“He should stay home and play with himself.”
Sejal turned to face the boys. Doug stole a glance. She didn’t look angry. She just looked naive to him, even disappointed. Innocent.
“You are not being polite,” she said.
“Why should I be?” a boy answered. “I don’t know you.”
“That is the point.”
“Turn around and watch the movie, goth girl.”
“Yeah, goth girl. Aren’t you a little brown for a goth, Kama Sutra?”
Here it was. The Frisbee had been thrown, and Doug knew he was supposed to do something with it. He’d read about people for whom time slowed under stressful conditions. People like snipers, or race car drivers, or ninjas. In slow time, the situation presented itself with intricate clarity.
It was always exactly the opposite for Doug. When the Frisbee was in play, time only seemed to speed up. His vision went blurry around the edges. It was like his body was trying to kill him. He could think of only one circumstance in his life when this hadn’t been the case, and he wasn’t hunting coyotes now. But that wet, visceral memory reminded him that it was night, and he was stronger than these guys. Maybe not stronger than both of them together, but…Little by little he turned to face them.
Ophelia did him one better by reeling to her feet. A torrent of screaming fiery hatred scorched the boys’ faces. That they weren’t allowed to talk about Sejal that way was the basic gist of it. That their dicks were small and embarrassing formed a sort of secondary thesis, but the whole message was illuminated with such a floral rococo of virtuoso cursing that it hardly mattered.
“…and if you ass clowns say another word about her, I’ll whittle your fuck sticks with my car keys!” she finished, and even the film actors’ voices seemed for a moment to be reverently hushed.
“Well…” said one of the boys, “well…she should control her boyfriend more, that’s all.”
“Why?” said Cat. “Because he’s making his own jokes? Because you asswipes need a script to be funny?”
A few moments passed. From the front of the auditorium an actor said, “Settle it or take it outside, guys.”
In another story, in a Western perhaps, the audience would have erupted into a theaterwide brawl. But these were mostly drama kids, so the girls were more prone to histrionics, and the boys were more likely to throw parties than punches.
“C’mon,” one of the boys said. “Rocky’s been getting lame for a long time. Let’s go to the band party.”
“Yeah, go to your band party,” Ophelia began, but with a touch on the arm from Sejal she fell silent. Then, surprisingly, Ophelia’s friend rose and left without a word. “Chrissy!” Ophelia hissed, and followed.
“Hey, the show’s down here,” the live-actor Janet called to the crowd. “Leave the drama to the professionals.”
The show resumed, and Doug burned happily in his seat. This was shaping up to be the best night of his teenage life. He tried to share a glance with Sejal, but Sejal’s eyes were fixed on the screen, her face reflecting its blue glow. Her moon face shone in the dark theater, unknowable and suddenly very far away.
19
PAJAMA PARTY
DOUG PEDALED through the bustling, trolley-tracked streets of West Philadelphia while the events of Friday played over and over in his head. He knew he should stop thinking about it and concentrate—he was biking to the home of his vampire mentor, Stephin David. This was arguably more important than a date. Why didn’t it feel more important?
Cat had defended him. Called him funny. And in the parking lot after the show everyone seemed to be on his side—Abby, Sophie, even Adam. Abby said it was proper for Rocky watchers to invent new lines to shout. The routine was always changing. She was certain someone would use Doug’s “gay cow” line at the next show.
There was an “Us” and a “Them,” and Doug was on the right side for a change.
“How about that Ophelia?” said Doug as he, Jay, Cat, and Sejal piled back into the car. “I’ve never seen her like that.”
“I have.” Cat laughed. “She was drunk is all. Did you smell her breath?”
“What’s up with that girl she was with? Her hair, and her clothes…she was like a really pretty boy.”
“Her jacket was rad,” said Cat.
Doug had no opinion about the girl’s jacket. “Ophelia said before that she had a date tonight. Is she…?”
“Gay?” asked Cat. “I’ve sort of thought so for a while. Gay or bi. She doesn’t date anyone at our school anymore.”
Doug realized he should have something to say about this, something worldly, but nothing came. He was at sea. He was drifting in unfamiliar waters, and he felt the passing seconds break against him.
“Are you okay, Sejal?” Jay asked. “You’re really quiet.”
“I’m only tired, thank you,” she said. She looked stiff, her small fingers interlaced and tense and pinned to her breast-bone. She lacked only a white lily to hold and a plush box to lie down in.
Doug realized now, on his bike, that she’d probably been offended by all the gay talk. India was different. He would have to let her know everything was cool, that he was on her side, whatever side that was. He had to stay on top of this.
After they’d dropped off Sejal and Cat, Doug had explained the situation to Jay. “Adam’s after Sejal,” he said. “I don’t think he cares about Sophie.”
“Really?”
“It’s obvious. Did you see how long he hugged her good night? And all his we’re married now, when’s the honeymoon jokes…”
“You said he only dates girls who’re at least two years younger,” Jay reminded him. “And not smart. Sejal’s our age and smart.”
“Yeah, but she’s foreign.”
“I don’t understand your math,” Jay had answered.
“I don’t understand your math,” Doug shouted, now, as he hurtled through the stale bus-and-curry-scented streets. He swerved to avoid a mother with stroller who’d just stepped into the bike lane to watch for larger traffic. Then, with quick reflexes (vampire reflexes!), he hopped the bike onto the sidewalk, his poncho blowing heroically behind him.
Stephin David owned an old row house near a park in West Philadelphia. Doug scanned the porches and steps for house numbers and nearly missed the pink and blue balloons and poster-board sign that said VAMPIRE attached to Stephin’s mailbox. Doug hastily tore down the sign and stuffed it in his backpack. In a disoriented rush he also popped the balloons and threw them inside the mailbox. Then he locked his bike to it and started up the path past a small, dry lawn. The door opened as he stepped onto the porch.
“Douglas?” said a man.
“Doug. Yes. Hi.”
“Hello, Doug. I’m Stephin. Come in.”
He was short, too, only a touch taller than Doug, but with a sonorous voice that seemed to creak up through the floor. And he was not what you would call classically good-looking. Maybe this was the rationale behind that “perfect match” Cassiopeia had mentioned.
Doug glanced around as Stephin led him through the foyer. If there had been a fourth Little Pig who’d elected to build his house out of cigarette butts it might have looked and smelled something like this place. The walls were as brown as a dead plant, the corners bruised with mold. Here and there the ghostly rectangles of missing picture frames haunted the hall. Books were stacked everywhere, clogging the already narrow artery into the house.
“Are you moving out?” asked Doug.
“It’s possible I am. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been moving out my whole life.”
Okay, thought Doug. They passed a frame that hadn’t yet been removed but was covered with a languid drape of cloth. It was a Jewish tradition to cover mirrors after someone died. Was Stephin Jewish? But, no, when Doug was sure he wouldn’t be seen, he lifted a corner of the drape. It was only an old portrait of a Civil War soldier.
Stephin led Doug into a sort of study or den, and invited him to sit in a worn leather chai
r. He fell into it, suddenly tired. He had been pushing himself a bit out there, actually. All that biking in the daytime. His back was sticking to his shirt, and now his shirt was sticking to the chair. He tried to steady his breathing as he looked around.
Small book stacks ringed his chair like a cul-de-sac. Suburbs. The chair Stephin chose was more like downtown Bookville—literary high-rises, thirty stories tall. In the amber glow of two small lamps the whole room took on the sepia blur of an old photograph. It was steeped in the musty but unaccountably pleasant smell of old paper.
They stared at each other a moment. There was something gnomish and subterranean about Stephin, Doug decided. Maybe he had been an accident, too.
“So,” said Stephin. “I haven’t done this in a very long time. You’ll forgive me if I’ve misplaced all my old lesson plans.”
“Well, should I—Should I just ask questions?”
“That would be fantastic.”
Now Doug was being asked to dive in headfirst, and Doug had never learned to dive. He thought perhaps he should start with Stephin himself.
“Are you…American?”
“I was born in Scotland. But we came here when I was three.”
“Have you lived here long? In Philadelphia I mean. Do you have to move around a lot?”
“About twenty years,” said Stephin. “This is not my only residence.”
“So how long have you been…ennobled?”
Stephin’s expression did not change, but when he answered, there was a sour note to his voice. “I’m not as fond as you might imagine of Miss Polidori’s delicate little euphemisms. Can we perhaps call the thing what it is?”
“You mean I should just say ‘vampire’?”
“If it walks like a bat and quacks like a bat…”
“All right, so how long have—”
“One hundred and forty-six years.”
“Oh. Well, that’s pretty good,” said Doug. He hoped he didn’t sound disappointed. He kind of wanted Stephin to be hundreds of years old. Even thousands. He didn’t think Signora Polidori was more than two or three hundred. He didn’t know anything about Alexander Borisov. All the other vampires he knew were recent hires like himself.
“Who’s the oldest?” asked Doug. “Like, who’s the oldest vampire you know.”
Stephin mulled this over a moment. “I suppose the oldest…the oldest I’m certain is still in this world is Cassiopeia herself. Born the year of Victoria’s coronation, as she likes to tell anyone who will listen. Alexander is only seventy or eighty.”
Doug nodded and looked at his feet. There was another pale rectangle here, this one in the center of the floor like the chalk outline of a dead coffee table.
“Are there many vampires?” he asked. “My friend Jay likes to work these things out and—and there were only three vampires here in the Philadelphia area up until a month ago. That’s three vampires for six million people. So maybe a hundred and fifty vampires in the whole country. Three thousand in the whole world. And we’re guessing there wouldn’t be as many in rural areas.”
“I suspect it’s something like that. I don’t have better numbers than you do. I would definitely agree about less populated areas, the countryside…It’s far riskier to hunt in such places.”
“So why aren’t there more vampires? Why don’t you know any really old ones? It’s not like they’re dying out or anything—”
With a jolt Doug realized that Stephin was in his pajamas. They were a loose pair of pants and a shirt with large buttons. The top and bottoms didn’t match so he’d mistaken it for an outfit. Pajamas.
“Don’t fool yourself, Doug. We can die. We’re not as difficult to kill as the movies would have you believe. We heal quickly, true, and we don’t strictly need a fair number of our organs anymore, but a close shotgun blast to the chest will put us down as decisively as a stake in the heart.”
Stephin was suddenly lively, like this was a favorite topic. Like he’d been asked about his great-great-great-great-grand-kids.
“Though not as quickly,” he added. “A sharp piece of wood will end it more quickly, for reasons that have never been adequately explained to me. Also, we still need to breathe. We still prefer not to be on fire. And though we might heal from a bayonet in the ribs we can’t regenerate a whole limb. How long,” he said, edging forward, “how long has any of us got before the big accident comes? The loss of arms, or legs? How do we hunt, then, with no wings? How much blood could a bloodsucker suck if a bloodsuck—and now I see I’m scaring you.”
“What?” said Doug with a start. “No.”
“I am. I’m sorry. I’m no longer practiced at human interaction. I’ve talked to so few people during the last fifteen or twenty years. I spent the whole of 1996 and part of ’97 speaking nothing but a language of my own invention called Stephinese, just to see if it would make life more diverting.”
“And?”
“And what?” Stephin drawled.
“Did it? Make life more diverting,” Doug reminded him.
Stephin didn’t answer. Doug glanced around at the small room, at the books and newspapers and dry furniture. There was a bell jar with a pocket watch inside. There was a small tin globe of the moon next to a cast-iron bank shaped like a slave holding a slice of watermelon. There was a picture frame on the floor, leaning against the wall. Behind the glass was something like a bouquet of dried flowers but fashioned from loops and braids of a fine brown thread.
“It’s made from human hair,” said Stephin. Doug frowned and leaned closer, and Stephin added, “It seemed like a good idea in the nineteenth century. So. You’ve told a friend about your affliction. Jay, was it?”
Doug flinched. His stomach lurched. Had he mentioned Jay? He had. What happened now? Did they fight? Did Doug have to fight to protect his friend?
“I frankly consider such complications unavoidable,” said Stephin. “Of course you’ve told someone—How can one bear this half life alone? For your sake I hope you’ve chosen well. Would you like to try some peyote?”
“The rest of the hour went a lot like that,” Doug reported to Jay afterward. The two boys sat heavily on Jay’s backyard swing set, not swinging. “Less like school than like a school dream—you know: hazy, difficult to follow, full of weird surprises and wardrobe choices.” When Doug had finally emerged, blinking, into the West Philadelphia afternoon, it had been like waking, and the memories of Stephin David faded in the sun. They’d agreed to meet again on Monday.
“Did you ask any of our questions?” said Jay. “Did you ask how to turn into a bat?”
“Sort of. He said if I really wanted all that kind of stuff to happen, it would probably just happen. It would happen when I needed it to.”
“Like, by instinct,” Jay offered.
“Yeah. He said I’d change whether I wanted to or not.”
Doug squinted up at the deck, where Jay’s sister, Pamela, had just emerged from the kitchen door holding a watering can. She squinted down at the swings.
“Shouldn’t one of you be pushing the other?” she called out. “That’s how it always is with you young lovers, isn’t it?”
On their best days Pam approached Doug as if he were a kind of hereditary illness—just something unpleasant she had to deal with because of family, like eczema. On their worst days, they had a sort of troll-hobbit relationship.
“I can come push you off the deck if you like,” Doug answered.
Jay sighed. “Can you guys maybe not fight?”
Pamela was six feet tall and curly haired and now, in light of Friday night’s movie, looked a little like Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Doug tried not to imagine her in fishnets, but you can’t really try not to imagine somebody in fishnets. And now Doug’s imagination was a slideshow of pornographic images starring himself and Pamela. The harder he tried to swap her out with a swimsuit model or something, the more his sweaty boy mind insisted on Pamela. Is this what being a teenager meant, that his fantasy life wasn’t even his own? Pamela
did have one thing going for her—a big rack. Maybe that was two things. Okay, three—he supposed she was smart.
A year or two ago Doug and his friend Stuart got into a debate over whether Pamela was hot. Stuart said she was because of her tits, and Doug said that’s sexist, you can’t think a girl’s hot just because of bra size if she’s otherwise ugly, and then Jay overheard and shouted, “HOW IS IT NOT SEXIST TO CALL HER UGLY AND, BESIDES, SHE’S NOT UGLY,” and then he started crying. It had been a really fantastic afternoon.
The secret key to their relationship was that Pamela had once kissed Doug while their mothers played tennis. When he was six and she seven. Neither of them ever referred to it directly, though when cornered, she still occasionally blamed him for giving her lice.
Now she stepped down into the yard with her watering can, the potted plants apparently forgotten, and silently studied Doug like his face was a chessboard. “You need more sun, you know,” she said.
As if, thought Doug.
“You’re never going to grow any taller, hiding under that poncho all the time. Here, I’ll water you.”
She tipped the can over his ponchoed head. His ears filled with the spatter of water on plastic. It didn’t get him very wet, but in his haste to escape he fell backward over the rubber swing.
“Gah—dammit!”
Pamela howled. Beside them, Jay said quietly, “Pam, Doug is my guest.”
“Yeah!” said Doug once he was back on his feet. His eyes burned. He hoped Pam could feel the intensity of his stare, the conviction behind his hatred. “Jay’s guest! So why don’t you show a little hospitality, huh?”
Pamela wore an odd look.
“Just…fuckin’…fix me a lemonade and leave us alone,” he told her.
She held his gaze for a moment, then walked off without a word.
“Well…good. Whatever,” said Doug as he watched Pam climb back onto the deck. The swing set creaked as he settled again in the seat next to Jay.
Jay said, “Sorry.”
“Forget about it,” Doug answered. “So what are you doing for the rest of today?”