Jane Jones Page 2

  I said “I was just …” again, but apparently, I was just was just not enough to stop Hurricane Ma.

  “Not to mention the fact that if that boy had sobered up, you could have been discovered. We could have all been discovered. Did you think of that?” She paused, as if waiting to hear my answer before asking again. Maybe she actually wanted me to participate in this “discussion.” “Did you?”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t think,” Ma interrupted. “Not for one second, did you?”

  “Ma, I didn’t really do anything.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to hear the excuses! You know what? Just sit there with your mouth shut until we get home.”

  I would have been totally happy to sit there with my mouth shut for seven years if that’s what my mother really wanted. But I knew she didn’t. I knew she was about to start right back up again in five, four, three, two—

  “I really want to understand what was going through your head. I really want to understand, Jo, why?” That last why came out kind of soft. I don’t want to give you the impression that my mother was no longer angry with me. It’s more like she had exhausted herself with the exertion of tearing me five new ones. Well, she wasn’t the only one who had a right to be upset. So now that she’d piped down, I let her have it right back.

  “Why? You want to know why? Because you made me go out with them! You ordered me to call Astrid and ask if I could hang out with all the vampire kids because you were sick of me lying around the house. You made me beg to play their vampire games. And that’s what they do, Ma! That’s their idea of fun.”

  “But just because all of them were doing it doesn’t mean—”

  “Doesn’t mean I had to do it too? Ma, you act like I haven’t been a teenager for the last seventy-five years. Believe me, I’ve tried just saying no to peer pressure. It doesn’t always work. Especially if your peers happen to be a-holes.” My voice was shaking with emotion, but I had more to say.

  “You’re the one who put me at risk, Ma. Because even though all those vampire kids share a secret, you knew I had something else that I would have liked to keep secret from them. And now they all know, and even if I live another thousand years, I will never live it down. I’m a mutant among mutants.”

  “Jo …”

  “It’s Jane, Ma. At least for the next four years until we move again. In fact, you can call me Lame—it’s what my ‘friends’ call me.” From the look on my mother’s face, I could tell I’d made her feel bad. Well, good. She was such a hypocrite, trying to tell me how to run my social life, or lack of social life, when she wouldn’t be caught undead hobnobbing with any of the adults in the local vampire community. Sure, no matter where we lived, we were always among others like us, because there is a thriving vampire community in just about any American town, and unfortunately our numbers seem to be growing all the time. But my mother obviously didn’t trust any of them. And for good reason. So why should she expect me to be any different?

  “I know how difficult this is, Jane,” she said. “I just thought things would be easier if you had some friends in your new school.”

  I didn’t feel like really putting the screws to her, but the truth is, she didn’t know at all how difficult it was. She’d only ever gone to a one-room schoolhouse, and only until the eighth grade, before leaving to help out on her family farm. Then she married my dad and they had their own farm to take care of. I remember that wasn’t going so well before everything … changed for us. So, while she’s no stranger to difficulty, she has no idea what it’s like for me, a former farmer’s daughter, now a vampire, attending her fourteenth high school in a town that happens to be filled with mortal as well as supernatural jerks.

  “I know what a great girl you are, Jane. Not everyone can be popular, but I know that if you just tried a little harder, you could make a few good friends.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Ma. The vampires may have to put up with me, but the regular kids … it’s like they don’t even see me.”

  “I bet you’re selling yourself short, honey.”

  “Ma, you know the group of super-nerdy kids who are obsessed with vampire novels and walk around the mall wearing capes? Even they won’t let me sit with them at lunch.” I knew I sounded pitiful now, but it was true. It was also kind of funny when I said it out loud like that. I guess it sounded funny to my mother too, because she covered her mouth to try to hide her smile before I could see it. Then she snorted.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh.”

  “It’s okay. It’s funny. It’s ironic. I mean, people always say they’re doing something ironically and it’s supposed to be funny, but usually it’s not really ironic at all. But this is genuine irony!” Now we were both LOLing and I noticed that despite our cool breath, we’d managed to fog the Volvo’s windows just a bit. I wiped my hand on the glass.

  “I guess we’d better get home before a policeman thinks we’re a couple of kids out parking,” she said.

  Oh, God. Did she really just say that out loud? Ma can always be counted on to take a pretty decent moment and put a stop to it by saying something creepy or corny. This time was a two-fer.

  We drove home in relative silence. It took a good fifteen minutes, because we lived clear across town from the Holcomb compound. Port Lincoln is a scenic town on the coast of Connecticut. The old roads are lined with old mansions built with old money. The new developments are dotted with new mansions built with new money. There’s a gorgeous river with a rowing club and the only requirements to join are that you’re gorgeous and interested in rowing.

  On the other side of that river, over a quaint little bridge and in the armpit of the highway and the train tracks that can take you to New York City, there’s a little neighborhood. It’s technically in Port Lincoln, but the houses are small and old. Not in the old mansion way, more in the worn and outdated way. That’s where we lived. I don’t want to make it sound like it was skid row, because the truth is that even though the houses were straight out of the seventies, they were all in good repair, with washed curtains and lawns striped light and dark green due to frequent mowings. My theory is that was because my neighbors were the handymen, housekeepers, and landscapers who catered to the rest of the town. Of course, it’s only a theory because I didn’t really know any of my neighbors. I didn’t really plan to. What was the point, when in a few short years, I’d have a whole new set?

  We pulled into our driveway, and I trudged behind my mother up to the front door. That’s another thing about vampires. We can’t fly. We don’t have superspeed. We drive cars and we trudge when we’re tired. I was so tired.

  My mother unlocked the door and flipped on the dim hallway light. She brushed my lank bangs out of my eyes and said, “Try to be quiet going upstairs. Your brother is asleep.”

  I nodded and padded up the carpeted staircase to my small, dark room. My hand searched and found the light switch. From the six recessed fixtures in my ceiling, huge 800-watt bulbs—like the ones used in sunlamps—hummed to life. I know you’ve heard the stories of how sunlight will destroy a vampire as soon as it touches his skin. In real life, direct sun is more like an irritant to vampires. If we bake in it, we get burned, just like you. Okay, we might crisp up a little faster than the living, but then, melanomas aren’t really an issue for us either. So we cover up, we wear SPF 100, and we stay in the shade. Everyone just thinks we’re Irish or something. And since we try to exist in the regular world, most of us keep normal hours, going to work and school during the day and sleeping at night. Vampires need the heat generated by the UV lamps to help us fight our bodies’—um, our corpses’—natural unnatural instincts to stay awake after sundown.

  Of course, I realize this isn’t the greenest practice and the irony that I may be contributing to the eventual destruction of the Earth when I’m someone who will probably need the Earth for kind of a long time is not lost on me. Plus I feel guilty about our insanely hi
gh electric bills, especially since I require extra wattage, due to my unfortunate condition. The glow coming from my ceiling would have been too much for even the most tanorexic human. I quickly double-checked the light-blocking blinds we’d installed so that curious neighbors wouldn’t drop by to ask why daylight was radiating from our house, then I opened the curtains surrounding my canopy bed and flopped down in the warm darkness, exhausted.

  I had closed my eyes for only one second before my mom’s head poked into my lair. “Are you hungry? I could defrost a little something for you.”

  A little something, in my case, would be a drop of Bombay blood. It’s the rarest blood type in the world. Lots of people think the rarest blood type is AB negative, because not many people have it, but Bombay blood is even scarcer. It has something to do with things called phenotypes and antigens. My younger brother, Zachary, could explain the exact science to you. He’s, like, a scientific genius even though he only looks ten. What I do know is that Bombay blood type was discovered in India in 1952 and I first tasted it in 1968 when my mother got her hands on some to test my brother’s theory that I could tolerate it. Fortunately, he was correct, because prior to that, after a few scary reactions to regular blood, I never fed on anything. That’s something else about vampires you might not know. We don’t absolutely need to drink blood to live. With only a few exceptions, nothing can really kill us, no matter what kind of rough shape we’re in. However, we do need blood to be healthy, but only a drop or two every day. Of course, there are vampires who can’t control their urge to have more than a drop or two … or two thousand. When you hear about a person being drained by a vampire, it’s because they were unlucky enough to meet a vampire with a real drinking problem. Since the only blood I can feed on is extremely precious—found in just four people out of every million—I can never afford to get that greedy. I eat much less frequently than others of my kind and I’ve existed off of the same bag of black-market donor blood for at least ten years. Yes, it was more expensive than I could even wrap my mind around, but it’s been a decade since we’ve had to go “grocery shopping” for me.

  I shook my head no at Ma’s offer of an impromptu snack, and she leaned in to kiss my chilly cheek with her cool lips before she turned and left for the warmth of her own bedroom. It was hard enough for us to sleep at night, but I knew it was even more difficult for her since my father had taken a job as a night quality-control manager at the Fresh Meadow Farms cookie and cracker plant in the next town over. It seemed like an ideal gig for a vampire, except for the fact that he had no use for the one semi-decent job perk of unlimited free cookies and crackers. In fact, the smell of those things baking made him pretty nauseated. But who knows, that might have been the case even if he’d still been human. Fresh Meadow Farms cookies and crackers are basically made of sawdust and glue.

  There was a time when my family would have been grateful to have any free food at our disposal, no matter how repugnant it was. I remember our sad little farm on the Oklahoma panhandle. I remember my father planting wheat, even though the crop had failed the year before. I remember all of us being so hungry that we thought about eating the skeletal old milk cow we had loved like a pet. Then I remember a brown cloud rolling across the plain and my mother covering our faces with wet rags as our house rattled and filled with something that looked like smoke. When it was over, dust had drifted in front of our door like snow. The cow was dead. The wheat was gone. Both of my parents cried, and so my brother and I cried too. I thought for a while that we would pack up our things and move away after that, but we didn’t. My mother just went to work cleaning the house, and my father replanted the wheat. I couldn’t help out the way I should have, because I came down with a pretty bad case of pneumonia and almost died. Almost. From what my parents have told me, we were all closer to death than they could admit at the time.

  According to Ma, even without me being able to sit up or eat, we had run out of food. We had no livestock and no dry goods and no money or credit to buy even a tin of anything to share. My parents were ashamed, but they agreed that we couldn’t go on that way. So my father set out on foot—because he’d never earned enough to buy the horse and carriage he’d planned on getting one day—to ask Mr. and Mrs. Pike if they had anything to spare. The Pikes had just settled in to the house nearest to ours, and I recall my parents being so thrilled to have neighbors. When my father arrived, he found them loading their Model A pickup truck with all of their belongings, saying they were moving on, going to try their luck out West. When my father explained our situation, the Pikes graciously drove him back to our house on their way. Ruth Pike offered to come in and help Ma make a stew out of some of the meat and vegetables she’d packed away for the trip. Turner Pike told my father, “You ain’t never had nothing like my Ruthie’s stew.” It’s true. We never had. And we never did either. By the time the Pikes peeled away from our farm, my family was no longer dying of starvation. Also, my family was no longer officially living.

  Like I said, I was worse off than anyone because of how sick I was. When I finally came around, my mother, my father, and Zachary were still trying to figure out what in the holy hell had happened to all of them. It wasn’t like the Pikes were kind enough to leave an instruction manual. From what they remembered, once Ruth and Turner had been invited across the threshold of our home, it was over within minutes. Ruth bit my father, and when my mother tried to pull her off, she was bitten by someone. My parents couldn’t bring themselves to describe what had happened to my brother, but I guessed he’d been somebody’s dessert. Nobody ever said what had happened to me either. My father did once tell me that when he woke up, Turner was squeezing drops of blood from Ruth’s fingertip into my mother’s mouth. When Ruth saw that he was awake, she just said, “Soon you’re all gonna feel right fine again.” Then they were gone.

  At first, we didn’t understand what we’d become. Eventually, though, my parents pieced together memories of the attack with scary stories they’d heard whispered around campfires. They gradually noticed that thoughts of food were slipping away, and the idea of eating something that once made us drool now repulsed us. Even though my parents had never been particularly religious, I remember my mother praying that it was all a mistake. Then I remember her trying to accept it, even saying what a blessing it was, because while we surely would have died from hunger before, now we could stay and keep trying to make the farm work, no matter how many dust storms blew through. She was in some deep denial. Soon it became apparent that even if my father could have planted a successful crop, it wasn’t practical for him to be tending fields in the hot sun every day.

  Ancient instincts also started kicking in, telling my family that in order to get stronger, we would need to feed like the Pikes had. We were thin and pale and hungry in a way that was altogether different from the way we had been hungry before. When we thought about eating, our sharp canine teeth protruded like animal fangs. As a family, we made a pact that we would feed as sparingly as possible. We wouldn’t kill anyone and we wouldn’t turn anyone like we’d been turned.

  It wasn’t long after that I discovered my problem. I mean, besides the problem of being a vampire. I vanted to suck blood, I just vasn’t able to vithout nearly croaking. While my family cooked up schemes and tricks for dining on human blood as ethically as they could, I just existed, thinner and paler and hungrier than ever.

  The problem with a vampire thinking about her past is that there’s so much past to think about. Once you get started down memory lane, it’s hard to stop remembering all the places you’ve been and all the people you’ve left behind. My family has been moving to a new town every four years for the past seventy-five years. It’s because we have to hide the fact that we’re not aging like regular people. I’m not sure exactly what would happen if we just decided to stay put, but I wish that we could. I would even stay here, in this place that I hate, where I will never fit in. I can’t think of anything dumber than living forever when every other thing
in your life is so temporary.

  If I had accepted my mother’s offer of a bedtime drop, I might have been able to sleep. My body was so tired, my limbs were rubbery, but my mind wouldn’t be quiet. I got out of bed and powered down the sunlamps. I made my way across my darkened room, sat at my desk, and opened my laptop. I logged on to my email account. Don’t think I don’t understand how sad it is that the highlight of my day is often reading a scam email from a fake Nigerian prince who claims that he needs to borrow money from me in order to make us both rich. I get that it’s pathetic, but I set up an email account because even pathetic loners need to be reachable in order to join message boards in order to talk with other pathetic loners.

  I actually like the Internet, because I can just pretend to be a regular human weirdo there. I belong to one webring where all the members are video-gamers and another one where everyone is a huge fan of this particular reality show. Honestly, I don’t give a rat’s tiny heinie about either of those things, but the people are friendly enough and I can talk for a little while without much chance of exposing who I am. What I am. Sometimes, on the gamer board, I even get a little flirty with this one guy who’s kind of funny. Once, my mom flipped out when she eavesread an exchange between us over my shoulder. She gave me this huge lecture about how the Internet is full of predators who are dangerous, especially to young girls. I completely agreed with her but couldn’t resist pointing out that I could, in theory, be considered the predator in this situation. True, a pitiful blood-intolerant vampire, but a genuine vampire nonetheless.

  When I opened my email, I had four messages. No Nigerian princes, but one alert about a sale at Hot Topic and one offer to sell me some celebrity’s secrets for teeth whitening. I briefly wondered if it would work on my fangs before hitting Delete.

  The third message was slightly intriguing. When we moved to town, I had set up a Facebook page for myself, with my new alias, Jane Jones. At the time, I was fantasizing about all the new acquaintances I would make in this place. I wasn’t really taking into account the fact that after being in high school for decades on end, I had never really associated with anyone who I would want to talk to outside of school. Needless to say, I was surprised when I read, “Eli Matthews has added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Eli Matthews in order for you to be friends.” Eli Matthews was a kid whose name I thought I recognized from my American history class. Maybe. We might have had some other classes together too, but I wasn’t sure. If he was who I wasn’t 100 percent certain he was, he wasn’t exactly noteworthy. Still, he had noticed me, I guess. My hand hovered over my laptop. After the evening’s events I wasn’t sure how smart it was to establish a relationship with someone at school, no matter how virtual or casual it was. I didn’t click Confirm, but I didn’t click Ignore or Delete either. The message would be there when I decided what I should do.