The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (13 page)

Edwin grunted, and exhaled and started breathing again, but let me take his hand and lead him out of the room. Once we were a few steps away from the classroom he jerked his hand away from mine and moved to the far side of the hallway, his shoulder almost touching the lockers as he walked. “What was all
that
about?”

“Testing a theory,” I said, resisting the urge to move closer to him.

“What theory?”

“I already told you.”

He looked around, then said, “That I’m a
vampire
?”

“That’s the one.”

“Bonnie, you’re being ridiculous.”

“By the way,” I said. “Yes, I’ll go with you to ‘the cities,’ as my dad calls them. I’ll go online and look up some goth clubs, what do you say? I’ll dress in black, something long and tight that shows off my neck—”

“Stop,” he said. “Please.”

“Do you want to taste my blood?” I said lightly. “I wouldn’t mind. I think it could bring us closer together.”

He made a strangled sort of noise and fled, not heading to the nurse’s office, but for the main doors. Well, well. I’d struck a nerve. Good to know.

I glanced at my hall pass. It didn’t specify a destination. I had my liberty. Might as well go to the library and see if they had a copy of
Interview with a Vampire
or something. I’m not much for reading, but I finally had a subject that interested me.

SUNSHINE AND PAIN

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

E
dwin didn’t come to school the next day, and I might have believed I was responsible, except none of the Scullens and the Scales were in school. I didn’t say anything, of course, but Kelly must have seen me looking toward their table, because she said, “They’re never here on really sunny days. Apparently they go camping whenever the weather’s nice. Like, the whole family. Pretty weird, right?”

“Where do they camp?” I asked.

Kelly shrugged. “I’m not sure. They drive over to the Chippewa National Forest sometimes, and sometimes to Paul Bunyan State Forest. That’s what my mom says—she’s a nurse over at the hospital, so she knows Dr. Scullen. And other times they camp more locally, I’m not sure. They pretty much live in the woods. Maybe they just walk out their back door with backpacks on. I don’t know what they do out there—hunt, maybe?”

“Hmm,” I said. Hunting.
That
was possible—the Scullens and Scales couldn’t be the only hikers out in the woods, and I bet hikers were delicious, if you liked that sort of thing. Probably disappeared without a trace all the time, too.

“Hey, do you, ah, want to go out with us tomorrow? We’re going to Bemidji to go shopping for dresses for the dance.”

Dance? Right. I’d seen posters. Some kind of fall formal. How exciting. “Wow, exotic Bemidji,” I said.

Kelly laughed. “Hey, it’s the biggest city in north central Minnesota. And the birthplace of the late great Jane Russell!”

Wow
, I thought. Quite a distinction. “Ah.”

Kelly went on: “And more important, they’ve got a mall, which is more than you can say for Lake Woebegotten. Are you going to the dance?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t have a date.”

“The Scullens never go to dances,” Kelly said.

“How interesting for them.” A little frost in my voice made her look away.

“Anyway, J and Ike are going together, of course, and I’m going with Terrence, you’d be welcome to come hang out with us if you want, but even if you don’t, you could come with us to help us pick out clothes, you’re from California so you’re like automatically more stylish than most people around here… Never mind.”

I retracted my claws. “No, thanks, I’d love to go, actually. I’ve never even been to Bemidji.” I could make some guesses about it though: they would have fields, and at least one lake, and a lot of trees, and soon they’d be covered in a crust of snow and ice. But I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for Edwin. I’d live life—or whatever simulacrum of life I could find here in the land of lakes and woe. “Count me in.”

“Great!” Kelly said. “Do you mind if we take my car? No offense, but Marmon, ah…”

“Not a luxury ride. I know. But excellently designed for squashing people, you’ll have to agree.”

“Mind if I go to Bemidji tomorrow night?” I asked, stirring my fork around in my caprese salad. The tomatoes weren’t very good—too late in the year, so they were hothouse—but I had to admit the cheese was tasty, and at least it wasn’t a meal served on a bun or dipped in batter and fried or both, which was pretty much what Harry seemed to subsist on.

He dropped several slices of mozzarella on a piece of white bread, squashed another slice on top, and took a big bite of what must have been the whitest sandwich in history, chewed, and said, “What for and who with?”

I rolled my eyes, as teenage girls are expected to do. “My friends Kelly and J. They’re going to some mall to pick out dresses for a dance next month.”

“Hmm. They’re nice kids. You going to the dance?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to go stag—or what is it when a girl goes to a dance by herself? Going doe?”

“I guess it’d be ‘going hind,’ actually,” Harry said, and grinned. “Doesn’t sound too good, does it? Not sure I’d want a daughter of mine going hind.”

Harry could surprise me like that. He was not a dumb guy, and was actually pretty funny. Far more perceptive than Mom, which was a drawback in general, but I was living an honest and virtuous life these days, so it hadn’t caused me many problems yet.

“Well,” he continued, “I can’t see why not. It’s a Friday night, and we haven’t discussed curfews or anything, and despite the badge and the gun I’m not necessarily all that authoritarian, so let’s just say, use your judgment, don’t be home too late, and don’t make me worry about you. I know a few of the cops over in Bemidji, nice enough guys even if they do put on airs what with working for a pretty big city.” (Bonnie here: let me note that Bemidji has a population of about 14,000 people. Santa Cruz—not a particularly large city by California standards—is four times more populous than that. Nevertheless, Bemidji is to Lake Woebegotten as New York City is to Lizard Lick, North Carolina, pretty much, so I guess Dad had a point.) “So I can make a call and have an APB put out for you, which would be pretty embarrassing for you if you weren’t in any trouble, so call if you’re going to be too late. Fair enough?”

“Works for me, Dad,” I said. Calling was no problem. Keeping up social and family appearances was one of my personal specialties.

I went to bed, and I dreamed of Edwin again. No bears this time. Not much blood, either. We were camping, out in the woods, and… let’s just say we didn’t do any hunting. We never even left the tent.

Another bright and sunshiny day, another total lack of the Scullens and the Scales. I didn’t believe for a moment they were camping, especially after Edwin told me he found Lake Woebegotten too countrified for his taste—why would he want to lower his civilization quotient even further? (Okay, possible answer: his parents forced him. But I had a hard time imagining anyone forcing Edwin to do anything.) Wasn’t it more likely that his absence on the first two consecutive cloudless days since I’d arrived in Lake Woebegotten had more to do with his vampirism?

Fine. That’s not actually more
likely
, the answer to a question like that is pretty much never “yes,” I understand, but it’s certainly more
interesting
. Maybe his sort of vampires are only vulnerable to direct sunlight or something. Perhaps vampires are like clematis (a plant that has always sounded like a particularly banal sort of sexually transmitted disease to me): they thrive best in partial shade. It was a theory, anyway. Or maybe I’d
really
scared him away by pressing the issue, cutting my thumb and showing him the blood. That was the possibility I didn’t want to dwell upon: that I might have blown my chance at true love and, not incidentally, eternal life and awesome predatory powers. I took comfort in Kelly’s claim that the Scullens always disappeared on sunny days, but damn: you’d think the boy could at least
call
me. Vampires don’t have cell phones? Vampires don’t
text
? Maybe he was hundreds of years old or something and didn’t have the hang of totally everyday modern technology. And, eww, that was kind of a gross thought. If Edwin was all kinds of ancient, wasn’t his obsession with me the next worst thing to being a pedophile? (Or, at the very least, an ephebophile, like the high school teacher I slept with the year before I moved to Lake Woebegotten said
he
was: obsessed with sleeping with late adolescents, which is only illegal for the
first
few years of their age-15-to-19 uber-fuckability window, depending on where you live.) But if he was that old,
everybody
was a child by comparison, unless they were dead like him, so he had no choice but to be a dirty old man, unless he wanted to be a necrophile. The moral complexities of vampire-human love matches made my head hurt, so I did what I always did when confronted with such a moral problem: decided morals are for losers and the weak, and, thus, utterly irrelevant for me.

I hoped to hear from him eventually. We were supposed to go to the Twin Cities soon, and the weather was going to be clear all weekend. I don’t like being stood up. If someone’s going to be stood up on, I want to be the one doing the standing.

I got through another day in school, made unspeakably tedious without the distraction of Edwin. Biology was increasingly ridiculous, as my lab partner had been absent more often than not—at least Mr. Whatever seemed inclined to cut me some slack on that point. How did Edwin get away with ditching so often? I needed to learn his secret. Maybe having a doctor dad meant he could get doctor’s notes to excuse his absences, but how far could you push something like that? The Scullens and Scales were all old enough to drop out of school if they wanted, but still, it seemed pretty unlikely Edwin would ever be able to actually graduate with so many missed days. That also pointed to him being a vampire: he obviously didn’t give a crap about his future, which made sense, when you figured his future would last potentially forever. What did getting a diploma matter?

Then again, why did Edwin and his quasi-siblings go to a public high school at all? It didn’t really make any sense. Sure, they looked young enough that they
should
be in school, but everybody thought their family was hardcore weirdos anyway, so it would’ve been easy to claim they were being homeschooled like a bunch of religious kids. Maybe Edwin and his brothers were just hungry for sweet teenage girlflesh, then—but what about those bitches Pleasance and Rosemarie? Were they eager for human contact to fill the empty hours of their lonely immortal lives? That didn’t make a lot of sense, either. Wolves don’t hang out with sheep for kicks. And my dad hadn’t mentioned a rash of disappearances or bodies turning up drained of blood in the past couple of years. What kind of vampires didn’t
feed
on the human cattle around them? If I could drain and kill these morons I would.

So… maybe I was an idiot. Maybe Edwin hadn’t shoved my truck. Maybe he was just a cute guy from an oddball family, and I’d driven him away by being all vampire-talky, coming off like a crazy bat lady. I had to consider the possibility that I
was
crazy.

Look. I know I’m… not like other people. I’d say I’m “non-neurotypical.” I don’t empathize the way the rest of you do (which is a blessing—it means I can think clearly. I don’t get the warm fuzzies very often, Edwin being an exception, but even then it’s more of a hot wetness with a side of cold calculation rather than any kind of warm fuzziness. Wikipedia says I have Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is dumb, because I’m all kinds of social—I love society, society is like the ocean to my shark—and I have plenty of personality, and it’s only a disorder if it messes up your life, and my life is awesome. I’ve never been formally diagnosed, and I never
will
be, because I’m smart enough to avoid that, but it’s not like I’ve never seen a serial killer profiler show, and it hasn’t escaped my notice that in my youth I exhibited the famous homicidal triad of setting fires, killing animals, and (fuck you) wetting the bed. (Plus, there’s the fact that I’ve committed homicide.) So I was already what some people would call “crazy,” though probably antelopes think cheetahs are crazy—antelopes must be like, “Those crazy bastards just go around
killing
us all the time, it’s like they don’t even respect our individuality or right to life, and do you see how they’re always running so fast all the time, like eighty miles an hour? That shit isn’t normal. Those cheetahs need professional help.” Sucks to be an antelope. Rocks to be a cheetah.

So, fine, crazy, or “mentally ill,” as defined by some. But was believing in vampires—more specifically, believing the boy I was crushing on was secretly a vampire—was that a whole different kind of crazy? A crazy that
wasn’t
actually completely and obviously advantageous for me? A crazy that I
did
need help for? And how could I get help for
that
without risking giving away my other flavor of crazy, the kind I didn’t
want
any help for?

Maybe I wasn’t even crazy. Maybe I was just so bored in Lake Woebegotten that I was desperately trying to make things more interesting, so I was imagining vampires and were-beasts where there were just cute boys. (Hmm, mental note: Edwin and Joachim three-way? Or, better, the two of them fighting over me, a real shirtless brawl with lots of rolling around in the mud, mmmm.) Not a nice thought, though it could’ve been worse: I could’ve imagined an alien bodysnatcher invasion or a zombie apocalypse or something cliché like that.

Okay. Deep breath. You see all that brooding up there? That mostly happened during biology class, and gym, and while J took me aside in the hallway and told me she was so glad I was going with them and she hoped I’d go to the dance and thanks again for helping Ike and her realize how they feel about each other and so on and on and on. (I found friendly J even more annoying than pissy J. Maybe getting her and Ike together was a mistake. I’d hoped they would wander off in a dizzy dippy haze of mutual sentimentality and hormone-frenzy, but they’d folded me into their love story and now I was stuck playing a role in their personal narrative that didn’t fit me too well, really. Oh well. I could always break them up later if things got too boring.)