The Bread We Eat in Dreams
It took me a long time to answer. I totally get him. Why wait. But finally, I just sighed. “I don’t think so. I have a bio test tomorrow.”
“Ok.” Noah lit a cigarette, just like Emmy. He looked like a total tool. Like he’s the vampire Marlboro Man or whatever.
“What does blood taste like now?” I asked. I can’t help it. I still want to know. I always want to know.
“Singing,” he mumbled around the cigarette, and puffed out the smoke without inhaling.
The other week, my Uncle Jack came to visit. He lives in Chicago and works for some big advertising company. He did that one billboard with the American Apparel kids all wrapped up in biohazard tape. My mom cooked, which means no salt, and Uncle Jack just wasn’t having that. He travels with his own can of Morton’s and made sure my steak tasted like beef jerky.
“Kids in your condition have to be extra careful,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m not pregnant, Uncle Jack.”
“You really can’t afford to take the risk, Scout. You have to think about your future. There’s so much bleed these days.”
That should pretty much tell you everything you need to know about what a bag of smarm my uncle is. He’ll use a terrible pun to talk about something that’ll probably kill me. He was talking about how that list of common causes is actually kind of out of date. Like how kids used to use textbooks that said: maybe someday man will walk on the moon. About a year ago, some of the causes started having baby causes. Like, it doesn’t have to be meat killed by a wolf anymore, it can be any predator, so hunting game is right out. Even for non-HRs. We’ve always kept kosher, so it’s not really an issue for us, but plenty of other ones are. They’ve acted like sex was on the no-no list since the beginning, but I don’t think it was. I think that was recent. If sex could turn you into a vampire way back in ancient Hungary, we’d all be sucking moonlight by now. Some people, who are assholes, call this bleed. But never in front of an HR. It’s just flat out rude.
My Uncle Jack is an asshole. I mean, I said he was in advertising, right?
“My firm is sponsoring a clean camp up in Wisconsin. Totally safe environment, absolutely scrubbed. For HRs, it’s the safest place to be. God, the only place to be, if I were HR! You should think about it.”
“I don’t really want to move to Wisconsin.”
“We wouldn’t feel right about that, Jack,” said my mother quietly. “We’d rather have her close. We take precautions, we take her in for shots.”
Uncle Jack made a fake-sympathetic face and started babbling the way old people do when they want to sound like they care but they don’t really. “My heart just breaks for you, Scout, honey. You, especially. You mu
st be so scared, poor thing! I feel like if we could just get a handle on the risk vectors, we could gain some ground with this thing. It’s pretty obvious the European embargo isn’t doing any good.”
“Probably because it’s not the like it’s the Romanian flu, Uncle Jack. You can’t blockade air. I don’t even think it really started there. Practically every culture has vampire legends.”
Mom quirked her eyebrow at me.
“Come on, Mom. There’s like nothing left to do but read. I’m not stupid.”
“Well, Scout,” continued Uncle Jack in a skeevy isn’t-it-cute-how-you-can-talk-like-a-grown-up voice. “You don’t see people detaching their heads and flying around with their spines hanging out, or eating nail clippings with iron teeth, so I think it’s safe to say the Slavic regions are the most likely source.”
“And AIDS comes from Africa, right? Isn’t it funny how nothing ever comes from us? Nothing’s ever our fault, we’re just victims.”
Uncle Jack put down his fork quietly and folded his hands in his lap. He looked up at me, scowling. His face was scary-calm.
“I think that kind of back-talk qualifies as immoral conduct, young lady.”
My mother froze, with her glass halfway up to her mouth. I just got up and left. Fuck that and fuck you, you know? But I could hear him as I stomped off. He wanted me to hear him. That’s fine, I wanted him to hear me stomping.
“Carol, I know it’s hard, but you can’t get so attached. These days, kids like her are a lost cause. HRs, well, they’re pretty much vampires already.”
The problem is they live forever and they can’t have kids. That’s it, right there. That’s the problem. They don’t play nice with the American dream. They won’t do the monkey-dance. They don’t care about what kind of car they drive. They don’t care about what’s on TV they know for damn sure they’re not on TV, so why bother? Guys like Uncle Jack can’t sell them anything. I mean, yeah, there’s the blood thing, too, but it’s not like nobody was getting killed or disappearing before they came along. Anyway, Noah says they mostly feed off each other when they’re new. Blood is blood. Cow, human, deer.
They all think I don’t get it, that I’m just a dumb kid who thinks vampires are cool because they all grew up reading those stupid books where some girl goes swooning over a boy vampire because he’s so deep and dreamy and he lived through centuries waiting for her. Gag. I guess that’s why that crap is banned now. No one wants their daughters getting the idea that all this could ever be hot. But guess what? They don’t have body fluids. They only have blood. You do the math. And then come back when you’re done throwing up. No one dates vampires.
Anyway, I’m not dumb. It’s hard to be dumb when half your friends only come out at night. I get it. Pretty soon they’ll outnumber us.
And then, pretty soon after that, it’ll be all of us.
Noah and I went to the park most nights. Nobody gave us any shit there—no kids play in parks anymore, anyway. It’s just empty. And it was so hot that summer, I couldn’t stand being inside. Even at night, I could hardly breathe.
One time Noah brought Emmy along. I wasn’t freaked or anything. I knew they weren’t dating anymore. Gossip knows no species, you know? I guess it must be pretty lonely to hang out with a human girl all the time and explain your business to her. They sat in the tire swing together and kind of draped their arms and legs all over each other. They didn’t make out or anything, they just sat there, touching.