The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  I got to thinking, maybe I should write one of those anonymous letters to an advice columnist. The only reason I thought of that is that I’m just this help column junkie—Dear Abby, Ann Landers, the “Sex & Body” and “Hard Questions” columns in Seventeen. My favourite is Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” which runs in XPress, our local alternative weekly, though Mom and Dad’d probably kill me if they knew I was reading it. I mean, it’s all about sex and gay stuff and I know I’m never going to have a boyfriend—who wants the Frankenstein monster on their arm?—but I still figure it’s stuff I should know.

  Imagine writing in to one of them with my problem. I’d try Dan first.

  Dear Dan,

  My sister doesn’t eat or menstruate anymore, but she’s not losing

  weight, nor is she pregnant. She has a phobia about Easter and sneaks

  out of the house late at night, going I don’t know where.

  I’m not trying to butt into her life, but I’m really worried. What do

  you think is wrong with her? What can I do?

  Confused in Ottawa

  What’s wrong with her? I started to think that the answer lay in one of those cheesy old sci-fi or horror movies that they run late at night. That she’d become a pod person or a secret monster of some kind. Except not in a bad way. She’s not mean to me, or anyone else that I can see. She’s just…weird.

  And then on my sixteenth birthday, I find out. It’s after the big dinner and presents and everything. I’m lying on my bed, looking up at the ceiling and trying to figure out why I don’t feel different—I mean, turning sixteen’s supposed to be a big deal, right?—when Apples comes in and closes the door behind her. I scoot up so that I’m leaning against a pillow propped up at my headboard. She props the other pillow up and lies down beside me. We’ve done this a thousand times, but tonight it feels different.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” she says and my head fills up with worry and questions that only gets worse when she goes on to add, “I’m a vampire.”

  I turn to look at her.

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, really,” she says.

  As she starts to explain how it all began after that concert when she did her four-day mystery jaunt, all the oddities and weirdnesses of the past few years start to make sense—or at least they make sense if I’m willing to accept the basic premise that my sister’s turned into a teenage Draculetta.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me before?” I ask.

  “I wanted to wait until you were the same age as I was when I…got turned.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I want to turn you.”

  She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed now, facing me, her face so earnest.

  “If you get changed,” she goes on, “you can get rid of both your leg brace and your puffer.”

  “Really?”

  I can’t imagine life without them. The chance to be normal. Then I catch myself. Normal, but dead.

  But Apples is nodding, a big grin stretching her lips. She holds out her right hand, pointer finger extended.

  “Remember when I lost my nail in volleyball practice?” she asks. “The whole thing came right off.”

  I nod. It was so gross.

  “Well, look,” she says, still waving her finger in front of my face. “It’s all healed.”

  “Apples,” I say. “That was four years ago. Of course it’s healed.”

  “I mean it healed when I changed. I had no fingernail the night I went to the concert, but there it was when I came back four days later. The…woman who changed me, she said the change heals anything.”

  “So you’re just going to bite me or something and I become like you?”

  She nods. “But we have to work this out just right. It takes three days before you’re changed, so we’ll have to figure out how and where we can do that so that no one gets suspicious. But don’t worry. I’ll be there for you the whole time, watching over you.”

  “And then we’ll live forever?”

  “Forever sixteen.”

  “What about Mom and Dad?”

  “We can’t tell them,” she says. “How could we even begin to explain this to them?”

  “You’re explaining it to me.”

  But she shakes her head. “They wouldn’t understand—how could they?”

  “The same way you think I can.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “So we live forever, but Mom and Dad just get old and die?”

  She gets this look on her face that tells me she never thought it out that far.

  “We can’t change everybody,” she says after a long moment.

  “Why not?”

  “Because then there’d be no one left for us to…”

  “What?” I ask when her voice trails off.

  She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, won’t meet my gaze.

  “To feed on,” she says finally. I guess I pull a face, because she quickly adds, “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  She’s already told me a whole lot of things about the differences between real vamps and the ones in the books and movies, but drinking blood’s still part of the deal and I’m sorry, but it still sounds gross.

  Apples get up from the bed. She looks—I don’t know. Embarrassed. Sad. Confused.

  “I guess you need some time to process all of this stuff I’ve been telling you,” she says.

  I give her a slow nod. I’d say something, but I don’t know what. I feel kind of overloaded.

  “Okay, then,” she says and she leaves me in my bedroom.

  I slouch back down on the bed and stare at the ceiling again, thinking about everything she’s told me.

  My sister’s a vampire. How weird is that?

  Does she still have a soul?

  I guess that’s a bizarre question in some ways. I mean, do any of us have souls? It’s like asking, Who is God? I guess. The best answer I’ve heard to that is when Deepak Chopra says, “Who is asking?” It makes sense that God would be different to different people, but also different to you, depending on who you are at the time you’re asking.

  I guess I believe we have souls. And when we die, they go on. But what that means for Apples, I don’t know. She’s dead, but she’s still here.

  She’s different now—but she’s still the big sister I knew growing up. There’s just more to her now. Maybe it’s like asking “Who is God?” She’s who she is depending on who I am when I’m wondering about her.

  Sometimes I think it’s only kids that wonder about existential stuff like this. Grown-ups always seem to be worried about money, or politics, or just stuff that has physical presence. It’s like somewhere along the way they lost the ability to think about what’s inside them.

  Here’s a story I like: One day Ramakrishna, this big-time spiritual leader back in the nineteenth century, is praying, when he suddenly has this flash that what he’s doing is meaningless. He’s looking for God, but already everything is God—the rituals he’s using, the idols, the floor under him, the walls, everything. Wherever he looks, he sees God. And he’s just so blown away by this, he can’t find the words to express it. All he can do is dance, like, for hours. This joyful Snoopy whirling and dervishing and spinning. I just love the image of that—some old wise man in flowing robes, just getting up and dancing.

  I’d love to be able to dance. I love music. I love the way I can feel it in every pore of my body. When your body’s moving to the music, it’s like you’re part of the music. You’re not just dancing to it anymore, you’re somehow helping to create it at the same time.

  But the most I can do is sort of shuffle around until I get all out of breath and I never let anyone see me trying to do it. Not even Apples.

  Boy, can she dance. Every movement she makes is just so liquid and smooth. She’s graceful just getting up from a chair or crossing a room. And I don’t say this because of the contrast between us.

  But none of this helps wi
th what she’s told me. All I can do is feel the weight of the door that she closed behind her and stare at the ceiling, my head full of a bewildering confusion.

  Normally when I have something I can’t work out, Apples is the one who helps me deal. But now she’s the problem….

  * * *

  Did you ever play the game of if you could only have one wish, what would you wish for? It’s so hard to decide, isn’t it? But I know what I would do. I would wish that all my wishes come true.

  But real life isn’t like that. And too often you find that the things you think you really, really want, are the last things in the world that you should get. I’ve always wanted to be able to walk without my leg brace, to run and jump and dance and just be normal. And breathing. Everybody takes it for granted. Well, I wish I could. And here’s my chance. Except it comes with a price, just like in all those old fairy tales I used to read as a kid.

  I have to choose. Go on like I am, a defect, a loser—at least in other people’s eyes. Or be like Apples, full of life and vigor, and live forever. Except to do that I’ve got to drink other people’s blood and everybody else I care about will eventually get old and die.

  What kind of a choice is that?

  This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to try to work out.

  * * *

  I get Mom to drive me to the mall the next day. I know she worries about me being out on my own, but she’s good about it. She reminds me not to overexert myself and we arrange what door she’ll meet me at in a couple of hours, and then I’m on my own.

  I don’t want to go shopping. I just want to sit someplace on my own and there’s no better place to do that than in the middle of a bunch of strangers like in the concourse of this mall.

  I watch the people go by and find myself staring at their throats. I can’t imagine drinking their blood. And then there’s this whole business that Apples explained about how she only feeds on bad people. That just makes me feel sicker. When she told me that, all I could think about was that time at dinner when I announced I was becoming a vegetarian and the look on her face when I told them why.

  You are what you eat.

  I don’t want the blood of some freak serial killer nourishing me. I don’t even want the blood of a jaywalker in me.

  After a while I make myself stop thinking. I do the people-watching thing, enjoying the way all these people are hurrying by my little island bench seat.

  But of course, as soon as I start to relax a little, some middle-aged freak in a trenchcoat has to sit down beside me, putting his lame moves on me. He walks by, once, twice, checks out the leg brace, sees I’m alone, and then he’s on the bench and it’s “That’s such a beautiful blouse—what kind of material is it made of?” and he’s reaching over and rubbing the sleeve between his fingers….

  If I was Apples, with this vamp strength she was telling me about, I could probably knock him on his ass before he even knew what was happening. Or I could at least run away. But all I can do is shrink away from him, feeling scared, until I see one of the mall’s rent-a-cops coming.

  “Officer!” I yell. They’re all wanna-be-cops and love it when you act like they’re real policemen.

  The pervert beside me jumps up from the bench and bolts down the hall before the security guard even looks in my direction. But that’s okay. I don’t want a scene. I just want to be left alone.

  “Was he bothering you?” the guard asks.

  I see him take it in. The leg brace. Me, so obviously helpless—and damn it, it’s true. And he’s all solicitous and pretty nice, actually. He asks if I’m on my own and when I tell him I’m meeting my mom later, offers to walk me to the door where I’m supposed to meet her.

  I take him up on it, but I’m thinking, it doesn’t have to be this way. If I let Apples change me, nobody will ever bother me again. It’d be like my own private human genome project. Only maybe I’m not supposed to be healthy. I keep thinking that maybe my asthma and bad leg are compensating for some other talent that just hasn’t shown up yet.

  I think of people throughout history who’ve overcome their handicaps to give us things that no one but they could have. Stephen Hawking. Vincent Van Gogh with his depressions. Terry Fox. Teddy Roosevelt. Stevie Wonder. Helen Keller.

  I’m not saying that they had to be handicapped to share their gifts with us, but if they hadn’t been handicapped, maybe they would have gone on to be other people and not become the inspirations or creative people they came to be.

  And I’m not saying I’m super smart or talented, or that I’m going to grow up and change the world. But it doesn’t seem right to just become something else. I won’t have earned it. It’s just too…too easy, I guess.

  * * *

  “There’s a reason why I am the way I am,” I tell Apples later.

  We’re sitting in the rec room, the TV turned to MuchMusic, but neither of us are really watching the Christina Aguilera video that’s playing. Dad’s in the kitchen, making dinner. Mom’s out in the garden, planting tulip and crocus bulbs.

  “You mean like it’s all part of God’s plan?” Apples asks.

  “No. I don’t know that I believe in God. But I believe everything has a purpose.”

  Apples shakes her head. “You can’t tell me you believe your asthma and your leg are a good thing.”

  “It might seem like they weaken me, but they actually make me strong. Maybe not physically, but in my heart and spirit.”

  Apples sighs and pulls me close to her. “You always were a space case,” she says into my hair. “But I guess that’s part of the reason I love you as much as I do.”

  I pull back so that we can look at each other.

  “I don’t want you to change me,” I say.

  Apples has always been good at hiding what she’s feeling, but she can’t hide the disappointment from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  “Don’t be,” she says. “You need to do what’s right for you.”

  “I feel like I’m letting you down.”

  “Cassie,” she says. “You could never let me down.”

  But she moved out of the house the next day.

  Three: Appoline

  Life sucks.

  Or maybe I should say, death sucks, since I’m not really alive—but everybody thinks death sucks because for them it’s the big end. So that doesn’t work either.

  Okay. How about this: undeath sucks.

  Or at least mine does.

  I had to move out of the house. After four years of waiting to be able to change Cassie, I just couldn’t live there anymore once she turned me down. I can’t believe how much I miss her. I miss the parents, too, but it’s not the same. I’ve never been as close to them as Cassie is. But I adore her and talking on the phone and seeing her a couple of times a week just isn’t enough.

  Trouble is, when I do see her or talk to her, that hurts, too. Everything just seems to hurt these days.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Sandy Browning, my best friend in grade school. We were inseparable until we got into junior high. That’s when she starting getting into these black moods. Half the time you couldn’t see them coming. It was like these black clouds would drift in from nowhere and just envelop her. When I discovered she was cutting herself—her arms and stomach were criss-crossed with dozens of little scars—I couldn’t deal with it and we sort of drifted apart.

  There’s two reasons people become cutters, she told me once, trying to explain. There’s those that can’t feel anything—the cutting makes them feels alive. And then there are the ones like her, who have this great weight of darkness and despair inside them. The cutting lets it out.

  I couldn’t really get it at the time—I couldn’t imagine having that kind of a bleak shadow swelling inside me—but I understand her now. Ever since Cassie turned me down, I’ve got this pressure inside me that won’t ease and I feel like the only way I can release it is to open a hole to let it out. But it doesn’t work for me. The one time
I ran a razor blade along the inside of my forearm, it hardly bled at all and the cut immediately started to seal up. Within half an hour, there wasn’t a mark on my skin.

  Sandy had been completely addicted to it. Her family moved away the year before I became a vamp and I don’t know what ever happened to her. I wish I’d been a better friend. I wish a lot of things these days.

  I wish I’d never talked to Cassie about my wanting to turn her.

  Sometimes I wonder: did I want to do it for her, so that she could finally put aside the limitations of her physical ailments, or did I do it for me, so I wouldn’t have to be alone?

  I guess it doesn’t matter.

  I’m sure alone now.

  I live in a tiny apartment above the Herb and Spice Natural Foods shop on Bank Street. I like the area. During the day, it’s like a normal neighbourhood with shops along Bank Street—video store, comic book shop, gay bookstore, restaurants—and mostly residential buildings in behind on the side streets. But come the night, the blocks up north around the clubs like Barrymore’s become prime hunting grounds for someone like me. All the would-be toughs, the scavengers and the hunters, come out of the woodwork, hoping to prey on the people who come to check out the bands and the scene.

  And I prey on them.

  But even stopping them from having their wicked way doesn’t really mean all that much anymore. I’m too lonely. It’s not that I can’t make friends. Ever since I got turned, that’s the least of my problems. It’s that I don’t have a foundation of normalcy to return to anymore. I don’t have a home and family. I just have my apartment. My job at the coffee shop. My hunting. I can’t seem to get close to anyone because as soon as I do, I remember that I’m going to be like I am forever, while they age and die. Sometimes I imagine I can see them aging, that I can see the cells dying. It’s even worse when I’m back home, seeing it happen to Cassie and my parents, so it’s not like I can move back there again either.