The Bread We Eat in Dreams (18 page)

These days, pretty much anything will turn you into a vampire.

We have these stupid safety and hygiene seminars at school. Like, before, it was D.A.R.E. and
oh my god if you even look crosswise at a bus that goes to that part of town you will be hit with a firehose blast full of PCP and there is nothing you can even do about it so just stay in your room and don’t think about beer.
Do you even know what PCP looks like? I have no idea.

I remember they used to say PCP made you think you could fly. That seems kind of funny, now.

Anyway, there’s lists. Two of them, actually. On the first day of S/H class, the teacher hands them out. They’re always the same, I practically have them memorized. One says:
Most Common Causes
. The other says:
High-Risk Groups
. So here, just in case you ditched that day so you could go down to
that part of town
and suck on the firehose, you fucking slacker.

Most Common Causes:

Immoral Conduct

Depression

Black Cat Crossing the Path of Pregnant or Nursing Mother

Improper Burial

Animal (Most Often Black) Jumping Over Grave, Corpse

Bird (Most Often Black) Flying Over Grave, Corpse

Butterfly Alighting on Tombstone

Ingestion of Meat from Animal Killed by a Wolf

Death Before Baptism

Burying Corpse at Crossroads

Failing to Bury Corpse at Crossroads

Direct Infection

Blood Transfusions Received 2011-2013

High Risk Groups (HR):

Persons Born With Extra Nipple, Vestigial Tail, Excess Hair, Teeth, 

Breech

Persons Whose Mothers Encountered Black Cats While Pregnant

Persons Whose Mothers Did Not Ingest Sufficient Salt While 

Pregnant

Seventh Children, Either Sex

Children Conceived on Saturday

Children Born Out of Wedlock

Children Vaccinated for Polio 1999-2002

Children Diagnosed Autistic/OCD

Promiscuous Youngsters

Persons Possessing Unkempt Eyebrows

Persons Bearing Unusual Moles or Birthmarks

Redheads with Blue Eyes

I swear to god you cannot even walk down the
street
without getting turned. That list doesn’t even get into your standard jump-out-of-the-shadows schtick. Like, half the graduating class have to get their diploma indoors, you know? Plus, I think they just put in that shit about promiscuous youngsters because it’s like their duty as teachers to make sure no one ever has sex. Who says
youngsters
, anyway? The problem with S/H class is that, just like the big scary PCP, we all know where to get it if we want it, so the whole thing is just…kill me now so I can go get a freaking milkshake.

My dad says this is all because of the immigrants coming in from Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria. I don’t know. I read
Dracula
and whatever. Doesn’t seem very realistic to me. Vampires are sort of something that just
happens
to you, like finals. I know people used to think they were all lords of the night and stuff, and they are, I guess. But it’s like, my friend Emmy got turned last week because a black dog walked around her house the wrong way. Sometimes things just get fucked up and it’s not because there was a revolution in Bulgaria.

But I guess the point is I’m going to graduate soon and I’m just sort of waiting for it to happen to me. There’s this whole summer before college and it’s like a million years long and I have red hair and blue eyes so, you know, eventually something big and black is just going to come sit on my chest till I die. I told Emmy:
it’s not your fault. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s just random. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like a raffle.

So my name is Scout. Yeah, my mom read
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Leave it to her to think 5th grade required reading is
totally deep. She also has a heart thing where she’s had to be on a low-sodium diet since she was my age, which means while she was pregnant with me, so
thanks
, mom. With high risk groups, birds don’t even have to fly over your own grave. It can be, like, anyone’s grave, if you’re nearby. It’s like a shockwave. I heard about this one HR guy like two towns over who was a seventh son with a unibrow
and
red hair
and
was born backwards, and he just turned
by himself
. Just sitting there in English class and
bang
. That’s what scares me the most. Like it’s something that’s inside you already, and you can’t stop it or even know it’s there, but there’s a little clock and it’s always counting down to English class.

The other night I was hanging out with Emmy, trying to be supportive friend like you’re supposed to be. In S/H class they say high risk kids should cut off their friends if they get turned. Like it’s one of those movies about how brutal high school is and we’re all going to shun Emmy on Monday if she’s wearing a little more black than usual. As if I would ever.

“What’s it like?” I said. Because that’s what they don’t tell you. What it feels like.
PCP is bad, it’ll make you jump off buildings
. Yeah, but before that. What’s it like? Before you crave blood and stalk the night. What’s it like?

“It’s stupid. My hair’s turning black. I have to go to this doctor every two weeks for tests. And, I don’t know…it’s like, I want to sleep in the dirt? When I get tired, my whole head fills up with this idea of how nice it would be to dig up the yard and snuggle down and sleep in there. The way I used to think about bubble baths.”

“Have you…done it yet?”

“Oh, blood? Yeah. Ethan let me right away. He’s good like that.” Emmy shoved her bangs back. She had a lot of make up on. Naturally Sunkissed was a big color that year. Keeps the pallor down but it doesn’t make you all Oompa-Loompa. “What? What do you want to hear? That it’s gross or that it’s awesome?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is.”

“It’s…like eating dinner, Scout. When somebody goes to a littleeffort to make something nice for you, it’s great. When they eat healthy and wash really good but don’t taste like soap. When they let you. But sometimes it just gets you through the night.” She lit a cigarette and looked at me like:
why shouldn’t I, now?
“Did you hear about Kimberly? She got turned the old fashioned way, by this gnarly weird guy from Zagreb, and she can
fly
. It’s so fucking unfair.”

Emmy wasn’t very different as a vampire. We had this same conversation after she lost her virginity (Ethan again) and she was all
it is what it is
then, too, with an extra helping of
I am part of a sacred sisterhood now
. Emmy has always been kind of crap as a friend, but I’ve known her since Barbies and kiddie soccer, so, whatever, right?

I don’t know, I suppose it was dumb, but things can get weird between girls who’ve known each other that long. Like this one time when we were thirteen we did that whole practice kissing on each other thing. We’d been hanging out in my room for hours and hours and rooms get all whacked out when you lock yourselves in like that. We sat cross-legged on my lame pink bedspread and kissed because we were lonely and we didn’t know anything except that we wanted to be older and have boyfriends because our sisters had them and her lips were really soft. I didn’t even know you were supposed to use tongue, that’s how thirteen I was. Her, too. We never told anyone about it, because, well, you just don’t. But I guess I’m talking about it now because I let Emmy feed off of me that night, even though I’m HR, and it was kind of like the same thing.

I didn’t see her much, though, after that. It was just awkward. I guess that sort of thing happens after senior year. People drift.

Back in 7th grade, right after the first ones started showing up, like every freaking book they assigned in school was a vampire book. That’s when I read
Dracula. Carmilla
and
The Bride of Corinth
, too.
The Vampyre, The Land Beyond the Forest. Varney the Freaking Vampire.
Classics, you know they said all the modern stuff was agitprop, whatever that means. It’s weird, though, because back then there were maybe twenty or thirty vampires in the whole world, and people just wrote and wrote about them, even though there’s like statistically
no way
that Stoker guy ever met one. And now there’s vampires all over. Google says there’s almost as many as there are people. They have a widget. But nobody’s written a vampire book in years.

So I’ve been hanging out in cemeteries a lot lately. I know, right? I mean, before? I would
never
. Have you seen how much it costs to get up in black fingernail polish and fishnets? And now, for an HR like me, it’s pretty much like slitting your wrists in the bathtub with a baby blue razor for sensitive skin. Everyone knows you’re not serious, but there’s a slim chance you’ll fuck up and off yourself anyway. If you want to get turned you don’t have to go chasing it. Not when some bad steak will do you for about $12.50, and a guy down on Bellefleur Street will do it for less than that.

So, I suck. So, I’m one of those girls. Like we didn’t know that already. Like you never did anything embarrassing. Anyway, it’s kind of peaceful. Not peaceful, really. Just kind of flat. I don’t do anything. I sit there on the hill and think about how like half my family is buried down there. Any second, a black bird could fly out over one of them. I wonder if you can see it when it happens, the affinity wave. What color it is. That’s what Miss Kinnelly calls it. An affinity wave. She leads an after-school group for HRs that my dad says I have to go to now. He picked Miss Kinnelly because she’s a racist bitch, or as he would put it, “has a strict policy against Eastern Europeans attending.” I was all:
duh, we’re Jewish, and isn’t Gram from like Latvia or wherever?
And he was all:
Jews aren’t Slavic, it’s the Slavs that are the problem, why do you think they knew about all the HR vectors before we did?
And I was like:
what the hell do you know about HR vectors? Your eyebrows are fucking perfect!

Anyway, group is deeply pointless. Mostly we talk about who we know that got turned that week, and how it happened. And how scared we all are, even though if you keep talking about how scared you are eventually you stop really being scared, which I thought was the point of having a group, but apparently not, because being scared is like what these people do for fun. All anyone wants to talk about is how it happened to their friend or their brother. It’s like someone gets a prize for the most random way. Some girl goes: “Oh my god, my cousin totally drank three bottles of vodka and passed out at the Stop & Rob and woke up a vampire!” And even though that is
highly
retarded, and it probably doesn’t work that way, at least, it doesn’t work that way yet, everyone goes
oooooh
like she just recited
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. Oh, yeah. We had to read that one, too. It’s not even about vampires, it’s about zombies, which is totally not the same thing, but apparently it falls under supplementary materials or something. 

Anyway, Miss Kinnelly then lectures for a hundred years about how immoral conduct is the most pernicious of all the causation scenarios, because you can never know where that “moral line” lies. By the time she gets to the part about abstinence is the only sensible choice, I want to stick her fake nails through her eyes. Once I said: “I hear you can totally get it from drinking from a glass one of them drank from.” And they all gasped like I was serious. God. Before, I wouldn’t have spent three seconds after school with those people. But the sports program is basically over.