Love: the dictionary describes it as ‘a strong feeling of affection’. But the description didn’t explain how love ties us together, destroys us, lifts us higher, fuels wars and makes little humans. It didn’t explain what it feels like to love or how and why it’s unbreakable. It didn’t warn me that it would hurt and feel like flying all at the same time. It didn’t say that love would make me want to die sometimes, and it didn’t tell me how to spot true love or distinguish it from lust, desire.
This single word has eluded me more than any other wonder in this amazing new world I woke to last year, and when I found love, when I was certain it was love, that single admission made me wish there was never any such thing as love. They say that hate is a powerful emotion, but it is nothing on love. It does not hurt as much as love. It does not do as much damage to the heart as love.
It is not as cruel as love.
“Ara, you can’t wear odd shoes to school.”
“Why not?” I tipped my toe inward and compared the shiny black boot on one foot to the purple one on the other.
“Because it’s weird. And people don’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t.” He turned me by the shoulders and gave me a gentle shove toward the stairs. “And besides, you have to wear a uniform, remember?”
“And I am.” I pointed out the ugly green tartan skirt and white button-up shirt.
“And a part of the uniform is black laced shoes.”
“Why?”
“Because it is. I don’t make the rules.” He gave me a fatherly whack on the bottom. “But I expect you to follow them.”
“Why?” I said, but flashed him a grin to show I was kidding. He’d explained that to me at length, but the custom still seemed silly. How did what I wore to school affect my ability to learn? After all, I was pretty much doomed in that department anyway.
“Just hurry up,” he said, showing his watch as he sat down at the dining table again. “I don’t want you to be late.”
“Okay, make my lunch for me then.”
“Already done,” he called, his voice following me up the stairs as I darted into my bedroom. Most of my boxes were sitting around the space still packed, but since all of them were full of things I owned before I woke from my death coma, I was happy to leave them all where the mover guys plonked them. I just didn’t feel any connection to the Ara I was before, nor did I have any interest in seeing who she was. So, they’d stay packed up like cardboard obstacles around my room until I was ready.
I had, however, made myself at home—the me I was when I wasn’t being told who I was. The old me didn’t have much say in things these days, and she had no hand in choosing the decor for my room either. Brett tried to talk me out of pink walls, but once I saw the cherry blossom quilt in the store where we bought my white bed, dresser and desk, I had to have it, and I had to paint the walls a soft, rosy pink. The curtains around my window seat and the other window beside my bed matched everything flawlessly, even though they were from a different store, taking my room from an impersonal sleeping quarter to a space I spent all my time. It made me feel safe. As the sun came up most days, I’d sit in my window seat and look at picture books, wondering what school would be like and if I’d make any friends, but today, as I opened my eyes, that wonder turned into a small pinch of fear—a pinch I kind-of enjoyed, since I’d never really felt fear before—and now it was strutting around in my belly as outright excitement.
I shoved a box aside and sifted through a pile of dirty laundry to find my shiny new school shoes, then slipped them on and shut my door to inspect myself in the full-length mirror on the back of it. The fact that I was nineteen human years old and wearing knee-high white socks with flat black shoes didn’t bother me too much. It’s not like I even felt nineteen; or acted it, so I was told.
But I did look a lot older, especially with the chin-length hair and wise blue eyes. While my brain hadn’t yet rekindled with the knowledge it once had—all forty years of human and immortal life that I’d lived before I died—my eyes still held all the wisdom of those years.
I wished I was as smart as I looked. And I wished I could just skip this school thing and get on with my life, but on the other hand, I was excited about school. I’d never been before and from what I’d seen on TV it would be a cold, lonely and ultimately thrilling experience—one that would shape and mold me—a platform for my personality to form. And yet I was standing back from it all in a way. None of it scared me. None of it daunted me, as if maybe the social conventions didn’t really apply to me. As if maybe being a nerd or being the most hated kid in school didn’t really matter.
Which I guess is because I knew it would be such a short period of time. I’d graduate next year and move on with my life—probably never see any of those people again. So, what was there to fear from them? And if any of them gave me any crap, I could rip off their arms without even flexing a bicep. Or have my blood donor turn them into a vampire so I could keep them in a cellar as my personal feeding slave for all time—I shrugged at myself in the mirror—whichever appealed to me on the day.
Brett’s deep voice rose up the stairs in a firm but very audible, “You’re messing around with a person’s life here, Jason! And being the king doesn’t make you the authority on what’s best for her.”
I leaned against the wall by my door and listened carefully. I’d never met Jason before, but I knew he was the Lilithian king—one of three rulers of what Brett called the Three Worlds: the Vampires, Lilithians—which is what I was—and the Witches. I’d never met a witch either, or the supposedly exquisite Lilithian queen. But I figured Brett was, or was once, close to the king. They argued a lot, and sometimes I got the sense that it was about me; you know, when he’d say things like ‘she’s different now’ and ‘she can handle the truth’, but I was certain this conversation was regarding me when he said, “She’ll hate me.”
My heart tightened in my chest as those three words hit it. Nothing could ever make me hate him. Ever.
“I get it. And based on that, I promised to support this decision, but when he sees her without a warning—”
It went quiet again.
“Then you’ll warn him?”
My immortal ears could pick up Jason’s voice on the other end of the line, but couldn’t hear what he was saying with my door closed. It creaked as I opened it, making me cringe.
“I know, but those visions are subjective. She can handle it now, I’m certain.” Brett sighed heavily. “The psychiatrist doesn’t know her. Hold on,” he said, pausing as I crept out into the hallway and picked up my schoolbag, throwing it over my shoulder. He knew I was listening. He always knew. The conversation cut short then with a, “I have to go.”
“The king again?” I said, jumping off the last step into the kitchen.
I could tell from his closed eyes and the looser muscles in his cheeks that he felt sick with worry. Whatever it was that they’d been keeping from me all this time, he wanted to tell me right now—without wasting another second. But if his face was anything to go by, I wasn’t sure I wanted, or needed, to know. There was something bad in my past and, as far as I was concerned, the past is where it could stay.
“Brett.” I touched his shoulder, shocking him out of his reverie.
He looked right at me with those kind caramel eyes, offering a half smile. “You all ready for school?”
I left that question to the obvious and cocked my head. “I have a lot to learn, Brett, we both know that. But I’m not, and never have been, ignorant—”
“So you heard that call, huh?” He looked passively at the phone on the table by his empty coffee cup.
“Whatever it is…” I started.
“I can’t tell you.” He stopped short of that last word, fighting with it as though he physically couldn’t tell me.
“I don’t care.” I walked away and dumped my bag on the floor by the fridge. “This life, moving here, going to school, it’s my fresh start. And unless whatever was in my past greatly affects my future, I don’t want to know.”
“But, Ara—”
“No. I’m serious.” I swung around and met firmly with his eyes. “Just stop it. Stop worrying, stop calling the king. Stop fighting for me! I’m a new person, Brett. I don’t want to know, nor do I care who I was or what I did—”
“What about who you knew?”
“Who I knew?”
He pursed his lips, clearly reconfiguring that question. “What about the people you loved before?”
My nose crinkled in confusion. “You said there wasn’t anyone.”
“What if there was?”
“Was there?”
He just shrugged, but his eyes said it all. And it was a good question—one that gave me pause for a moment. Since I woke, I’d been told I was pretty much a flake and didn’t really do much in life other than play piano. I had no family, aside from a father, who was the king of the Vampires, which is why Brett aka Falcon had taken on the role as my step brother and caregiver—since my father was too busy—a role which we both played to at first but soon fell into as if it was natural. And now it seemed like my life had never been anything but what it was now. So if there were people I loved before, then a: why didn’t they tell me, and b: would I want to know about them now, after so much time had passed? Or would I want to know why it was kept from me? Brett never had anything but a good reason to either tell me things or keep them from me, so if he felt it was safe to keep me in the dark, then I was happy here. With all the mushrooms.
“Can I just…” I turned back to the fridge and grabbed a YoGo. “How about I just get to know myself before I bring other people into the mix?”
“That seems to be everyone else’s theory, but—”
“Brett, please,” I insisted. “Whatever it is, it can wait. If there are people that loved me before, they’re not going to stop just because I choose to find out who I am before I find out who I was—”
“I’m just afraid—”
“I won’t hate you. I promise.” I walked over and kissed his head. “When I’m ready for the truth, I’ll come to you, okay? I am giving you permission to just let it be…” I looked from one eye to the other, taking in his square face and cute but manly half grin. “Okay?”
He drew me in by the hand, holding the back of my head to his chest as he stood up and hugged me.
“I love you, Brett,” I said, my cheek all squished up against him. “No matter what. So stop worrying about me and just let me live.”
He kissed my head firmly, breathing in deeply. “I’ll never stop worrying, but I can promise to let you live.”
“Good.” I stepped back and smiled up at him. “Then take me to school so I can be tortured as only teenagers can torture.”
He laughed. “They’re going to love you, Ara.”
“Of course they will,” I chirped, grabbing my bag. “And hate me behind my back, right?”
“Not everyone is like that.”
“They are on TV.”
He laughed louder this time, opening the front door for me. “You watch way too much TV.”
“Says the guy that bought me one for my bedroom.”
“And now I’m thinking I should take it out.” He shut the door behind us. “Or maybe subscribe you to the documentary channel instead.”
“Why, so I can watch lions have sex?” I said loudly, making him blush while the neighbors looked up, shaking their heads as they loaded their young children into their car. “Sorry.” I waved apologetically, suddenly remembering that people didn’t use the ‘s’ word very often. Or loudly. Apparently, everyone liked sex but no one admitted it. They even ignored the fact that, to get those three kids they were taking to school, they had to have had sex.
“What are you thinking?” Brett asked, studying my blank stare.
“What if I meet a boy and I want to have sex with him?”
Even though he wasn’t eating or swallowing at the time, he somehow managed to choke on something, coughing it out loudly. “What?”
“Well, you said people only do that stuff behind closed doors. So if we’re in a classroom with the door closed—”
“No.” He wiped the air clean with a flat palm. “Do not, under any circumstances, have sex with any boy, for any reason—”
“Relax, Brett.” I laughed, patting his arm as I walked down the front steps. “I was kidding.”
I felt the relief swim around him as he followed me to the car. The fact was, I knew sex involved two naked people and that boys had a penis in place of what we had, so I figured the penis rubbed against the girl’s back for some reason, like lions, but I didn’t know why. I only knew a baby came out after.
I had so many questions I couldn’t ask Brett, because he went bright red whenever I broached the subject with him. So I was kind of hoping I’d make some girlfriends that I could eventually ask, because none of this made sense to me. There was Google, and obviously porn sites I could look up for help, but based on how people acted about sex, I was a little afraid of what I’d find.
As we both climbed into the car and shut the doors, he paused a moment with the key rested at the ignition. He gave me that long, thoughtful look again—the same one that always crossed his face after he spoke to the king.
“Just drive, Brett,” I said firmly, putting my seatbelt on.
He started the engine and said nothing more.
“We have a few new students this year, class, so I’d like you all to write down what you did this summer and tell us a little bit about yourselves, then we’ll read it out and have a class discussion.”
Everyone else groaned and I grimaced at the blank sheet of paper the teacher placed on my desk, trying to envision the words there that could describe my crazy summer. Well, crazy year, really. And I guess, if I think about it, it started with a dark room and a face I didn’t know was a face. But I couldn’t write that down. Even if I could actually write anything other than my own name and a few three-lettered animals, everything I told people would have to be the lie I’d rehearsed every day since Brett enrolled me in school.
“Hey,” the boy beside me whispered, leaning in. “What are you gonna write?”
I smiled mischievously. “Hm. Well, technically, I guess I could leave it blank.”
He stared at me blankly.
“I was in an accident,” I informed him, tapping my head to indicate the half-dead brain within it. “Had to learn to talk and walk again, so other than moving to a new country, my summer has pretty much been a blank page of its own.”
That standard reaction—you know, the one where people get the instant shock first that soon simmers away to a major look of pity—moved across his face, and his mouth popped, as they usually did, lost for words. Before ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘Man, that really bites’ could come out, I cut him off. “What about you? What are you going to write?”
“I spent the last six months in juvie—which is why I’m in Special Ed class,” he whispered, his sparkling eyes showing no remorse whatsoever for that. “So I guess I could write about the daily beatings, the starvation and the solitary confinement and…” He stopped to take in my horror. “I was kidding.”
Relief swam over my face, making my cheeks drop enough to bring out a smile. “So you weren’t in juvie?”
“No. I was. But it’s not really like that, you know,” he said, “like it is on TV.”
We both looked up as the teacher directed a new and very late student to sit at the desk behind us. I only caught a flash glimpse of him, but I was pretty sure he was the boy I met outside the school this morning. David or something: the library lady’s son.
“Even if it were,” I continued, leaning in to hide our conversation, “I wouldn’t know any better. I surmised the fact that juvie was some kind of lock-up only by what you were saying, but—”
“So you got nothing, no experiences, no knowledge of the world?”
“I know a little. But—”
“But you’re like a little kid?” He tapped his head with his pen tip.
“A toddler, in a lot of ways.” I looked back at my blank page. “So I’m told.”
“Can you write? Spell?”
“Not really. Not much.”
“Read?”
“I can read ‘The Cat in the Hat’,” I offered enthusiastically, and he laughed, as did the new kid as he sat behind us.
“Okay then.” He slid my paper over the desk and under his pen. “Then dictate. I’ll take notes for you.”
I smiled appreciatively, if not a little forlorn. I knew myself to be a pretty independent sort of girl; well, I think I did. But since I first opened my eyes with a strange feeling in what I now knew was my stomach—the feeling then quelled by a warm rush that I now knew was vampire blood, my staple food—I’d had to rely on others to tell me what I was feeling, what I needed, what basic things were, like a hand or a car or a toilet. Brett only recently stopped supervising me in the bathroom, since my passion for discovery usually always led to me either flushing something un-flushable down the toilet or squeezing out the toothpaste to see what color it was at the bottom of the tube. And all this help I’d needed just to get me independent enough to attend school had been almost suffocating, yet now, on my first day out in the real world without Brett, I found myself actually relieved to accept help.
“I’m Cal, by the way,” he offered. “Callum for short.”
I laughed. “Ara. Um, Amara-Rose for short.”
He laughed too, accepting my hand in a shake as I offered. He had a firm handshake—a quality that Brett told me demonstrated good character—but Cal clearly held back a little for the delicate and rather petite hand of a girl.
“So, Ara…” He tapped the blank page. “What did you do this summer?”
“Let’s see…” I looked around the room for the answer. I could say that I furthered my language skills after mastering walking, mostly, but that sarcasm and slang still eluded me, and I could say that I learned I was a unique breed of vampire called a Lilithian—that my ‘brother’ spent the better part of five weeks teaching me to hunt vampires or drink from them without draining them dry—but that last bit would land me in a very different kind of class than this; the kind with bars and straightjackets. So I said, “It was a struggle learning to be a person,” and Cal started writing. “I don’t know who I was in my past. I only know what I’m told—only know some of the things I did, not how I felt about them or grew from them. My brother guards me with a kind of ferocity that sometimes suffocates me, but I know it’s only out of love. I probably spent more of my summer observing the relationships between person to person than learning how to be one, which is mainly because of my deep need to understand why.”
“Why what?” Cal asked.
“Why he does it. My brother.” I narrowed my eyes at nothing, thinking back to the nights when he would lift me from the floor when I rolled out of bed or when he taught me how to wipe my own butt—that girls had to wash in a very different way to cats. “I suppose the answer I’m seeking is… what is love made of? And why does it make us do horrible things to either protect and care for a person, or outright harm them? And how can we emulate that love, or find it, and if we do find it, how do we know it’s real? And—”
“Okay, okay, Miss Philosophy, take a step back before you cook your own brain,” he said with a laugh. “Didn’t anyone teach you this yet?”
“Teach me what?” I asked, hopeful that Cal had the answer to all the questions I’d been living with.
“There are things in life no one knows the answer to.” He put the pen and paper down with my hopes. “And you’ll drive yourself bat-shit crazy trying to find it.”
That, I already knew. Brett had dedicated himself to my rehabilitation with so much love and compassion that I was left wondering how anyone could be so committed to another, taking nothing for themselves. I knew he loved me, but I guess I wondered if he’d loved me before I died or if he grew to love me after, and then I’d find myself wondering how he could come to love me when I was really nothing more than a big chore. And from that, I would wonder if I could do the same for him, or for someone I didn’t know, and I wasn’t sure I could, which left me wondering if I was a bad person or if I was normal and Brett was just amazing, or if love just made people amazing, and then I’d go off on this carousel of thoughts about love and family and the world and why we’re here and what is God and what is love and then I’d get really tired and feel like crying and…
“What are you thinking?” he asked, his smirk pushing a frown around his brow. “You have a funny look on your face.”
“Could you wipe a grown teenager’s ass?”
His sudden burst of laughter drew a long ‘shush’ from the teacher and a few raised heads. “No. Why?”
“I feel bad, I guess. Because now I understand just how awful it is to wipe asses and bathe people, I feel sort of embarrassed that my brother did all of that for me. It’s like being a toddler one day, having your butt changed on a changing table, and then realizing the next day that… you know… that’s a kind of personal area.”
“So you have the knowledge of yourself now.” His eyes moved to my nether region for a second, landing on the teacher across the room before he said, “You’re starting to get those ‘awakenings’ down there?”
I pushed my hand across the space between us and gave him a light punch. “Shut up.”
“I second that,” David snapped from behind us.
“What’s it to you?” Cal gave him a dirty look and then leaned a bit closer to me. “It’s normal, you know—to be embarrassed about that stuff. But your brother obviously loves you, or he would’ve hired someone to care for you, right?”
“I wish he had.” My cheeks went hot. “I find it hard to look at him sometimes.”
“He’s your brother. I’m sure he’s seen it all before.”
“I wish I could be as candid as you.” I took my sheet of paper back. “But the embarrassment led to me trying to understand how he could do such gross things to care for me, and that led to me learning that it’s out of love, which led to me wondering what love is and now—”
“Now you’re searching for the meaning of life.” He shook his head with a derisive little laugh and leaned over his own page. “Welcome to being human.”
I sat back and looked up at the clock on the wall, my attentions on the pulse in my neck for a moment. Yes, human. I might be an immortal with a thirst for vampire blood, but at the end of the day, no matter what I’d recovered from, I was still, at its basic and most elemental level, human. And I liked that. It made all my faults and failures and embarrassments seem a little less dramatic.
“Thanks, Cal.”
“For what?”
I bumped one shoulder up passively. “For knowing stuff.”
He scoffed. “Any time. Hey, it’s kinda nice to find someone dumber than me.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve got life smarts,” I added, backhanding him for calling me dumb. “Which is more than I can say for a lot of smart people I’ve met.”
Cal smiled in a kind of way that made his eyes glimmer, like maybe he didn’t hear that sort of thing very often, and I knew, as we both turned back to our pages, that I’d made my first friend of the day.
“You’ve got word-smarts,” he offered, after a moment.
“Word what?”
“Your vocabulary is pretty advanced for someone who can’t even write.”
“Yeah.” I smiled, thinking about Brett and his dictionary. “It’s a game we play—my brother and me. He reads a word from the dictionary and I have to guess what it means.”
Cal nodded, thoughtful. “That’s a pretty good idea.”
“Yeah. He wanted me to at least be able to understand what people were saying, even if I couldn’t quite read and write yet.”
“Well, it’s working.” He bumped me with his shoulder, which… I wasn’t certain, but I think maybe it was a friendly gesture. I smiled, just to test, and he smiled back, so I figured my guess was right.
“Sorry to interrupt this sickeningly cute little exchange,” David said from behind us, leaning across his desk until his face nearly touched my hair, “but do either of you have a pen I can borrow?”
I handed one backward, giving him nothing more than a half smile as our eyes met, and then secluded myself in my work—trying to read the words Cal wrote—until the teacher called on us to share our stories. Most people had pretty bland summers, spending days by the beach or staying with family further inland, but all of their summers sounded marginally more exciting than mine. I’d have easily swapped lazy days on the sand for the strain of learning to hold a pencil or use a fork.
When it came time for the new kid behind us to share, he stood up and made a crass joke that the entire class laughed at, but I had no idea what he meant. Cal had to explain that it was a joke about a recent episode of a show I’d never heard of. I didn’t pay much attention to David’s story, other than to hear that he lived with his mother, who worked at the local public library, and that he’d spent his summer looking after his kid cousin Harry.
When Cal hopped up to read, I expected a witty, maybe funny but ultimately short story about his summer of events that probably didn’t really happen, but my lack of ability to sum up a person left my assumptions falling flat. Instead, he started off with a rather heartfelt recollection of how his grandfather died. I was just wiping a tear from my eye when another kid put his hand up.
“Uh, question?”
Cal pressed his finger to his lips, and the kid put his hand down, laughing to himself.
“No, what were you going to ask, Chase?” the teacher prompted.
“His grandfather isn’t dead,” a girl stated snottily, folding her arms. “I’m friends with his sister and she never said anything about that.”
“Cal?” The teacher looked at him disapprovingly.
“What?” He shrugged. “You never said we had to write a true story.”
“Sit down,” she huffed, shaking her head as though she’d really expected nothing less. “Um, how ’bout we hear from Ara now?”
Just like kids on TV who get asked to speak in front of a new class, I expected my knees to knock, but nowhere in my body was there any signs of nervousness. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that I was in this class because I was a dummy, but so was everyone else, so if I couldn’t read, it was probably not that big a deal. “I spent my summer unpacking,” I said, reading words that weren’t actually on the page. “My brother and I moved here from… from…” Shit, I couldn’t remember the name of the place we used to live.
“It’s okay, Ara,” the teacher said sympathetically, motioning for me to sit down. “We’ll work on yours later.”
“Okay,” I said, relieved.
The rest of the class paid attention to the new discussion, but I couldn’t focus on anything but trying to remember the name of the town I just left three months ago. Where had it gone? Fair enough I couldn’t remember my life before the accident, but forgetting things that happened after I woke? That hadn’t happened before.
“Are you okay?” David asked, leaning across his desk again.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked rhetorically, knowing full well that I’d probably gone a bit pale.
“Do you need some fresh air?” Cal asked. “You look sick.”
“I’m fine.” I put my head down on my desk and closed my eyes, drifting in and out of thought until I heard the bell.