He was just being funny. On television people insulted each other all the time. For laughs. Humor made the world a better place. Clever insults were the basis of all humor.
No, he realized with sudden clarity. Not insults. Control. Control was the basis of all humor. Even at its most innocent, what was a joke or a clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.
People like him—the unbeautiful, the less popular—were almost inhuman in some people’s eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. You made eye contact only by accident and then you turned quickly away. The word “geek” had once only referred to a circus freak, hadn’t it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bite the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover.
Wasn’t this how they always tried to compensate? To overcome a girl’s disgust or another boy’s contempt and make them laugh despite themselves was to take some small measure of control. No wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny. They didn’t have to be. Why else would people find it so hilarious to see some short kid’s textbook stolen, held high above his head, out of reach? It wasn’t funny—it was pure control. Insult comedy minus the comedy.
So humor is a kind of weakness, Doug thought as he approached the house. He couldn’t understand why he’d never seen it before. Enough jokes, then. He was going to become the least funny person he knew.
The scent of cloves mixed with an oddly nostalgic smell of wet leaves. Absinthe was sitting on the front steps of the Polidori house, smoking a cigarette. She knit her brow at him as he approached.
“Hey,” said Doug.
“Oh,” said Absinthe. “It’s you. Douglas.”
“Yeah.”
“You look different.”
“So I’ve been told.”
They studied each other for a second.
“It’s fortunate I ran into you,” said Doug. “I was going to leave your clothes with Cassiopeia.” He held out the neat little pile.
“That is fortunate,” Absinthe agreed. “Mama Cass probably would have had Asa burn them in the backyard.”
Doug couldn’t tell if he was supposed to laugh. He pushed a noncommittal little puff of air through his nose and sat down on the step. “Are you having…problems with the signora?”
“Problems?” said Absinthe. “No. No, we don’t have any problems. I’m learning so much, thank god I can command rats now—that’s going right on my college applications.”
“You can command rats?”
“Yeah. All I ever want to do is command them the hell away from me.”
Doug nodded, and looked out of the corner of his eyes at her breasts. Deep in his mind there was a space like a basement where he kept ideas he’d used once or twice but had mostly forgotten. Self-improving ideas, like exercise equipment, gathering dust. One of these was the realization that sexy people were not always, themselves, hypersexual, that just because Doug could only think of sex—sexy, hot nude intercourse sex—when he looked at Absinthe didn’t mean that it was on her mind at all. There was probably no clever conversational password that could get her making out with him at this moment. Probably.
“I can make fog,” he said.
“Hey, look, so can I,” said Absinthe. She took a drag and blew a plume through her plum lips. It smelled like Christmas.
Doug laughed. “That’s not what I meant. I—”
“Do you like your tutor guy? Mr. David whatever?”
“Not really.”
“I can’t stand this anymore,” said Absinthe. “I hate her! It’s like, I get to hang out with this totally hot two hundred-year-old vamp and she’s just like my mom. Worse, even—at least my mom will die someday.”
Doug managed to say, “What’s wrong with—” before she started up again.
“I mean, what’s the point of being a vampire if everything is ‘don’t do this’ and ‘I forbid you to do that’? She’s even got the nerve to insult my clothes, like her Masterpiece Theatre wardrobe hasn’t been out of fashion for, like, ever. I’m all, like, ‘You should talk. Nice empire waist. I bet you were the belle of the Industrial Revolution, bitch.’”
Absinthe sighed.
“I totally should have said that.”
“I like your clothes,” said Doug.
“Jesus. Of course you do. You’re just another horndog boy. But Madam Polidori says I look like a hooker, and I say, no, I look like a vampire, so she says I look like a vampire hooker. Then she shows me a photo of this vampire hooker she knows in New Orleans and we’re wearing the same top.”
Vampire hooker, thought Doug.
“And all the time she—she wants me to…” Absinthe quailed, but recovered quickly. “Did you know that Asa really isn’t a vampire? He’s a…thrall. It’s so fucked up.”
“She introduced him to me that way. As her thrall.”
“Yeah, but do you know what it means? It means she almost made him a vampire, but she didn’t give him enough blood. She just gives him a tiny bit at a time, so he’s addicted. It means he’s her slave. He can never leave—he has to do whatever she says. What kind of person does that to someone?” Her face pruned. “Shit! I’m in such shit,” she said, and she folded up against her knees.
Doug put his arm around her as he’d seen people do on television, but she only seemed to stiffen and lean away. Like the way an unhappy baby could almost pitch herself backward out of your awkward clutches. He let her go as she got to her feet. She turned and hugged her arms, though Doug knew she could not possibly be cold.
“I told my boyfriend. Almost right away I told him. He was cool with it. Well, not so cool with the whole getting-ravished-by-a-vampire thing, but…I made it sound like I hadn’t been into it. Like it was more of a…rape or whatever.”
“Uh-huh,” said Doug. Where was this going?
“I guess he…I guess he really never was okay with it. He started making all these little comments, not much at first, but then all the time, and…I finally got tired of it and dumped him.”
She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it out with her toe.
“But then people started asking me these questions, everyone’s looking at me different, and I know he’s been talking about me…” She raised her face and pinched her eyes shut. “God, Travis! Don’t you know I have to kill you? Don’t you know you’re making me?”
“Elizabeth?” said a voice behind Doug, and he turned to see Cassiopeia Polidori stepping onto the porch.
“Oh, perfect,” Absinthe said, her eyes shining. “Perfect timing.”
“Hello, Douglas,” said the signora. “You are welcome inside. Elizabeth, why don’t you come back in—”
“Don’t look at me,” said Absinthe, and then her whole body exhaled and was only mist, a lewd column that shed its clothes and lost its shape and rose into the sky.
Doug looked at the pile of clothes, next to the other pile of clothes.
“You can’t keep transmogrifying away from your problems, young lady,” Cassiopeia called to the vapor as it drifted over the trees. She watched, for several beats after it had vanished from sight, then turned as if suddenly remembering that Doug was also there. “Douglas. This is a surprise. Leave the clothes. Asa will see to them.” Doug followed her inside.
They walked through the parched, candlelit hall. “You’re looking well,” said Cassiopeia. “I can’t confess to agree with your recent flair for vigilantism, but I daresay it agrees with you.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you’ve been hearing about me,” said Doug.
“Hm. So I suppose you don’t have an invisible motorcycle? What a disappointment—I was rather looking forward to not seeing it.”
They settled in the drawing room near the harpsichord, Doug on an uncomfortable chair and Signora Polidori on what Doug assumed was an uncomfortable sofa. He thought they should be drinking tea and remarking on the latest soci
ety gossip and news from London and whenever would Mr. Fucklesby settle down and marry? A moment later Asa arrived with the tea.
He glanced briefly at Doug with eyes that, while not exactly approving, no longer carried the hint that Doug was something to be scraped from his heel. So that was something. Doug thought about what Absinthe had said. If true, it was Doug who was the superior being—Asa probably wished he were him.
“Mr. David tells me that you did not attend your last appointment with him,” said Cassiopeia after Asa withdrew. “And that he’s heard naught from you since. Milk?”
“Uh, no,” said Doug, looking down at the tea.
“Sugar?”
“No. Thanks. So…I didn’t feel I was learning with him. And I didn’t like his attitude, to be honest.”
“Mr. David, despite his many fine qualities, could have a more winning disposition,” Cassiopeia admitted.
“Right. Well, I heard from Victor that there was supposed to be some big meeting a few weeks ago. Stephin forgot about it, or just blew it off. I dunno.”
“And I have not pursued the matter because I believe the issue at heart has been…settled? The television show?”
Doug allowed a beat to pass before speaking. “Let’s just say I took care of it,” he said. It was something else that happened on TV a lot, these kinds of enigmatic statements. They were probably a kind of story shorthand, thought Doug. It was all that needed to be said, because the viewer already knew the details, or wasn’t meant to yet. It wasn’t going to work in real life, he reasoned. Nobody just let you say a thing like that without explaining yourself. But here, now, was Cassiopeia’s curt nod, and then silence. Don’t you want to know what I did? thought Doug. Don’t you want to know how I did it? He had a sense that he was moments from being dismissed. That the signora would stand, and Doug would have to stand, and then Asa would come from wherever Asa came from to guide Doug through such uncharted territory as the stair hall and the foyer.
He didn’t want to leave. He was kin to women like this. Why had he ever thought vampires smelled bad to one another? Here he was in a vampire’s chambers, and he couldn’t smell a thing. The world outside smelled like a farm.
“Have you found out anything about the mystery vampire?” asked Doug quickly. “The one that made…all us guys.”
Cassiopeia shifted in her seat. “We are investigating. It’s no fox hunt. It can be a long and delicate process, finding a fellow cousin.”
“Oh, right,” said Doug. “Obviously. I didn’t expect you would have found her yet, it’s just Stephin thought I ought to try to learn more—”
“I don’t suppose you have any further details about your benefactor you may have neglected to mention…?”
“No. Like I said before, it was dark. I didn’t get that good a look at her.”
Cassiopeia pursed her lips. “It would seem no one did. Douglas, may I be frank? When one considers young Victor and Evan and Danny, the inescapable conclusion one reaches is that our mysterious stranger has a…type. One positively leaps to this conclusion. Do you take my meaning?”
“I’m not sure. You’re being awfully subtle.”
“Yes. Very good. Most of our kind develop ‘types,’ Douglas. The older we get, the more distasteful we find the notion of supping on anything but our ideal. Like…a restaurant ‘regular’ who always orders ‘the usual’. Yes?”
Doug didn’t like where this was heading. He needed a change of subject.
“Perhaps we search out subjects that remind us of first loves. Or past enemies, punishing some former rival again and again,” Cassiopeia continued, though she made it clear by her tone that she found this latter habit offensive. “Others simply have a physical preference. I have known a hundred kinsmen, and we are all the same in this regard. All but our Mr. David, who has always claimed a more egalitarian lack of preference. But our Mr. David is given to invention.”
“You mean he’s a liar?”
“A dreadful liar.” Cassiopeia smiled sweetly. “Quite unapologetic about it. To hear him tell it, he has been in the night tide reborn so many different ways. Bitten by a despondent New York banker in October 1929. Or in Reconstruction South. During five distinct wars…at the culmination of the Boston Tea Party…whilst a cast member in the original touring production of Faust.”
Doug frowned at his hands. “He told me he’d been made in the Civil War.” He remembered Stephin’s narrative and felt like a chump. Tom North? Oh, and let me guess—he was shot by Dick South?
“It is a favorite of his. Mayhap it’s even true! Something has to be. But to return to my earlier point, Douglas: it would be passing strange that our cousin should have ennobled the three boys and also you. And so soon after Victor!” She laughed airily. “Is this woman trying to assemble a baseball team?”
“We could play night games,” Doug said, because he was nervous. I could be batboy.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me about your benefactor, Douglas? Is there anything you’d like to tell me about Victor?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Part of the reason…part of the reason I’m here is because Victor and I have been talking about the vampire who made us.” Doug saw Cassiopeia flinch at the word “vampire,” but he pressed on, seeing an opening. “I told Victor that I was going to try to find out more about her, and he wanted me to tell him everything I learned. He wants to find her.” This wasn’t the least bit true. Doug and Victor had been talking more and more at school, even nodding to each other in the halls, but in fact the hot mystery vampire never came up. “He keeps bugging me about it. Like…he knows I’m smarter, so he figures I’ll have better luck figuring out who she is. It’s like I’m doing his homework for him.” He forced himself to take a sip of his tea. Wait for it, thought Doug. Don’t be too obvious.
“Hm. I suppose we all want to discover her.”
“I guess. I mean, I’m curious, but it’s all he talks about.”
“And has he indicated why he’s so keen to make contact?”
It was just what Doug hoped she’d ask, and he nearly pounced out of his skin. “You know…I didn’t think so, but…a while ago, like weeks ago, he mentioned this movie he’d seen where a vampire—an ennobled person, I mean—turned normal after killing his…ennobler.”
Cassiopeia put her teacup very firmly down on the table. Not on its saucer. Not on a coaster, even.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Doug added. “I wouldn’t want to get him in trouble or anything. It probably doesn’t even work, right? Killing your maker? I told him you’d probably have to kill the head of the family or something—and, besides, don’t do it. I said.”
Cassiopeia stood. So that was it. “I must beg your forgiveness, Douglas. There is a matter that needs attending.” Doug stood as she passed him, and he turned to see Asa suddenly at his shoulder like Droopy Dawg, like you’d only just wrapped him up in chains and nailed him inside a crate and shipped him to Albuquerque but, surprise! there was Asa.
“Does it work, though?” Doug asked Cassiopeia. “If it does, I won’t tell Victor ’cause, hell, who wants to encourage him, right? But if it doesn’t, I can get the whole stupid idea out of his—”
“Of course it does not work. I bid you good night and good hunting.” With that Signora Polidori swept out of the room.
Doug looked at Asa. Asa looked back, not so much at Doug as at the empty Doug-shaped space he’d soon be leaving in their drawing room.
“If young master would—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
They walked the familiar path back to the front door, Doug all the while staring out of the corner of his eye at Asa’s face, smelling his strange smell. He remembered, suddenly, the back lot of a café near Jay’s house. It was one of those unwanted places, free from adult supervision, where you were permitted the pleasure of doing nothing. He and Jay and Stuart had spent a lot of time there in middle school. Asa smelled like the Dumpster in that back lot, the surprisingly sweet s
mell of pastries slowly melting into flies’ nests and poison. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you told a person, but it made Doug feel kindly toward him.
“You know, um…Absinthe told me about your and Cassiopeia’s…relationship,” Doug said, and Asa paused at the door. “I think it’s really…Well. I wouldn’t do that to a person, personally.”
Asa’s long, bell face was absolutely still and silent.
“I just wanted you to know that I understand…It must be really hard, your…situation. And I just wanted to…say that.” Asa opened the great door and stood to one side. Fine, thought Doug. He stepped out onto the front stairs and into the night air.
“Young master,” said Asa behind him.
Doug turned. Asa was still standing in the doorframe, blue-skinned against the warm embers of the hall behind him. Silhouetted like this, Doug could just barely make out a jagged smile in the corner of Asa’s lips, like a crack in his bell.
“My mistress misspoke. It works,” he said, and closed the door.
29
THE UNDYED
OPHELIA HOSTED a hair-dyeing party for all the girls playing Puerto Ricans. It was something of a magnanimous gesture, after fighting tooth and nail for the right to keep her brown-sugar hair and pink bangs. Her family had Puerto Rican friends in New York, she argued—real Puerto Rican New Yorkers—and they didn’t all have black hair. But Samantha Todd, the theater director, was adamant—now that she’d cast Sejal in the leading role she wanted the other girls to match.
Mostly they watched the Natalie Wood West Side Story and ate. Ophelia, Sophie, Jenny Underwood, Emily Purvis, and Jordan Belledin needed to dye their hair, but of course Sejal didn’t. And Abby was playing a white girl, essentially an extra. And Cat was just there to assistant direct the whole thing.
“I can deal with the hair,” said Jordan as Cat picked across her scalp, “but are we really going to wear dark makeup? Isn’t that supposed to be offensive or something?”
“Offensive?” said Sejal.
“I don’t mean offensive to have dark skin,” Jordan assured her, though it hadn’t occurred to Sejal to consider this until she was assured not to. “I mean, it’s blackface, right? I think people get really upset if you wear blackface.”