“I DON’T WANT TO eat lunch by the tree,” said Jay to Doug as they walked from math class to Spanish. “All the drama kids eat there. The popular ones.”
“Well, so what?” said Doug. “You were in the musical, right? You played that waiter character—What was his name?”
“Waiter.”
“See?”
Specifically, the kids who ate by the tree were the ones who got good parts in the plays. Lead actors, plus maybe an assistant director or two. Less popular were the kids who got small parts and nonspeaking roles, but at least they were still members of the cast. Doug was crew. Crew were like the friends you called only when you needed help moving furniture.
Doug always tried out for a part in each production, and so far he’d always failed to get one. He often thought about how his life would change if he landed a lead role, but on some level he understood what everyone in Masque & Dagger understood: you weren’t popular because you’d played a lead role, you got lead roles because you were popular. Or, rather, your popularity and your distinguished high school drama career both stemmed from some effortless charisma that shone from your face and spilled from your lips—a shower of quarters when you opened your mouth, a trail of flowers and corpses in your wake.
Doug was just as nervous about lunch as Jay. More so, perhaps, as he assumed he was more highly regarded and therefore had more to lose. At least the rest of his classes were indoors, so he expected his skin to clear up by lunch.
“I should have brought a baseball cap from home,” he said. “I was in such a rush.”
“You were hard to wake up,” said Jay.
“I only got like an hour of sleep! My body won’t let me sleep at night anymore. I maybe nodded off around six thirty.”
Jay had woken him at 7:30, and then again at 8:00. At some point, while he dozed, Doug had changed back to normal. Then he had had only thirty minutes to bike home, watch Mom and Dad pull out of the driveway, sneak into the empty house, shower, and change. In the foggy bathroom mirror he glanced quickly at himself to be sure. Pale. Hairless chest. The impression of being clammy even when he wasn’t clammy. Normal, or what passed for normal now.
The kids in Spanish class were broken up into groups of two and three, and Doug and Jay took up their usual spot near a poster from the Spanish board of tourism. Mr. Gonzales wandered around the room.
“She seems really nice,” said Doug. And short enough. And kind of pretty. “I just need a chance to talk to her more. Maybe she could be, you know, the one.”
“Would you turn her into a vampire?” asked Jay.
“I don’t know. If she wanted. I don’t even really know how to do that.”
“The vampiress drained all your blood, right?”
Doug nodded slowly at the tourism poster, an unfinished cathedral in Barcelona with facades like two rows of sharp teeth.
“I think so,” he said.
July in the Poconos, near Hickory Run. Alternating sun and clouds, rain every few days. Biting insects, mosquitoes that swarm your ankles and arms like you’re passing out little supermarket samples of blood. New Product! A hundred discrete marks on your skin.
You were out late again, alone, watching the spiders tick-tack across that field of boulders between the trees. You had to feel your way back to the family cabin through the fireflies and the moonless night.
The vampire came at you then, milk white. Naked. Howling through the trees. Wounded, open chested, it oozed its red center. The spill collected in tangled crotch hair and traced ligatures down pale legs.
The vampire pressed down on you. There was no beguilement, no charm or enchantment. You were held fast by the hair as the vampire tore you open and siphoned off your life. Your blood mingled. It wasn’t romantic.
The vampire made a wrenching noise and folded in on itself. Now small, it flapped thin wings and disappeared into the trees.
You were left too weak to stand. Your lungs fluttered in your chest and you were desperately thirsty. Your death was like a slow fall into a deep well.
When you stirred again, it startled two coyotes that were sniffing at your carcass. The vampire’s blood laced your empty veins; tensed their red, spindly fingers; and closed you up like a fist over the closest animal. It thrashed, but you drank it dry and rose unsteadily, needing more. Still night. A hundred yards distant you could tell (without any trouble at all) that the second coyote had paused to look back. You chased it for an hour and fell upon it in a copse of trees.
When your mind found its place again, you collapsed and dry heaved into a creek and washed the stains from your skin. There were no wounds on your body, save a long, dry welt on your neck. But your clothes were covered in blood. You buried them.
“Bienvenido al supermercado,” Jay was saying. Doug just stared at him for a dim moment, dumbfounded by this talking animal and his Spanish classroom exercise.
Oh, it was Jay.
“This would…this would all be a lot easier if I was just an asshole,” Doug said. “I could just find someone and hold them still and feed. I wouldn’t even have to kill them. I could just take a pint or two, like I do with the cows. I wish I could be sure that wouldn’t turn them into vampires, too.”
Jay pushed aside his textbook. “There’s gotta be a way,” he said. “Look.”
He produced his calculator from his backpack.
“Say you drink from someone once a week. Is that about right?”
“Yeah,” said Doug.
“So if your first victim becomes a vampire, then in a week there are two vampires who need to feed. You and him.”
“Me and her,” Doug stressed.
“And then in two weeks there’s four vampires, and in three weeks eight, and on and on. So guess how many weeks it takes before everyone on Earth is a vampire.”
“I dunno.” Doug sighed. “Ten.”
Jay frowned. “You don’t think that. You just guessed low so my answer won’t sound amazing.”
“So what is it already?”
“It’s, like, thirty-four. Thirty-three and a half.”
“That’s really amazing.”
“Anyway,” said Jay, sounding deflated, “it means there must be a way to just feed, like we thought. Maybe even a way to feed so the victim forgets, like some kind of vampire hypnosis, or else there’d be news reports of vampire attacks all the time.”
“I don’t like that idea,” said Doug. “Hypnosis. It’d be like slipping something in her drink.”
“Well, what if the person…gave you permission?”
Doug covered his face. “We’ve been through this. I appreciate the offer, but it just seems…gay. I’d rather drink a little cow here and there and try to meet some girl who’s into it. Like this new girl. She’s pretty goth for an Indian.”
“I’m not saying I want you to do it,” said Jay. “It’s just…hard to see you hurting so much. You could just drink a little of my blood, just to see—”
“Uh-uh,” said Mr. Gonzales as he loomed suddenly over their desks. “No inglés. En español, por favor.”
Jay glanced in the teacher’s direction, then stared at his hands. “Um…Podría usted…beber un poco de mi…sangre? Es correcto? Sangre?”
“Sangre es ‘blood,’”
“Sí,” said Jay. Doug pretended to read his book. Mr. Gonzales coughed.
“You’re supposed to be pretending to buy pineapples,” he said.