The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“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.

This one time Aidan from my geometry class started talking about staking them, like in old movies. Everyone got real quiet. Thing is, it’s not like those movies. A vampire’s body doesn’t go anywhere if you mess with it. It doesn’t go poof. It just lies there, and it’s a dead person, and you have to bury it, and god, burying things by yourself is practically a crime these days. There’s hazmat teams at every funeral. It’s the law, for like three years now. Plus, it’s not that big a town. Everyone knows everyone, and you try stabbing the kid you used to play softball with in the heart. I couldn’t do it. They’re still the same kids. They still play softball. We’re the ones who’ve stopped.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting up on the hill by the Greenbaum mausoleum, I think about Emmy. I wonder if she’s still going to State in the fall.

Probably not, I guess.

I dated this guy for awhile during junior year. His name was Noah. He was ok, I guess. He was super tall, played center for basketball, one of the few sports we still played back then. Indoors, right? I remember when the soccer teams moved indoors. It was horrible, your shoes squeak on the floor because it’s shellacked within an inch of its life. The way it used to be, soccer was the only thing I really liked to do. Run around in the grass, in the sun. There’s something really satisfying about kicking the ball perfectly so it just flies up, the feeling of nailing it just on the right part of your foot. I’ve played since I was like four. Every league. And then, finally, they just called it off. Too dangerous, not enough girls anymore. You can’t just go running around outside like that now. You could fall down. Get cut. Scrape your knee. So now instead of running drills I have to read The Land Beyond the Forest for the millionth time and stay inside. God, I’m turning into one of those snotty brainy hipster chicks.

Oh, right, Noah. See, the soccer girls date basketball boys. We’re the second tier. Baseballers are somewhere below us, and then there’s

like archery and modern dance circling the drain. And then all the people who cry into their lockers because they can’t hit a ball. Football and cheerleaders are up at the top, still, even though it’s not exactly 1957 and not exactly the Midwest where they still play football. But some things stick. I think maybe it’s because all the TV shows still have regular high school. It’s a network thing. No one wants to show vampires integrating, dating chess geeks, whatever would be jam-packed with soap opera hilarity. TV is strictly pre. So we keep acting like what we did in 6th grade matters, even though no one actually plays football or cheers at all. It’s like we all froze how we were three or four years ago and we’ll never get any older.

Anyway, I remember Noah drank like two jumbo bottles of Diet Coke every day. He’d bring his bottle into class and park it next to his desk. When we kissed, he always tasted like Coke. Everyone thought we were sleeping together, but really, we weren’t. It’s not that I didn’t think I was ready or whatever. Sex just doesn’t really seem like that big a deal anymore. I guess it should. My dad says it definitely qualifies as immoral conduct. I just don’t think about it, though. Like, what does it matter if Alexis let the yearbook editor go down on her in the darkroom if she found out like not even a week later that the Hep A vac she got for the senior trip to Spain was tainted and now she freaks out if the teacher drops chalk because she has to count the pieces of dust? It’s just not that important. Plus, this couple Noah and I hung with sometimes, Dylan and Bethany, turned while they were doing it, just, not even any warning, straight from third base to teeth out in zero point five. We broke up a little after that. Just didn’t see much point. I don’t watch TV anymore, either.

But lately, I’ve been seeing him around. He turned during midterms. I think he even dated Emmy for awhile, which, fine. I get it. They had a lot in common. I just didn’t really want to know. Anyway, it wasn’t any big plan. One minute I barely thought about him anymore and the next we’re sitting on the swingset in Narragansett Park way past midnight, kicking the gravel and talking about how he still drinks Diet Coke, it just tastes really funny now.

“It’s like, before it was just Coke. But now all I can taste is the aspartame. And not really the aspartame, but like, the chemicals that make up aspartame. I taste what aspartame is like on the inside. I still get the shakes, though. So I’m down to a can a day.”

Noah isn’t exactly cute. The basketball guys usually aren’t, not like the football guys. He’s extra-lanky and skinny, and the whole vampire thing pretty much comes free with black hair and pale skin. He used to have really nice green eyes.

“How did it happen to you?” I hated saying it like that. But it was the only think I could think of. How it happens to you. Like a car accident. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. If it’s, you know, private.”

Noah was counting the bits of gravel. He didn’t want me to know he was doing it, but he moved his lips when he counted. That’s why OCD is on the high risk list. Because vampires compulsively count everything. I think it’s the other way, though. You don’t turn because you’re OCD. You’re OCD because you turned.

“Yeah, no, it’s not private. It’s just not that interesting. Remember when the HR list first came out and I was so freaked because I was conceived on a Saturday and I have that mole on my hip? I was so sure I’d get it before everyone else. But it didn’t happen like I thought, like when that 3rd grader just flipped one day and the CDC guys figured out it was because her mom is a crazy cat lady and she doesn’t even have a path to cross without a black cat there to cross it for her. Ana Cruz. I thought it would be like that. Like Ana. I couldn’t stop thinking about how it would be. Just walking down the street, and bang. But it wasn’t. I woke up one night and this woman was looking in my window. She was older. Pretty, though. She looked…kind, I guess.”

“How old was she?”

“One of the oldest ones in California, it turned out, so about six? Her name was Maria. She used to be an anesthesiologist, down at the hospital.”

“Were you guys…together? Or something?”

“No, Scout, you just kind of get to talking eventually. Afterward, there’s not that much to do but wait, and she was nice. She stayed with me. Held my hand. She didn’t have to. Anyway, I opened the window, but I didn’t let her in. I’m not an idiot. I just sat there looking back at her. You know how they look after they’re past the first couple of years. All wolfy and hard and stuff. And finally she said: ‘why wait?’ And I thought, shit, she’s right. It’s gonna happen, sooner or later. I might as well get on with it. If I do it now, at least I can stop thinking about it. So I climbed out.” He laughed shortly, like a bark. “I didn’t invite her in. She invited me out. I guess that’s sort of funny. Anyway, you know how it works. I don’t want to get all porny on you. It was really gross at first. Blood just tastes like blood, you know? Like hot syrup. But then, it sort of changes, and it was like I could hear her singing, even though she was totally silent the whole time. Anyway. It hurts when you wake up the next night. Like when your arm falls asleep but all over. My mom was really mad.”

I picked at the peeling paint on the side of the swingset. “I think about it.”

“Oh! Do you want me to…?” God, Noah was always so fucking eager to please. He’s like a puppy.