Fat Vampire (15 page)

“Doug, I'm not interested in you as a suit—as a boyfriend. I think perhaps we should not hang around anymore.”

Doug smiled. “You don't mean that.”

Sejal blinked and skimmed back through her last statement for typos. Everything checked out.

“I do mean that. Actually.”

“There's a lot you don't understand,” Doug answered, “but you will. I'll take care of you.”

Sejal laughed now, half from nerves. But then she laughed harder as a sort of slap in the face, the best she could do to soothe a bright animal whisper in her to flee, to put doors and distance between her and this boy—or else to attack, to push her sharp thumbs into his soft eyes. Gods, was it just a panic
attack? Why did it feel like Doug was to blame? Her laughter, anyway, had the effect she wanted—Doug flinched, and a little of that old uncertainty flickered across his face.

“You'll…” Sejal sputtered. “You do not need to take care of me, Doug. I will manage on my own, thank you. Why do you Americans think we are all orphaned children? For only pennies a day you can buy me a donkey! Excellent! Thank you. I'll put it with the rest.”

“Hey. Hey! Why're you…where do you get off saying shit like that to me?” said Doug. “No one says stuff like that to me. Anymore.”

“I'm sorry,” said Sejal, looking away.

“Do you have any idea what you're doing, saying stuff like that?”

Sejal sighed. “I am doing what needs to be done. I'm sorry if I…got mean about it.”

“You've been giving me signals. Don't pretend you haven't. You've been going out of your way to lead me on.”

“I am like that only,” Sejal insisted. “I've been trying to be friendly. I did not know you would…not see it like this.”

“So what's wrong with me, then?”

“Doug—”

“No. Really. I'd like to know. I'm too short? Too fat? I can tell you without bullshit that I am maybe the second-strongest guy in school. Do you want to know how?”

“You are not kind!” Sejal said, braced forward, knuckles white around the swing set chains. “You are no better than you have to be. Why are you no better? Because people treat you poorly? You treat others poorly. You treat Jay poorly.”

“I've been nothing but nice to Jay today—”

“Yes. Today. It is like you've been running for office.”

They fell silent and the old nag of a swing set creaked and groaned. The leafy tangles at the property's edge shuddered in the night air.

“You don't know what you're doing,” Doug said. “It's not my fault, if you say these things.”

Sejal stood, feeling suddenly foolish, and put the black curved seat between her and Doug. It shimmied and bumped against her hips. “I know what I'm doing. I have been trying to find something in you…I have been looking for your heart. There should be something divine in all our hearts.” She swallowed hard and her eyes rimmed with tears.

“Hey,” said Doug. “Hey, hey, hey, it's all right.” He tried to take hold of her, but Sejal backed away and in between the swing and struts.

“There's something wrong with me, too, Doug,” she said. “Something missing. That is how I can see it. But I'm trying to be better. You're only trying to be admired.”

“Oh, and—and I suppose
Adam's
a good person.”

“Adam? This has nothing to do with Adam.”

“He likes you.”

“He likes Sophie,” said Sejal.

She was cold and her feet were damp and she wanted to go inside and then to leave with Cat. After a moment Doug said something. Sejal couldn't make it out as he barely moved his lips, so tight were they over his teeth. He looked as though he might be biting the inside of his mouth.

“I can't hear you,” said Sejal. But Doug didn't repeat
himself, so after a moment she added, “I'm going in.” She walked back up the deck stairs and into the house
(don't turn around,
she thought,
don't look)
, and left Doug alone below in the dark.

“How dramatic,” she whispered to herself sourly. “I should try out for the school play.”

I
T HAD RAINED
in the early morning. By lunch the world was as fresh and clean as a green apple. The air was spiced with the smell of new possibilities and taquitos. While most of the usual lunch group was occupied with a loud and stuttering debate over whether Andrea did or did not sleep with Blaine on
Lexington Avenue
(it was like watching toddlers play soccer, this debate—each new idea was swarmed and kicked simultaneously from all directions), Ophelia asked Sejal about the rest of her weekend.

“Saturday we went shopping on South Street,” she answered. “Is that right? South Street?”

“Was it all body jewelry and sex shops?”

“There was also a comic book store.”

Ophelia nodded. “South Street.”

South Street had felt a little more like home than the Main Line suburbs. There was bright, messy life on the streets. Colors. And here the colors had not been washed and scrubbed until they faded into taupe and eggshell.

Not that there weren't still differences, big differences. There was an almost stultifying array of choices—kinds of people, kinds of foods. Here, amid the produce wallahs of the Italian Market, she'd counted six fruits she'd never even seen before and gasped at a line of ripe mangoes—their blushing skins looking suitably embarrassed to be spotted so far from home and in September. They practically shivered in the autumn air.

“What'd you do on Sunday?” asked Ophelia.

“Ah—I ruined Cat's Sunday by asking to accompany the family to church.”

Cat overheard this and disengaged from the TV show argument, which had just devolved into personal attacks and name calling anyway. “I didn't say you ruined my Sunday,
yaar
. I'm just disappointed. I thought you were going to be my Get Out of Church Free card for the whole year.”

“I am here to try new things.” Sejal smiled. “Tough shit for you!”

“Ho,
ho
!” Cat shouted.

“New things, huh?” Ophelia purred as she leaned in. “What kind of new things do you want to try?”

Cat puckered her lips in a silent whistle and turned back
to the others. That left Sejal alone with Ophelia, so to speak, in this tangle of thorns that had suddenly grown up around them.

“I don't know,” she said, looking at Cat. “Things.” She considered what to tell Ophelia about her visit with Doug and Jay when a shadow fell across her lap.

Doug's head was blotting out the sun. Jay stood behind, looking vaguely apologetic.

Sejal hadn't expected him to show up for lunch. He had rather pointedly ignored her in math class that morning. “Doug,” she said.

“Hey, Meatball, Jay,” said Sophie.

“I prefer ‘Doug,'” answered Doug, and he sat down at the base of the tree where the roots were packed in tight, intestinal coils.

“Okay,” said Sophie. “Doug. You look different. You got contacts! But there's something else.”

Conversation wilted. Faces turned and became transfixed by this something else, this question of how exactly Doug had changed. Doug seemed unfazed by the attention, almost bored with it. Where he would have previously only had eyes for Sejal, he now examined Abby with all the careless detachment of the mean judge on a reality talent show.

“But, hey,” Cat broke the silence. “What about Jay? Isn't his hair rad?”

Jay flinched as the group came back to themselves and stared at his head. He smiled sheepishly and bobbed it back and forth.

“That looks so good on you, Jay,” said Ophelia.
“Although—and you know I'm only saying this because I like you—your new hair doesn't really go with your Simpsons T-shirt.”

“Or your cargo shorts,” Sophie added.

“It's like your head's on the wrong action figure,” said Adam, and everyone laughed.

“Fuck you,” Doug said suddenly like a whip crack. “You don't have to take that from him, Jay.”

“It was funny,” Jay mumbled. “He wasn't being mean.”

“I really wasn't,” said Adam. “I'm just, like, Jay's too cool for his clothes now. That's all.”

Doug gave a princely nod. Everyone seemed to avoid his gaze. Everyone except Abby.

“Jay and I are going to start a band,” Cat said. “Me on bass, him on theremin and MIDI. We're inventing a new genre—early goth plus nerdcore. We're gonna call it nerdcave.”

“What's a theremin?” asked Sophie. “What's a middy?”

And so they talked about electronic music, and they talked about nerdcave, and they talked about Cat and Jay's theoretical band (which was now called Primordial Soup for the Teenage Soul) until Victor approached.

Even Sejal knew his name. He had been impossible to miss on campus. And though Cat had once referred to him as a “meathead asswipe,” even she stared now with unabashed longing.

“Hey, Victor,” said Adam.

“Can I talk to you a minute, Doug?” said Victor. “I have a homework question. About the chiroptera family.”

Doug made a face. Then he got up, and the two boys walked
away. The drama group watched them depart in silence.

“I never noticed before,” Cat said finally, “but…don't those two look kind of alike? In a really weird way?”

Sophie nodded. For a few moments the rest didn't nod or say anything, but even their lack of reaction to such a patently absurd claim was in itself a kind of endorsement.

“It's like they're a ‘before' and ‘after' picture,” Adam said. But nobody laughed.

 

“You look better,” said Victor as they walked around to the far side of the gym. “Not as douchey. You get some neck?”

“Maybe,” said Doug.
Get some neck?

“Maybe?”

“All right, no. But I did try some deer. It's better than cow.”

“Huh,” said Victor while scratching his cheek. A cheek that had a blue grit of stubble, Doug noted—unlike his own face, which had never produced more than a thin cotton-candy fuzz on the sides of his jaw. And never would, he supposed. “You hunted a deer?” Victor continued. “Well, that's…it's not actually cool, but it's closer to cool than before. Like, now maybe you can at least see ‘cool' if you stand on something.”

“Thank you. Your brotherly encouragement is the fucking wind beneath my wings.”

Victor laughed. “Not a bad crowd,” he said, pointing his chin in the direction of the drama kids. “A couple of those girls are definitely fuckable.”

Doug looked lazily over his shoulder as if the thought hadn't occurred to him. “That was real subtle—‘chiroptera
family'? Are you
trying
to give us away?”

“Relax. Nobody knows that ‘chiroptera' means bat.”

“
I
knew. Jay might know.”

Victor looked back at the tree. “You think he could figure out what I meant?”

“No,” said Doug, too quickly. He pretended to consider the possibility for a moment, and shook his head. “No. No way. Jay's really rational. Like, scientific. I happen to know for a fact that he doesn't believe in us.”

“Seriously? I know you two have been best friends since preschool or whatever. You used to talk about him all the time at the cabins in the summer. Made him sound a lot cooler than he actually is, too, but…admit it—you've told him, right?”

“I have not told him. Seriously. You think I want to get him killed?”

“Good,” said Victor, “'cause the other vamps really have their panties in a twist lately. Where were you guys yesterday?”

Doug frowned. He didn't know what Victor was talking about, and he was conditioned to be distrustful of situations where he didn't know what some taller and more popular boy was talking about. They always reeked of a setup. At worst they were a kind of entrapment. At best they were like a friendly hand to be yanked away at the most humiliating moment. But these sorts of stunts required an audience, and the boys were alone.

“Me and Jay?” Doug asked.

“You and Stephin David,” Victor explained. “We were all supposed to meet and talk about this
Vampire Hunters
thing,
didn't he tell you? Everyone's freaked. The signora sent Asa. Borisov sent me. But you and David weren't at his house at five-thirty.”

That's true,
thought Doug.
We were walking around the park.

“Stephin didn't say anything to me about it. I mean, he mentioned there was concern about the TV show, but he didn't say anything about any meeting. Maybe he forgot.”

“Well, he owes me,” said Victor. “I want the half hour back that I spent alone with that ghoul Asa. That guy's depressing as boiled steak. And now Borisov's got me watching that lame show for homework so I can report back to him.”

“I missed it,” Doug admitted, “but they still think I live in San Diego, right?”

“Right. Those fucktards couldn't find a vampire in a phone booth.”

Doug nodded. Then he said, “You use a lot of colorful expressions.”

“Well, you know…we're from Tennessee.”

Look at the two of us,
thought Doug.
Talking like we're old friends.
He sort of wished more people could look at the two of them, but on this side of the gym they were visible only to the crows and a band teacher in a golf cart.

“So what do you and David talk about?” asked Victor.

Last night we talked about whether I should kill you.

“Nothing much. He rambles. Tells me about the Civil War. I'm thinking of asking the signora if I can meet with someone else.”

“You should definitely go see her. She'll want to talk to
you about the show. She'll want to talk to you about that other little stunt of yours last night.”

Doug started. Victor grinned his corn-fed grin.

“I knew it was you! Superhero powers, white cape and hood? Okay, that's officially cool. You stopped an armed robbery! Up here, Batman!”

Victor held up his hand, and Doug slapped it awkwardly. It was a bit of a miss—too much fingers, not enough palm.

“Lost all your clothes, didn't you? I figured that was why you didn't have your poncho today.”

“Well,” Doug said, and he gave a glance back at what would plainly have been the drama tree had there not been a gym in the way. “I don't think I'm going to be needing it anymore.”

Then Jay emerged from that same direction and approached them—stiffly and with that ridiculous new hairstyle and a look both of apprehension and concentration on his face. Like he was walking toward a bomb while trying to remember a telephone number.

Before Doug's cat had died the previous winter, he'd become all too familiar with a particular smell, a kind of tangy feline musk she'd produced at the vet's, during car rides, or whenever you tried to give her her ear medicine. A fear smell. He was getting a whiff of something like this now. And no wonder, he supposed—Jay looked terrified. Then Victor cleared his throat, and Doug turned his head.

It was altogether possible that Victor was making the smell. Doug inhaled deeply, tried to narrow in on it, but now it was gone. Gone, or else his nose, like a gracious host, was
already pretending it hadn't happened at all.

“Sorry to—Are you guys still talking?” Jay asked. “I need to talk to Doug, alone.”

Victor glanced from Jay to Doug. His face was inscrutable.

“We're done,” he said, and walked off toward the parking lot.

Jay watched him go.

“You haven't told me everything about Victor Bradley,” Jay said after a moment. “Have you?”

“There's nothing to tell. What's this about?”

“What's
this
about? What was last night about? What's everything about?”

Doug rolled his eyes. “I'm not really in the mood to discuss the meaning of life right now. I could probably find you some pamphlets in the counselor's office—”

“You know what I'm talking about. You're walking around suddenly like you got a stake up your butt.”

Doug glared at Jay's serious face. But then the corner of Jay's mouth twitched and a laugh came coughing out his nose. Doug lost it, too.

“A stake up my—How long have you been waiting to use that?”

“Just since last night.”

The boys stared at each other, smiles fading.

“You look better,” said Jay. “Did you…get some blood last night, or—”

“I think it would be better if I didn't share every little detail of my life now,” Doug answered.

“Oh. Well.”

The truth, as Doug considered it, was that he had not become a vampire in the Poconos so many weeks ago. Last night had been like a ritual, and he told Jay so.
Now
he was a vampire.

“Huh,” said Jay. “Like a dark Bar Mitzvah. Like a…well, I was going to say
Bat
Mitzvah, but that's for girls, right?”

“Okay, see? This is what I can't have anymore. I'm different, now. I'm getting a do over on my life. I can't get my do over if you're always around being all…”

Jay frowned. “What?”

The bell rang, signaling the end of round one and of lunch in general.

“We'll talk after school,” Jay insisted. “Well…not right after school, 'cause I'm going over to Cat's and I guess you wouldn't want to…but later, maybe? After dark?”

“I have something I have to do after dark,” said Doug.