“I can…hide you in our shed,” said Jay.
Doug sighed like a tin whistle. “Okay…but I need a lift. I don’t think I can ride a bike like this.”
They walked to Jay’s car—a long walk, now that Doug was roughly the size and build of E.T. He imagined himself riding home in the front basket of his own bike.
Jay loaded Doug’s bike into the trunk and helped him into the backseat, where he could lie down. And as they drove he felt unexpectedly childlike, lying in the back of the car at night, listening to the road hum through the seat, someone there to take care of him.
He’d known Jay forever. They hadn’t gone to the same elementary school (Jay had been homeschooled) but had met through Jay’s mother, a noted doctor of the hair and scalp. Dr. Rouse had chosen her specialization mostly out of frustration from dealing with her own son’s uncombable hair syndrome. To this day if you google “uncombable hair syndrome” you can easily find a photo of Jay from a scientific article written by his mother, his eyes masked by a scandalous black rectangle.
As a toddler he’d had pale, shimmery dandelion hair that could not be combed down nor back nor parted or tamed in any way. Like a spray of fiber optics. Like something that should be plugged in at Christmas. This and a naturally inquisitive temperament had given him the appearance of always being startled.
At the age of six Doug had taken part in a study conducted by Dr. Rouse to investigate a new head lice treatment. He had even been persuaded to have his picture taken for a series of informational posters (caption: Sleep tight. Don’t let the head bugs bite) that hung in hospitals and clinics. These posters now fetched upward of fifty dollars on eBay. A hundred if they were signed. Doug didn’t really understand it, but that didn’t stop him from selling signed posters.
Jay and Doug had met in Dr. Rouse’s office, and once Doug’s lice had cleared up, the boys fell into an easy routine of play in the common areas and empty clinical spaces. They hid in cupboards and wore rubber gloves everywhere. They made spaceships and Podracers out of stethoscopes and vaginal specula.
Doug’s eyes welled up just thinking about it.
“Jay…” he said, “I…really appreciate all you…I’d have been screwed these last few weeks without you. You’re a good friend. I know I’m not, sometimes.”
“What did you say?” Jay called over his shoulder. “I can barely understand you.”
“Nothing.”
9
SOUND BITES
“HELLO?”
“Mr. Lee? This is Jay.”
“Oh, hi, Jay. Is Doug with you? He hasn’t come home yet.”
“He’s here. We wanted to know if he could spend the night at my house.”
“Tomorrow’s the first day of school, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s okay, though. He can ride in with me. He has his book bag.”
“Why didn’t he call me himself?”
“He said you’d say no. We want to play D&D.”
“One last hurrah, then it’s back to the coal mines, is that right?”
“Um…right.”
“Well, I suppose. Don’t stay up too late slaying elves!”
“…Okay. Thanks. Good-bye.”
“Bye, now.”
10
CONFLUENCE
THE NEXT MORNING, Sejal followed Cat to the high school office. She’d taken half a Niravam with her orange juice and her surprisingly bacon-oriented American breakfast and was feeling okay.
“Hope we have some classes together,” Cat told Sejal. “Probably not, though. You’re way smarter than me.”
“That is not true.”
“It is. Plus you speak three languages and you’re Indian and you don’t use as many contractions as I do. That alone’ll get you into AP everything.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Cat. “I can always rely on my breathtaking hotness, right? See you at lunch.”
“By the tree, na?”
“By the tree.”
Sejal entered the office and stepped up to a wide counter. Beyond this were a pair of desks, one of which was occupied by a middle-aged woman as blond and toothy as an ear of corn. Sejal waited to be acknowledged. After a while this didn’t seem to be working, so she cleared her throat.
“Hello,” said Sejal. “This is my first day.”
The woman didn’t look up from her computer. “This is a lot of people’s first day, hon. Take a seat.”
Sejal blinked and looked around her at the otherwise empty office. She sat down in an unfriendly chair next to a fake plant.
There were no sounds, save the faint clicks of a mouse and the constant sigh of an unseen air conditioner. Each click sent a little tickle up her spine. She willed herself to be at peace. She tried to quiet her mind. In moments like these she once would have been texting or talking or checking her email. Now, more often than not, she found herself filling the void by twiddling her thumbs. Honest-to-gods thumb twiddling, but it helped.
Her heart and soul were off someplace, hopping from one computer to the next. They were riding the rails like hoboes.
On a wall behind the counter a framed poster said POSITIVITY, beneath a photo of a blizzard-battered penguin cradling an egg on its feet. Below the frame was a cartoon cat who hated Mondays. Sejal rather thought the two posters canceled each other out and searched for a third to break the tie.
The office door opened and a boy entered. He was gathering up a rain poncho as if he’d just been holding it over his head, though a glimpse of the sky outside confirmed that it was just as sunny and cloudless as it had been a few minutes ago. The boy stood at the counter and waited.
The blond woman rose and said to the boy, “Now then. It’s your first day?”
“What? No, I’m just late. I need a late pass.”
“It is my first day,” said Sejal, standing.
“Oh my dear!” the woman said to her. “You’re our foreign exchange student, aren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think it made a difference,” Sejal explained, though clearly it had already caused this woman to double the volume of her voice.
“Say-jall…Gangooly?” the woman ventured, reading Sejal’s name from a file. “From India?”
“Yes. Kolkata.”
“It says here ‘Calcutta.’”
“It is the same thing.”
“And this is an Indian dress you’re wearing? It’s very exotic.”
The boy was frowning at it. “It’s from Dark Matter,” he said. “In the mall.”
The corn woman’s entire demeanor went stale as she turned to the boy.
“Name?”
“Um, Doug. Douglas Lee.”
“Reason for being tardy?”
“It…took me longer to get ready this morning than usual.”
The woman sniffed. “That’s no excuse. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a Tardy.”
“Right. Hey,” said Doug, pointing at Sejal’s file, “that says she’s in the same Pre-Cal class as me first period. I can show her the way.”
Pre-Calculus was held in one of the temporary buildings ringing the parking lot, and Doug felt the sun crackling on his skin as he escorted Sejal. It could have felt worse, though—he had recently fed—and there was no way he was going to duck and cover around the one girl in school who hadn’t already decided he was a loser.
“I hate that word,” said Doug. “‘Tardy.’ Don’t you?”
“I had never heard it before a minute ago,” said Sejal.
“Oh. Well, school’s the only place you’ll ever hear it. It just means ‘late.’ And they invented it because they really needed a special word for kids that means ‘late’ but also sounds like ‘retard.’”
Sejal laughed. The sound of it rang Doug like a bell.
“So…” he said, “when did you get here? To America?”
“A week ago.”
“You like it?”
“I like it. Everyone
has been…very nice.”
“Yeah, well…high school’s just starting. Give it a few days.”
A brittle silence passed.
“So,” said Sejal. “You are interested in fashion?”
“What?”
“You knew from where my dress had come. The boys back home would never—”
“Well…you know, I think guys can be interested in that kind of thing without being…you know,” Doug said in what he hoped would be taken for a confidently masculine voice. He only recognized the dress because he’d spent several summer afternoons at Dark Matter attempting to meet a nice girl with a vampire fetish.
They stopped outside the classroom door. The walk had been too short. And now Sejal was already frowning at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sejal. “Your face…you look like you’ve had a lot of sun, no?”
“Oh. Yeah. I spent a lot of the summer at the beach. You know.”
“I didn’t notice it in the office.”
“Also…” said Doug, “also I caught some sort of sun allergy. My skin’s really sensitive.”
Sensitive, thought Doug. May as well ask her to braid my hair.
“Oh. I was going to ask you where you eat lunch,” said Sejal, “but you wouldn’t want to eat outside, then, by the tree.”
She was inside the classroom door before he could answer.
11
FIRST ISSUE
“I DON’T WANT TO eat lunch by the tree,” said Jay to Doug as they walked from math class to Spanish. “All the drama kids eat there. The popular ones.”
“Well, so what?” said Doug. “You were in the musical, right? You played that waiter character—What was his name?”
“Waiter.”
“See?”
Specifically, the kids who ate by the tree were the ones who got good parts in the plays. Lead actors, plus maybe an assistant director or two. Less popular were the kids who got small parts and nonspeaking roles, but at least they were still members of the cast. Doug was crew. Crew were like the friends you called only when you needed help moving furniture.
Doug always tried out for a part in each production, and so far he’d always failed to get one. He often thought about how his life would change if he landed a lead role, but on some level he understood what everyone in Masque & Dagger understood: you weren’t popular because you’d played a lead role, you got lead roles because you were popular. Or, rather, your popularity and your distinguished high school drama career both stemmed from some effortless charisma that shone from your face and spilled from your lips—a shower of quarters when you opened your mouth, a trail of flowers and corpses in your wake.
Doug was just as nervous about lunch as Jay. More so, perhaps, as he assumed he was more highly regarded and therefore had more to lose. At least the rest of his classes were indoors, so he expected his skin to clear up by lunch.
“I should have brought a baseball cap from home,” he said. “I was in such a rush.”
“You were hard to wake up,” said Jay.
“I only got like an hour of sleep! My body won’t let me sleep at night anymore. I maybe nodded off around six thirty.”
Jay had woken him at 7:30, and then again at 8:00. At some point, while he dozed, Doug had changed back to normal. Then he had had only thirty minutes to bike home, watch Mom and Dad pull out of the driveway, sneak into the empty house, shower, and change. In the foggy bathroom mirror he glanced quickly at himself to be sure. Pale. Hairless chest. The impression of being clammy even when he wasn’t clammy. Normal, or what passed for normal now.
The kids in Spanish class were broken up into groups of two and three, and Doug and Jay took up their usual spot near a poster from the Spanish board of tourism. Mr. Gonzales wandered around the room.
“She seems really nice,” said Doug. And short enough. And kind of pretty. “I just need a chance to talk to her more. Maybe she could be, you know, the one.”
“Would you turn her into a vampire?” asked Jay.
“I don’t know. If she wanted. I don’t even really know how to do that.”
“The vampiress drained all your blood, right?”
Doug nodded slowly at the tourism poster, an unfinished cathedral in Barcelona with facades like two rows of sharp teeth.
“I think so,” he said.
July in the Poconos, near Hickory Run. Alternating sun and clouds, rain every few days. Biting insects, mosquitoes that swarm your ankles and arms like you’re passing out little supermarket samples of blood. New Product! A hundred discrete marks on your skin.
You were out late again, alone, watching the spiders tick-tack across that field of boulders between the trees. You had to feel your way back to the family cabin through the fireflies and the moonless night.
The vampire came at you then, milk white. Naked. Howling through the trees. Wounded, open chested, it oozed its red center. The spill collected in tangled crotch hair and traced ligatures down pale legs.
The vampire pressed down on you. There was no beguilement, no charm or enchantment. You were held fast by the hair as the vampire tore you open and siphoned off your life. Your blood mingled. It wasn’t romantic.
The vampire made a wrenching noise and folded in on itself. Now small, it flapped thin wings and disappeared into the trees.
You were left too weak to stand. Your lungs fluttered in your chest and you were desperately thirsty. Your death was like a slow fall into a deep well.
When you stirred again, it startled two coyotes that were sniffing at your carcass. The vampire’s blood laced your empty veins; tensed their red, spindly fingers; and closed you up like a fist over the closest animal. It thrashed, but you drank it dry and rose unsteadily, needing more. Still night. A hundred yards distant you could tell (without any trouble at all) that the second coyote had paused to look back. You chased it for an hour and fell upon it in a copse of trees.
When your mind found its place again, you collapsed and dry heaved into a creek and washed the stains from your skin. There were no wounds on your body, save a long, dry welt on your neck. But your clothes were covered in blood. You buried them.
“Bienvenido al supermercado,” Jay was saying. Doug just stared at him for a dim moment, dumbfounded by this talking animal and his Spanish classroom exercise.
Oh, it was Jay.
“This would…this would all be a lot easier if I was just an asshole,” Doug said. “I could just find someone and hold them still and feed. I wouldn’t even have to kill them. I could just take a pint or two, like I do with the cows. I wish I could be sure that wouldn’t turn them into vampires, too.”
Jay pushed aside his textbook. “There’s gotta be a way,” he said. “Look.”
He produced his calculator from his backpack.
“Say you drink from someone once a week. Is that about right?”
“Yeah,” said Doug.
“So if your first victim becomes a vampire, then in a week there are two vampires who need to feed. You and him.”
“Me and her,” Doug stressed.
“And then in two weeks there’s four vampires, and in three weeks eight, and on and on. So guess how many weeks it takes before everyone on Earth is a vampire.”
“I dunno.” Doug sighed. “Ten.”
Jay frowned. “You don’t think that. You just guessed low so my answer won’t sound amazing.”
“So what is it already?”
“It’s, like, thirty-four. Thirty-three and a half.”
“That’s really amazing.”
“Anyway,” said Jay, sounding deflated, “it means there must be a way to just feed, like we thought. Maybe even a way to feed so the victim forgets, like some kind of vampire hypnosis, or else there’d be news reports of vampire attacks all the time.”
“I don’t like that idea,” said Doug. “Hypnosis. It’d be like slipping something in her drink.”
“Well, what if the person…gave you permission?”
Doug covered his face. “We’ve been through this. I appreciate the offer, but it just seems…gay. I’d rather drink a little cow here and there and try to meet some girl who’s into it. Like this new girl. She’s pretty goth for an Indian.”
“I’m not saying I want you to do it,” said Jay. “It’s just…hard to see you hurting so much. You could just drink a little of my blood, just to see—”
“Uh-uh,” said Mr. Gonzales as he loomed suddenly over their desks. “No inglés. En español, por favor.”
Jay glanced in the teacher’s direction, then stared at his hands. “Um…Podría usted…beber un poco de mi…sangre? Es correcto? Sangre?”
“Sangre es ‘blood,’”
“Sí,” said Jay. Doug pretended to read his book. Mr. Gonzales coughed.
“You’re supposed to be pretending to buy pineapples,” he said.
12
PACK LUNCH
SEJAL CARRIED her lunch through the center aisle of the crowded cafeteria like a bride, aware of the careless stares of other students, the brush of their eyes on her skin—the designs that they left there, some pretty, some not. For the second time that day a boy asked in a loud stage whisper as she passed if Sejal had ever read the Kama Sutra. Maybe the same boy.
“Dude, I think she heard you!” said another. Laughter all around.
That’s what I get, she thought. It hadn’t been necessary to walk among them all like that. She could have skirted around the side, but she’d made the effort to be visible, to be an actual actor in the actual world. As if, as the new girl, she really needed to give them an excuse to stare.
She dipped her head, let her hair fall in front of her face.
She had to remind herself of one of the points her psychoanalyst was always trying to drive home: that the internet was less inviting, that it was even more critical. Her conspicuous stroll through the cafeteria of the internet would have started a flame war. Each nasty comment would burn like a match against her skin. How could she miss the warmth of all those matches?