Pretty Dead (3 page)

M
y closet is really more like a room filled with designer clothes. Tweedy Chanel suits, Yves Saint Laurent satin smoking jackets, Dior chiffon gowns, Balenciaga taffetas. I like to say the name of those masters; they have a magical, incantory sound. Emily liked to go into that room and run her hands over everything, feeling the textures of lace, velvet and silk. My shoes were too big for her, but she took them out of their boxes and their linen pouches and tried them on anyway, like a little girl playing dress-up, teetering around in the chunky platforms, the spike-heeled
pointed pumps, the strappy sandals. We even looked through my lingerie—the boxes of antique French-lace bras and satin panties embroidered with tiny rosettes and tied at the hips with ribbons. Sometimes I would see a tense look on Emily’s face as she explored. Perhaps it was envy, but I hoped that it was not. One reason I never got close to anyone was because of this familiar look. There were girls I had met over the years whom I wanted to know better. But they always seemed to resent me for my material wealth and perhaps for my appearance, my apparent power over boys. I could never explain that what I had meant nothing compared to being truly alive. Even though Emily did not know my story, I sensed that she was different, that she somehow understood what was really important. Maybe the look on her face only meant that she was sad because she did not have what I did, not that she wanted to take it from me. Maybe I just wished this to be so.

Once, when she was trying on my shoes, I asked her what was wrong.

“It’s just insane how much stuff you have. You’re so lucky.”

“You’re welcome to borrow any of it,” I said, and the look on her face softened.

“No one has ever been so generous. Ever.”

“You deserve it, You deserve to have everything you want.”

“I do,” she said. “I have Jared and I have you.”

One night I dressed her in a Courrèges silver 1960s mini shift dress and go-go boots, and we went to a club in Santa Monica. My outfit matched hers, but it was in gold. I had tailored the silver dress to fit her, and she let me put makeup on her face and douse her with French perfume. She looked beautiful, like my little doll, and she smelled like Paris, especially to my sensitive nostrils, but she kept checking her reflection in her compact mirror and wrinkling her nose at herself.

“I’m so much shorter than you are,” she said.

“You’re perfect.”

The bouncer let our fake IDs pass with a wink. He thought he was doing me a big favor, but he had no idea that I was three times as old as he was.

“I guess he thought we were cute,” I said.

Emily rolled her eyes. “He thought you were Gisele Bündchen. Of course we got in.”

“Okay, Miss Natalie Portman. Or are you Keira Knightley?”

“Shut up, Gisele.”

The club was small and boxy, but the music was good. Goldfrapp and Ladytron pounding away in a neopsychedelic trance. Emily seemed a little withdrawn, so I bought her a drink, and when she’d loosened up I pulled her out on the floor. I could feel people watching us, trying to figure out our story. I liked that feeling; it used to thrill me to walk in somewhere with William and capture everyone’s attention.

I told Emily, and she said, “They’re watching you.
I might as well be invisible.”

I took her hands in mine and leaned closer, speaking into her ear while the music vibrated up through our feet.

“You have no idea how pretty and perfect you are. I don’t want to hear anything more about that.”

Emily hugged me. “It’s not true, but thank you for saying it.”

I kissed her cheek. There was sweat on her face. She had her period; I could tell. I could smell her blood.

We’d fallen asleep on my bed in our clothes, watching a movie called
The Dead Girl
by candlelight. It was about how the discovery of a prostitute’s body made several other female characters realize that they were the living dead.

She told me later that I had cried out in my sleep, “Don’t leave me, Emily!”

“Wake up, Char. You’re dreaming.”

Her hands were like sun-warmed petals against my
cheeks. As she leaned over me, her breath was even warmer. Sweet. I opened my eyes. Her pupils looked huge, and her lashes made shadows on her cheeks. Her curls fell loosely about her face. The candles had burned down to a low flicker.

I gripped her tiny wrists. “Don’t leave!”

“What were you dreaming about?”

“I didn’t want you to die,” I said. My heart was still pounding, and the back of my neck felt clammy and cold.

“I’m fine,” Emily whispered, putting her arms around me. “I’m right here.”

“But someday you will die.” I knew I sounded like a child, but I couldn’t help myself. It was as if I were still dreaming.

Emily laughed softly. She rested her curly, soft head on my shoulder. “Someday. We all will. Even you, Miss Perfect.”

“Shhh. Don’t call me that.” The panic rose in me again. I couldn’t explain to her that this idea of
perfection was no joke. It was a deadly thing.

“Oh, sorry,” she said breezily. “Miss Perfect with all the perfect clothes.”

“Stop.” My jaw and fists clenched. I wanted to silence her. It was the first time she had ever really angered me. The heat of it flashed at my temples and in my throat. She had no idea who I was, and if she really knew, I was afraid she would leave me. I would be alone again.

“Char? I’ve never seen you like this. What happened?”

“It was so real. You were dead. And,” I added, saying too much, “I wasn’t ever going to be.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad in my opinion,” she laughed. “I’d like to be immortal. In this house. With you. We could dance and dance and never stop.”

I smelled the rich red wine of her blood again then. Like tiny grapes. Plums. Berries. A bit of cocoa. A hint of cinnamon. A tang of iron.

“Don’t say that!”

“Maybe Jared could come, too.”

I put my hand over her mouth. Her lips felt like a small wet fruit. But with sharp seed teeth. For a second something showed in her eyes. It was fear, but I hadn’t recognized it immediately in Emily’s trusting face, and I moved my hand away.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just don’t say that around me. Don’t joke about it.”

“All right, Char. I won’t. You just need to calm down, okay? Let’s make you some chamomile tea or something.”

The candles had all burned down to their wicks. My mouth felt like sand. She got up and padded on her sock feet into the kitchen. I followed her like a pet, inhaling her scent. I had very little strength left. Very little willpower. It gets exhausting being a girl. Having to monitor everything you say and do, everything you consume—even, if someone is sleeping beside you, your very dreams.

S
ome very strange things have been happening to me since Emily died.

For one thing, there was the broken nail. My nails do not break. Ever. But here it was, split at the quick, the day after Emily’s death, ruining the perfection of my hand. It terrified me, because I did not understand, but it also gave me a strange sense of relief. I wondered if it was perhaps possible that somehow the curse could reverse itself, that somehow I could become mortal. I remembered reading something in one of William’s old books. It was a story of a vampire
named Mariette and her handmaid, Camille. Mariette wanted to escape her curse. When she gave in to her urges and attacked Camille, Mariette’s maker intervened at the last moment and changed Camille into his eternal partner. Mariette became a human once again, graced with mortality and death.

Could vampires become human? Could this, weird as it sounded but no less strange than my life so far, be happening to me?

The next morning, I went to wash my face and there in the mirror (yes, we have reflections) was my face with a difference. A small red bump on my forehead. I believe they call it a zit. I wouldn’t know. Again I felt terror and a queasy relief. I patted makeup over the offending pimple and went to school.

And finally, there was the blood. There was the cow blood I used to drink that I no longer wanted. I had switched to wine. And there was the blood staining my white undergraments on the third morning after Emily’s death. The bleeding didn’t stop. At first
I thought,
Oh, I am dying! Charles, Charles, I am dying at last. Too cowardly for a stake through the heart, but now I will come to you anyway.

Something was happening to me. Vampires do not break their nails. Their skin does not break out; they do not bleed. But all these things had happened to me when I was a real girl.

Before I was just pretty dead.

I
was worried about Jared Pierce. When I walked away from him on the beach that day, I wondered if I would ever see him again. He was in class the following afternoon, but I was still concerned.

What is worry? A mild anguish in the chest. A gnawing sensation. Repeated thoughts whirling in the brain. I had worried about Charles constantly when we were little. I did have some kind of intuition about what would happen to him, but at the beginning I believed everyone turned fearful thoughts of loved ones over in their brains, polishing them in this way,
making them smoother and more precise, until the incident occurred or was prevented. Would he fall and hurt himself? Would a bee sting him? What if he got lost on his way home? When I had these thoughts, I found out later that my fears had come to pass. Or had almost come to pass: the bee, for instance, hadn’t actually stung him, though it had circled close and frightened him the day I thought of it. But for some reason I never thought that Charles might catch a fever and die. Perhaps that fear was too much for my mortal soul to comprehend.

When the bell rang, I followed Jared discreetly down the hall. I followed him home to the trailer park that day. Emily had told me that after Jared’s father left, his mother didn’t want to take her children out of the school district, and the trailer was all she could afford. I waited, parked on the street, while he went inside and then came out again. I got out of my Porsche and followed him to the beach. I hid behind a sandbank and watched him for a long time. He did
nothing but sit on the sand and stare into the distance. After a while my eyes closed. Moments later I opened them to clear an image from my mind. It was of Jared standing, taking off his clothes, and walking naked into the ocean. But no, there he was, dressed and still sitting on the sand. I remembered the visions I’d had of Charles—it had been so long since I had seen images of what was to come. I wondered how it was possible for them to return. Was it that I had just never felt so connected to anyone else? Or was it something in me that had changed when I became what I am now? Was I somehow changing back?

Jared and I sat like that until nightfall, and then I followed him to his trailer and left him reluctantly. I did not trust that he was going to be all right after Emily’s death, after what I had seen.

Later that night, unable to sleep, I returned to the trailer. I prowled around its perimeter, peering into the windows. The space was cluttered and dimly lit. A heavyset blond woman reclined on the couch, asleep
in front of the glaring television. In one room Jared’s younger sister slept in the arms of her boyfriend. The other siblings had moved out. Jared’s room was the smallest. I could see him sitting on his bed, holding a piece of white fabric; I recognized Emily’s bra, the one he’d had at the beach. Jared took out a bottle of what looked like perfume and sprayed it on the garment. Then he undressed and lay on his bed. I stood mesmerized. The look on his face was not of pleasure but of great sorrow. It sent a tremor through my body.

The crate I was standing on slipped then, and I fell. The clattering sound made Jared jump. He got out of bed, naked, and ran to the window. I vanished into the night, satisfied at least that he was still alive, still able to feel sensations in his body. I thought of his body until dawn. Its golden shade. Its lean musculature. His trunk. His sapling arms. His stark, vulnerable pelvis.

T
he next day, just a few days after Emily’s death, we learned that my English teacher’s husband had died. He’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she’d been missing more and more school, her face sagging farther with grief every day. I had been able to smell his death on her, and I was only waiting for the substitute to arrive. But, even with my sharpened senses, I could not detect who it was going to be. Perhaps my senses were failing me, as they had continually since Emily had been gone.

He walked in wearing a black cotton button-down
shirt, black jeans and heavy black shoes. He had a goatee, and his hair was cropped close. There were tiny marks on his earlobes where they had been pierced. On his wrist was a heavy silver watch.

1920. 2007. It didn’t matter. The face was the same.

“I’m Mr. Eliot,” he said. “As in T. S. I assume you know who that is?”

He smirked at us. His dark eyes absorbed all the light from the window behind me.

“I know you’ve all had to deal with Mrs. Harter’s situation. It isn’t easy to have to watch that every day. Sometimes it’s as if you can smell the death on someone.”

A few people snickered.

Mr. Eliot stepped closer. He seemed to grow in size as we watched.

“Not funny. I’d think you could appreciate that kind of loss, after what just happened to your classmate.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Mr. Eliot began to roam around the room like an uncaged panther. The students stiffened in their chairs as he passed them.

“But that doesn’t mean I’m going to cut you any slack,” he snarled. “I’m going to expect a lot out of you. English literature is not about your friends blogging so-called poems on MySpace or even Death Cab for Cutie quotes under their names. Now. T. S. Eliot?” He glanced affectedly at the attendance sheet and then at me. “Charlotte?”

The classroom seemed to darken, as if a cloud had blocked the sun.

I could feel the old, familiar tightening in my throat. The numb tingling in my fingers and toes. The shortness of breath. He’d told me that was how he’d felt when he’d made me. He’d wanted so badly to keep going, to drain me entirely, but he held himself back, offered me his own bleeding wrist. He said this as if it were a sacrifice he’d made for me, as
if I were not the sacrifice.

But I am strong,
I told myself.
I am wiser now. I have the ability to make others just as he made me.
Then I ran the tip of my thumb along the quick-torn nail. It had only grown back a little. Everything had been changing inside and around me since Emily’s death. What was happening? Why had William Eliot returned now, after all this time? I made myself speak, but my voice sounded strangled.

“September 26, 1888, to January 4, 1965. Expatriate. Author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday
and others. Won the Nobel Prize in 1948.”

I did my best to appear bored. I even rolled my eyes. He smiled at me.

“I see someone has been listening. You seem wise beyond your years, Miss Emerson. Are you really just seventeen?”

I had the strangest sensation of blood rising to my cheeks, as it had when I was still a girl. But I could no
longer blush. At least I hadn’t been able to for years.

I got up and walked out of the room. That was when I realized that my armpits were damp; sweat had soaked through my white blouse.

We do not perspire.

As I ran down the corridor, my Prada bootheels clicking, all I could think of was reclining in that Venetian gondola as the sun set, turning the water red. I was eating slices of watermelon, the spongy flesh disintegrating in my mouth. My dress spread out around me in the boat. The buildings were peeling like sunburned flesh. My heart beat a dull dirge in my chest.

“The fallen angels choose only the most beautiful humans to be their fledglings, their disciples,” he told me. His cold hands with the silver rings stroked my hair nervously. “Do you know why, my Char?”

“No,” I murmured. “Tell me.”

“You are a great beauty. Do you know it?”

I gazed up at his face. It was so perfectly chiseled,
as if carved from stone. So white, waxy, masklike in this light. I didn’t know what he was yet, but I was beginning to understand. They say that vampires aren’t real, that they are a myth that came about during the time of cholera, when the dehydrated bodies looked as if they’d been drained by a beast, but I had always believed in monsters. William was beautiful, too, but he was also something more than that, something ghoulish, although I didn’t realize the extent of it. We continued to glide through the red water. He glared at the setting sun. Night was coming, and then he would relax. He was always less agitated in the dark.

“My beauty doesn’t matter,” I said. “Charles was taken from me because he was too beautiful. Not of this world. Maybe the fallen angels stole him. Because any god worth believing in never would.”

“You are too beautiful for this world,” he said. “You are perfect, even in your sorrow. Even without your brother.”

“I am nothing without him.”

“Listen, listen. I didn’t tell you the answer to my question. Maybe you are right about Charles. The fallen angels chose only the most beautiful humans to be their disciples because it was an even greater insult to God.”

“Fallen angels,” I said. “Is that what you are?”

He smiled, but he did not answer.

We were in Rome when we finally succumbed. I say “we” because it seems to me that it was something we did together in Rome in the dark. Something both of us wanted at that time. I had figured out what Wiliam was and I wanted to join him. How can you not succumb to such a desire in Rome, in the dark with a fountain spurting outside your window, the shadows long from the white moon?

I was like that moon to William’s demon sun. “The moon does not really emit light at all,” my father had told me. “It is the sun that is so bright.”

I thought of these words as I entered William Stone Eliot’s chamber. It had been easy to get away. Gwendolyn Doolittle, my chaperone, was fast asleep. She and her husband had fallen under William’s spell. There was no furniture in William’s room; only the long black box. There was no one to protect me. From William Eliot. And, perhaps more relevantly, from myself. Maybe the dark trick of being changed into a vampire is not something that is wholly done to you. Is it something that comes when called by the subconscious? Thoughts are powerful. They can bring love. They can bring death. They can bring death in the guise of love, a dark-haired man in heavy trousers and a linen nightshirt less white than his skin, who bows his head to your breast, and bares, and punctures, and ruptures and drains until you are empty and he is full. Then death/love offers you his wrist and you drink until the reverse is true.