Suck It Up (7 page)

Retreating to her room, she muttered, “It can wait till morning.” She chuckled at her unintended joke and re-locked her door.

FAQs

CAN VAMPIRES HAVE CHILDREN?

No. We're a sterile race. Which is a good thing. An immortal race that could breed would soon turn the world into a mosh pit of immortals. Sterility is the price we pay for immortality.

WHAT IS IMMORTALITY?

An ancient way of being. Many species started out immortal. While a few species survive today that can live for hundreds, even thousands of years, mortality evolved in most species for two reasons. (1) It saves them from overwhelming their habitat. (2) Aging and death allows each generation to adapt and evolve in an ever-changing environment.

In this way, people of mortality are a more evolved species than immortals. But we too can adapt to ensure our survival. Whereas vampires were once the most feared race on earth, we have evolved into a benign and peaceful people. Today, we are no more threatening than an apple orchard.

9

Morning Mystified

Early the next morning, when Portia's alarm joggled her awake, she thought it was a dream that her mother had endangered their lives by bringing home a stranger and letting him sleep in the guest room. Then she saw the article from the
Lower East Side Voice
that she'd printed and left on her desk. It all came back to her, especially the part about the untold story of what had motivated little Morning to throw himself into traffic on the Williams Bird Bridge. And the fantastic idea she'd come up with for her video essay.

After pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, she ate a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. Except for bird racket coming from the back garden, the apartment was quiet. Her mother was still in bed. No surprise there. She was a night owl. But the silence coming from the upstairs was irritating. She noisily rinsed her bowl and clattered it into the dishwasher. Then she realized that even if she woke him up, of course he was going to pretend to sleep in. To keep up his vampire act, he wouldn't get up until after sunset. Which was perfect. After school, she'd fire up her Handycam, park herself outside his door, and when he emerged, pepper him with questions about the Williams Bird Bridge. It would be so
60 Minutes.

But to pull it off there was another bridge that needed mending. Before leaving for school, she slid a note under the guest room door.

Morning, Morning,

Wait—wait! Don't tear this up 'cause you've heard that doofy joke a gazillion times, and 'cause you must hate me for being so rude last night. I'm blaming it on PTS (Pretest Stress). Being rude, not the lame joke. There's no excuse for that.
Anyway,
having a “vampire” as a houseguest is a lot cooler than the last one we had, Two-Headed Harry. (Don't ask.) Soooo…mi crib es su crib, and all that.

Your new roomie,
Portia

PS Look forward to fangin' out—oops—I mean
hangin'
out with ya later.

Morning didn't have to pretend to sleep in. The previous day had been long and exhausting, even for someone with the recuperative powers of a vampire. But his stay in horizontal heaven was cut short by Penny pounding on the door. She told him to hurry up and get dressed. He barely had time to swill a Blood Lite before they were out the door.

Morning squinted against the sun brightening both sides of the narrow street. Penny hailed a cab. He stumbled into the backseat after her. He was barely awake, and only because he'd read Portia's note. Her change of mood was an eye-opener, especially the part about “mi crib es su crib.” That could be taken a lot of different ways. When Penny gave the driver an address on the Lower East Side, Morning's brain jolted to full alert. “We're going to St. Giles?”

“Yes.”

“Is that the first move in Mr. Birnam's playbook?”

“No,” Penny answered with a frown. “Your friend, or whatever he is, has a twisted sense of humor. His so-called playbook is blank.”

Morning laughed.

She shot him a testy look. “Did you know that?”

“No.” He immediately got Birnam's joke. A vampire had never been outed. How could there be a playbook for a game that had never been played? “But that's a good thing,” he added. “Now you get to write the playbook as it goes.”

“Yes, for as long as it goes.”

“Why are we going to St. Giles?”

“It's a surprise.”

Anticipation surged through him. “I haven't seen Sister Flora for almost a year.”

“Sorry, Morning,” she said. “When I called last night, they told me she's moved on to other things.”

He deflated. The nuns at St. Giles came and went, but Sister Flora had been there since his first day. As far as he was concerned, she was the only reason to go back. “C'mon, what are we doing there?”

Penny gave him an enigmatic smile. “Writing the first page in the playbook.”

He stared out the window and thought about the other playbook. The one between him and Birnam that Penny knew nothing about. This book was also blank, except for the first page: to CD in front of Penny. Last night had been the wrong moment to come out. He would have to bide his time until the right moment presented itself.

The cab turned off Delancey Street's crowded boulevard and nosed down a narrow canyon of tenement buildings.

Seeing his old street stirred up a riptide of feelings. It was the place he thought of when people asked him where he was from. And it was a prison. A prison he had thought he'd escaped from so many times, but each time he'd looked at it for the “last time,” he had been returned after flunking out of another family.

The cab pulled to a stop in front of a small stoop. The building that housed St. Giles looked the same as the other six-story brick tenements on the block. The big difference was the occupants: nuns and an unruly bunch of boys ranging from infants to teenagers short of their eighteenth birthday, when they “aged out” of the foster care system.

As Morning followed Penny onto the stoop, he glanced up at the wire web above the door. It protected a half-moon window with
ST
.
GILES GROUP HOME FOR BOYS
stenciled on the glass. A black handball was still wedged in the wire where one of the Mallozzi twins had thrown it while trying to break the window. Morning wondered if the Mallozzi twins had finally found a real life version of their perfect foster family: the Sopranos.

Penny pushed open the door. “Wait here a sec,” she instructed. “I'll be right back.” She stepped inside the entryway and rang a buzzer.

He didn't mind waiting. If Sister Flora wasn't there, it wasn't like there was anyone else he wanted to see. And if the Mallozzi twins had not been successfully placed in a crime family, he didn't want to run into them. Even though they were two years younger than him, they were much bigger and the neighborhood bullies.

He surveyed the tenements on the other side of the street. The bright splatter of fall flowers in windowboxes took him back to a day he had tried to imagine countless times. It was a summer morning, sixteen years earlier, when he had been stranded on the stoop for the first time. As Sister Flora told it, his mother, or someone, left him on the stoop in one of those plastic handbaskets used in grocery stores. A note was pinned to his baby blanket: “Please take care of me.” When Sister Flora opened the door and discovered the baby, she said, “Good morning.” The baby responded with a happy smile, so she started calling him Good Morning. She dropped “Good” during his terrible twos. McCobb became his last name in the St. Giles tradition of assigning surnames from the orphanage's founders.

Morning's time travel was interrupted by the gun of an engine. He spotted a white van speeding down the street. A satellite dish rode on top. As it jerked to a stop in front of the stoop, he read the big logo on the side.
HOUND TV
. His eyes darted around the street looking for the slashes of yellow tape he'd probably missed. But there was no police tape cordoning off a crime scene. Hound TV, a local all-news channel, was famous for its crime reporting, and for showing grisly footage none of the other channels would show. “We report, you recoil” was how one New York comedian put it.

The driver of the van hopped out and disappeared around the back. A handsome man with a helmet of blond hair emerged from the passenger side. His face was tan-in-a-can orange. Morning recognized him as one of Hound TV's star reporters, Drake Sanders.

“Is this St. Giles Group Home?” Drake asked.

“Yeah,” Morning said. “Did someone die?”

“Nah, we're doing a three-hankie piece, backup for the day there's a corpse shortage.” Drake stopped at the bottom of the stoop and struck a dramatic pose. “‘With no red gold flowing anew, tears of silver will have to do.'” Then he hit Morning with his megawatt smile. “Tele-journalism is what I do, poetry is who I
am
.”

The driver, now with a camera on his shoulder, joined Drake, followed by a woman carrying a microphone with a big “H” on it. “Where's the princess of PR?” the camera guy asked.

Drake glanced down the street. “Must be running late.”

Penny came out the door and onto the stoop. “Hey, Drake. Ready to go?”

“This better be good, Penster,” Drake said as he grabbed the mic from the soundwoman. “But I can't promise airtime. You know how it works. Gory bumps gooey every time.”

Surprised that Drake seemed to know her, Morning glanced at Penny. “What's going on?”

“We're doing a press conference about your miraculous return to St. Giles.” Before Morning could object, Penny grabbed his arm. “Gimme a sec,” she told Drake as she pushed her client into the entryway. “Morning, this is New York. Everyone dressed in black with purple hair claims to be a vampire. I had to go with a different angle to get the media outlets here.”

He waved outside. “You mean all one of 'em.”

She held his shoulders like a steering wheel. “Listen, I trusted you enough to let you stay in my house last night. Will you trust me enough to do this interview? I promise you, it's a lot bigger than it looks.”

“I know it's a lot bigger. I'm a vampire. If you want, I'll prove it to you right now.”

Penny gripped his shoulders. “Please, don't use the V-word on camera. If you do, our little media play will go up in a cloud of BOWGAS. You know what BOWGAS is? It's short for the Book of Who Gives a Shit.”

Morning remembered Birnam's warning about another stage Lifers might go through in their first encounter with a vampire. Total dismissal. There was only one cure for it. His own version of gas. He shut his eyes and laser-focused on a gray mist. As he dove into a mental wormhole, a loud sound snatched him back.

Drake's head poked through the opening door. “Penster, every nine minutes there's a death by unnatural causes in the city of sob stories.” He tapped his watch. “You got three minutes before my police scanner starts to wail.”

“We're good to go,” Penny said, guiding Morning outside.

He wondered if he was ever going to get the chance to come out.

The cameraman started shooting as Drake joined them on the stoop. Drake began with a transition to an absent anchorwoman. “Thanks, Kristin. I'm here on the Lower East Side, at the St. Giles Group Home for Boys, for an incredible moment in the life of this young man, Morning McCobb. This is his friend Penny, and she's going to fill us in. Penny.”

Penny talked to the camera. “Last November, Morning McCobb left St. Giles for a Thanksgiving meal in a real home, and then mysteriously disappeared for ten months. Unlike so many stories about missing children that end tragically, this one is about to end happily. In fact, we've arranged a surprise reunion with the nun who raised Morning since he was a baby.”

As Morning realized he'd been set up, Penny reached back and opened the door. “Sister.”

A stout old nun wearing a gray pantsuit barreled outside and wrapped Morning in a bear hug. Tears streamed down her face as she alternated between laughter and thanking God. Morning answered her joyous embrace with his own. It felt like he hadn't seen her in years. He tried not to cry in front of the camera. But Sister Flora squeezed a couple of tears out of him anyway.

Drake pushed the mike toward her. “Sister, what was your first thought when you saw Morning?”

“It's a miracle!” she exclaimed as she finally let go of him. “Seeing his face again is the wondrous work of God.”

“Do you have anything special you'd like to say to him?”

“Besides wanting to take my ruler to him for not writing or calling?” Everyone laughed at her joke, including the dozen onlookers gathered on the sidewalk. “Yes, I do have something to say.” She took Morning's hand and beamed at him. “My dear boy, today the pigeons took back the Williams Bird Bridge.”

“What's that mean?” Drake asked.

“A little secret between me and Morning,” Sister Flora said with a chuckle. “But I've got a question.”

“Go ahead,” Drake urged.

She wiped away her tears and held Morning with somber eyes. “We heard a terrible rumor about your disappearance.”

“Really?” Drake perked up. “What was that?”

Flora cleared her throat. “We heard, and I pray it's not true, that you were turned into a vampire.”

The question stunned Morning. As far as he knew, a Leaguer Rescue Squad had swept into the house where he'd been turned, and had removed all evidence that he'd ever been there. The only thing Sister Flora had been told was that he had disappeared without a trace.

Penny jumped in. “All right, let's wrap this up.”

“No, no.” Drake shot a mischievous glance at the camera. “I think our viewers would love to hear the answer. Is it true, Morning? Did you become a vampire?”

Morning half-heard the question. He was staring at the face he had spotted at the back of the small crowd. Luther Birnam. With a reassuring smile, Birnam gave him a thumbs-up. Morning had no doubt what the gesture meant. It was time. A private exhibition for Penny was no longer in the cards. He leaned into Drake's microphone. “Yes, I am a vampire.”