” Ophelia laughed.

The girls fell silent. Sejal supposed they were thinking the same thing she was: If they were doing
Grease
, she wouldn't be playing the lead.

“Crap, that's my phone,” said Cat. “I have goopy gloves.”

Ophelia fished the phone from Cat's boxy velvet purse and sang, “It's Ja-ay.”

“Put it up to my ear. Hey, Jay! No, I'm at Ophelia's. A bunch of us girls are here, trimming each other's bushes.”

A couple of girls gave scandalized shrieks, and everyone laughed except Emily, whom Sejal had come to think took everything a little too seriously. “Aah! Tell him we're not really, Cat!” Emily said. “He'll spread it around school.”

“Shave a lightning bolt in mine!” shouted Ophelia.

“He knows when Cat's joking,” Sejal told Emily. “He'll not spread it around.”

“He'll tell Doug, maybe,” Emily whimpered.

“So what if he does?” said Abby. “Doug doesn't care about your business.”

Silence, again, apart from Cat's brassy laugh—Jay must have said something funny. She looked abruptly startled, chastened, as if she'd just remembered she was in church and surrounded by sober, serious people. “It just got really quiet here,” she said into the phone.

What did the other girls think when they heard his name?
wondered Sejal. Surely they couldn't be having the same thoughts as she. It really was a ridiculous idea. The way Doug had been acting, and Abby's decline, and the stories from that store robbery and the bat that night—you didn't just put all those pieces together any way you pleased. They had their own order, or lack of order. And although these pieces were all cut from Western cloth, she knew how it would sound to American ears if she, the Indian girl, started talking about vampires. That was the gaudy image she was embroidering from all these loose threads, wasn't it? That Doug was a vampire? It was the Niravam, certainly. She had to stop taking it—it only made her worse. Poor Indian girl—her head is full of superstitious hoodoo. It's a culture of confusion—too many gods, all those arms—what do you expect?

“Can I talk to you a minute, Abby?” asked Emily.
“In private,”
she added in the least private tone possible. It was discreet like a kazoo was discreet. The two girls rose and went off in search of some quiet corner.

“I don't know. Some drama,” Cat told Jay. “We're a dramatic people.”

“Okay, so what's the deal with Doug Lee?” said Ophelia. Sejal imagined that a less brazen version of this question might at that very moment been posed to Abby in another part of the house, but Ophelia's seemed to be directed primarily at Sejal.

“I know, right?” said Jordan as Cat tucked the last of her slick hair under a plastic grocery bag. “So creepy. My uncle pulled this really weird Jekyll and Hyde thing a few years ago, and that turned out to be a stroke.”

“Why are you looking at me?” Sejal asked Ophelia. “You have known him longer.”

“Yeah, but I've only been paying attention to him as long as you have. And he has a huge crush on you, so maybe you got to know him. For a while some people thought you might like
him
, too.”

So we're not just talking about Doug,
thought Sejal. “Maybe you should shout your questions louder,” she said, “so Jay can hear. So Abby can hear.”

“Ophelia wants to know what's up with Doug,” Cat said to Jay. Ophelia winced. Cat leaned away from the phone. “Jay says nothing's wrong with Doug, but he's saying it in this weird way he gets whenever he's lying. Like he's talking in all caps. What? No, I'm just telling them what you said.”

“This is gonna sound all weird,” said Sophie, “and if you tell anyone I said so I'll kick your ass, but…like, I know you said you thought he was looking better, 'Felia, but does anyone think he actually looks…good? Like not
good
good, but…like you see some eggplant and you actually feel like
trying it even though eggplant makes you throw up.”

“I know what you're saying,” said Jordan. “I'll admit it. It's like he got some kind of Guido body spray and it actually works like the commercials say it does.”

“Do you think they've…you know,” asked Carrie. “Do you think he took her virginity?”

“Ha!” said Ophelia. “He's not a time traveler.”

Cat had by then hung up. “Jay says he and Doug haven't hung out much lately, but…he thinks it all has to do with Doug wanting to go with Sejal and her saying no. Doug thinks she led him on—sorry, Sejal, I don't think you did. Maybe he's just bitter or depressed or something.”

“I need a glass of water,” said Sejal. “Does anyone want a glass of water?” No one did. “Excuse me.”

She didn't know this house well, and at the bottom of the staircase she veered away from the sibilant whispers of Abby and Emily (“Jodi thinks so, too,” Emily was saying. “She called him evil…”) and down one hall, past a loo, and into a laundry room.

“Damn,” she whispered. She turned and found Ophelia blocking the hall.

“Hi,” said Ophelia. “Here.” Then she leaned forward, her still-sugary-brown locks breezing fragrantly past Sejal's nose, and switched on the dryer. The empty tumble made the small, slightly chilly room inexplicably more inviting. Dapples of warm light like goldfish appeared on the blue moonlit wall behind the dryer. Ophelia half closed the door. No one would hear them speak.

“I didn't lead Doug on,” Sejal said. “I thought I might grow
to like him, isn't it? When I realized my mistake, I stopped it.”

“I'm sorry.”

“What I did was proper. I do not mean to lead
anyone
on.”

“I believe you. I'm sorry.”

They paused. Sejal listened to the warm, snoring dryer.

“I'm trying to learn to be a better person,” Sejal said. “A stronger person.”

“You're good. You're strong.”

“I'm not,” Sejal insisted. “I have the Google. Did you know that?”

“Oh,” said Ophelia, stepping back. “That internet disease?”

“It's not contagious.”

“Sorry.”

“It makes you forget what's important. I lost track of myself for a while. I forgot who I was. You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are,
na
?”

Ophelia shifted from one foot to the other. She shrugged slightly.

“I became a ghost, and I only cared about other ghosts. I was not available to people at school, on the street…I wasn't there. But move your mouse like on a Ouija board and you could speak with me. You could conjure me up. I lost every one of my real friends, but I had a box full of trolls and demons, like Pandora.”

“You don't have to tell me all this if you don't want to,” Ophelia whispered.

“No, I don't,” Sejal said. “That's true. Will you let me?”
Now that she'd started, she was impatient to get it off her chest, finally. The story of it all stuck to her like wet clothes.

A second passed, then Ophelia nodded.

“There was this girl,” Sejal continued. “A girl from my neighborhood, one of the only ones to follow me onto the web. One of the only kids I still talked to who knew me in real life. Maybe that was part of it…She had a blog. She posted videos, bad poetry. And we
haunted
this poor girl. Me and the other ghosts. They were awful to her, and I was awful. We posted terrible comments, things I would never say in real life. Because I only cared for the people online and for what they thought of me—and when I was mean, I was funny, and when I was funny, I could make them laugh out loud.”

Ophelia was shaking her head. “Lots of people are meaner on the internet.”

“And those people will have to deal with what they've been. Or they won't, I don't know. But listen: This girl, Chitra, she posted a video, singing and playing the ukulele. Because pretty girls playing the ukulele was a thing then. And this girl…this poor stupid girl always left the comments on.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I wrote that she had made me pukelele with her bad singing. I—I and the other commenters suggested maybe she wasn't really pretty enough for the pretty girls-with-ukuleles meme.”

“God.”

“Yes.” Sejal nodded. “She singled me out—I was the only one who actually knew her. ‘Why was I being so mean?' I had my own blog pages full of posts and videos and hundreds of
comments, good and bad. Some terribly bad. In the outside world I felt numb and half dead, but then I could look at my hit counter and read the comments, and every little vicious word was like a paper cut that got my heart beating again. And this fat ukulele player wanted to know why I was being so mean?”

“Um…”

“I became something awful. I made personal attacks. I revealed all her crushes and told all her embarrassing secrets. And because I never knew her all
that
well, I ran out of secrets fast and began pinning her name to some of my own. Even the trolls started telling me to back off, in their way. They claimed the thread had gotten stale and I was getting boring and, besides, Chitra hadn't said a word in days. She hadn't posted in days because she'd tried to kill herself.”

“W-what?” said Ophelia. She covered her mouth with her hands.

“When I found out I just…I broke it off with the real world. Entirely. It could not touch me. When my mother came home that night, she found me sitting in front of my own video blog, watching myself watching myself. Like I was trying to fold right up into one single electron. My parents got me help. When Chitra's parents found out my part in the whole thing, they tried to bring me up on charges, but I hadn't done anything against the law. But I got help. I got better. That was the best I could do for them, for Chitra. I'm lucky in that way—I had this horrid event to tell me I was not the sort of girl I thought I was, and now I have made the decision to be good. I don't believe most people think to make this decision, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence.

“I thought I saw something familiar in Doug, but…I'm trying to be good, and I don't need any more friends who are not also trying.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“Also I think Doug is a vampire.”

“Um.” Ophelia frowned. “You mean, like, a metaphorical vampire?”

“No, the regular kind.”

Silence.

“So, watch out for that,” said Sejal. “I'm going to go,” she added, and waited for Ophelia to let her out of the laundry room.

 

Cat tried to talk her into staying, or at least accepting a ride home, but Sejal told her she'd prefer to walk. It wasn't even a kilometer, and the streets were sort of familiar. Jay lived nearby.

She supposed Ophelia would tell everyone that she had the Google. And maybe that she thought Doug was a vampire.
Well, good,
she thought as she pulled her coat closer and started down the hill.
Fine. What better way to kick-start this new, improved Sejal—this strong girl who's good and who knows her own mind and doesn't care what other people think?
She shuddered and pulled her coat closer still.

These neighborhoods looked fake at night. In the dim lamplight one could see only a scant spill of stars, and the
colors and details of the lawns and houses flattened out and gave the impression of huge miniatures. And now there was a thickening fog at the bottom of the hill. It reminded Sejal of the fogging of distant objects in some video games. There was not enough processing power to render the bottom of the hill. The bottom of the hill would not exist until she got there.

There was a rustling behind her, and then a rustling to one side as she turned to look, and then it was down the hill and gone. Sejal considered suddenly the wisdom of declaring someone a vampire and then taking a walk, alone, at night. Had she never seen a movie? Did she not understand how these things worked? She comforted herself, however, with the insight that the movie would not kill off the well-meaning foreign exchange student with the comical internet addiction. Sejal wouldn't be the main character, the hero—not in an American movie—but she might be the best friend or the comic relief or the one you think is dead but turns out to be all right in the end. She wondered who the main character in her life was.