12
Trying to blend groups of friends from the living and undead worlds can be difficult. It’s better if social events involving both the living and the nonliving do not center around food. Some more comfortable themes include poker games, bowling nights, and historical reenactments.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
From the outside, Greenfield Studios looked like a respectable family photography business in one of the newer buildings of the Hollow’s riverfront business district. I didn’t know anyone who’d had their pictures done there, but the company had only set up shop a few months before, and it was difficult to get Hollow residents out of the Sears Christmas-card-photos habit.
I’d parked Big Bertha almost two blocks away and around a corner, trying to give myself some “pep talk and walk” time. If I’d needed to breathe, I probably would have been hyperventilating with my head against the steering wheel. I hadn’t been on a job interview since just after college. And if the head of the library board hadn’t been one of my favorite high-school English teachers, Mrs. Stubblefield probably would have launched me out of the room with some sort of spring-loaded chair.
I reread the want ad. Greenfield was advertising for an appointment secretary with a pleasant phone voice, good communication skills, and a “people-pleasing personality.” Having two out of three wasn’t bad.
One. One out of three wasn’t bad.
This was the first ad I’d come across that actually sounded somewhat appealing. I could handle an office job. I could handle pleasing people, to a certain extent, as long as it didn’t inconvenience me too much. It seemed sort of odd for a photography studio to be open all night, but the supervisor, Sandy, who was supposed to interview me said clients made their photo appointments after they got home from work.
I climbed out of Big Bertha and straightened what I hoped was an appropriately secretarial outfit—a red cardigan and a black pencil skirt that Andrea had helped me pick out. I had also accepted her ridiculously high black heels with the ankle straps because she said they made me look sophisticated yet sensible. On the walk to the office, I felt well dressed yet nauseated.
I rang the bell outside the brick front entrance and nervously fingered the manila envelope that contained my résumé. Sandy turned out to be a tiny, birdlike woman in her sixties. She reeked of Virginia Slims and had a voice like scraping the bottom of a whiskey barrel, but she looked like the poster woman for clean senior living, with fluffed curls of pure white and a face that was carefully made up. She was wearing a rose-colored track suit, a white golf visor, and a rhinestone pin shaped like a kitten at her shoulder.
“Come in, come in!” she said, smiling as she led me to an all-beige reception area. The lobby was clean, newly painted, and quiet as a church. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
Sandy gestured for me to sit, and I handed her my résumé. She crossed her leg primly as she sat in the overstuffed armchair to my left. She looked over my qualifications while I filled out the surprisingly scant job application. Greenfield Studios didn’t seem to want to know much about me beyond my name and social security number. However, one of the boxes asked for my “life status,” and I was supposed to check whether I was living or undead. While it was illegal to ask an applicant about race, age, or marital status, it was still perfectly legal to ask whether he or she was a vampire. Congressional lobbyists fighting against undead rights claimed it was a public-safety issue, saying that employers had the right to protect their workplaces from “dangerous predators.” I left the space blank and hoped Sandy wouldn’t notice until after I’d gauged the office’s general attitude toward vampires.
I handed her the application, and she smiled brightly. “Well, it seems that you are more than qualified. You have a solid employment history, which is always nice to see in someone your age. Could you do me a favor, honey, and read this out loud for me?”
Sandy handed me a badly copied sheet of paper with several paragraphs in all caps:
HELLO, MY NAME IS (BLANK), AND I’M CALLING THIS EVENING ON BEHALF OF GREENFIELD STUDIOS. OUR RECORDS SHOW THAT YOU HAVE INDICATED AN INTEREST IN HAVING YOUR FAMILY PORTRAIT TAKEN WITH GREENFIELD. I’M CALLING TO HELP YOU SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT AND TO TELL YOU ABOUT AN EXCITING NEW PRODUCT—
“That’s very nice,” she said, pulling the script from my hand. “So, when would you like to start?”
This seemed rather quick. Why wasn’t she asking me more questions? Why wasn’t she asking me to tell her about myself? Why was my potential supervisor wearing a track suit? And why exactly did the script appear to have me calling people at home to schedule appointments instead of the other way around? And what was the exciting new product?
“Um, the ad said you were looking for a receptionist?”
“An appointment secretary,” she said, nodding. “You would call people who have willingly and legally given us their contact information and book appointments for them to have their family portraits taken.”
Why were the words “willingly” and “legally” necessary? Wait a minute. Pleasant phone voice, good communication skills, and people-pleasing personality? This was not secretarial work, this was telemarketing.
“I don’t think this is going to work for me,” I said, hesitantly rising to my feet.
“Oh, honey, please, just give it a try!” she cried. “You’ve got the voice. And you’re well educated, articulate. People who are lonely, just waiting by the phone hoping someone will call, they’ll love talking to someone like you. You could make a lot of money doing this.”
OK, we were talking about telemarketing, not phone sex. Right?
“But I’ve never done telemarketing before,” I said, clutching my purse like a lifeline and taking a step toward the door.
“Oh, we don’t like to use that word around here. We prefer telecommunications-based sales.”
“And the difference is…”
Sandy ignored my question. “You said you needed a night job, and you won’t find many nice, safe sales jobs with hours available this late. We call the West Coast until eight P.M. Pacific time. You’ll get on-the-job training. And you won’t find a sweeter group of girls to work with. We’re just a big, happy family here.”
I chewed my lip and cast a longing glance at the reception desk, which I now noticed was brand new and looked as if it had never been touched. I could not afford to be proud or picky. I had bills to pay and a dog who expected to be fed occasionally. Besides, they probably weren’t going to ask me to do anything grosser than scraping chewing gum off the bottom of tables or degunking a grease trap, both of which I’d done regularly while working at the Dairy Freeze in my teens. Hell, I was the one who ran for the “vomit dust” whenever a kid got sick at the library. Nothing could be worse than that. Right now, something was better than nothing. And this was something.
“When can I start?”
As I rounded the corner, I couldn’t help but think I’d just made a rather large mistake. I was not a salesperson. I was definitely not a telecommunications-based salesperson. But I’d already given Sandy my social security number, and I think that’s the point of no return in terms of employment etiquette. Sandy had even given me an information packet on Greenfield Studios and how the company was bringing affordable family memories to you. I was supposed to review the materials before Friday, my first night on the job.
As I turned toward the block where Big Bertha was parked, the breeze carried the scent of blood. I looked around for an injured person, some source of the smell. But the scent was old, the blood long cold and dead.
The closer I walked to the car, the stronger the smell. I could make out splashes of red across the hood. I jogged closer to see that some ambitious soul had scrawled “BLOODSUCKING WHORE” in huge, dripping, bloody letters across Big Bertha’s paint.
“What the hell?” I gaped. “What—”
I slid my fingers through the crook of the U. The blood smeared sticky and cold across my fingers. It was animal blood, something gamey, deer blood. Cringing, I swiped my fingers across my skirt, too shocked to worry about the stains it would leave. I scanned the street for any sign of the vandal. There might as well have been tumbleweeds blowing across the asphalt.
Shock gave way to fear, fear to anger, then anger to shame. And when I realized that I was actually tearing up because someone wrote mean things about me on my car, I rolled right back to anger again. This was a nasty girl trick. This was high school stuff. My hands were shaking so badly it took several passes to try to pull my keys from my pocket.
And now I was driving around town in a car declaring that I was a bloodsucking whore. No one would notice that. I slumped low behind the wheel and drove on as many side streets as I could. Fortunately, there were very few people who needed to wash slanderous graffiti off their cars after ten P.M., so I had the Auto Spa all to myself.
As the remnants swirled red around the drain of the car-wash bay, I pondered the list of people who might have victimized Big Bertha. Unless Sandy had some sort of senior-citizen ninja skills, I doubted she’d be able to beat me back to my car, bloody it, and then get out of sight before I got there. Could it have been a friend of Walter’s? A human who guessed my secret and was determined to out me whether I liked it or not?
The more I thought about it, the more pissed off I got. I was a grown woman, a vampire. People weren’t supposed to be able to pull crap like this on me. By the time I turned the newly bathed Bertha onto my driveway, I’d gripped the steering wheel so tightly I’d warped it. Big Bertha now aimed slightly to the right no matter how I steered.
That was kind of an improvement.
I couldn’t burn Walter’s festering grab bag of personal effects. It seemed mean and petty, especially when you considered his fiery end. I decided to give the box to Dick. He was the only person I knew who had some sort of history with Walter and the only person I could think of who could unload so many Knight Rider DVDs.
I made absolutely no effort to look nice. Plain white T-shirt, fat jeans, no makeup. I was planning to go to one of Zeb’s FFOTU meetings afterward, so I wanted to stand out as little as possible, anyway.
I knocked tentatively on the door, half hoping he wouldn’t be home. I wasn’t in the mood for dirty charades. The door swung open, and out stepped a familiar, barely dressed blonde.
“Missy! Wow, you’re mostly naked,” I exclaimed.
“Hi, shug!” she said cheerfully. You’d think that someone with a “public sales persona” like Missy would be embarrassed to be caught in a position like this. But she soldiered through the situation as if she weren’t just wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a smile.
“Hi. So, I guess the other night on the phone, when you mentioned you knew Dick, you meant that you knew Dick. Wow. Awkward.”
“Jane?” Dick came up behind Missy, barefoot and buttoning ragged Levi’s. He looked mildly embarrassed but not embarrassed enough to go put on a shirt. I just stared, unsure of what to say or where to look.
“Hi,” I said, settling for a long glance at the pull-tab wind chime dangling from Dick’s porch light. I intentionally hoisted a mental brick wall between my brain/ senses and whatever was going on in Dick’s and Missy’s heads. I did not need those visuals haunting me for the rest of my immortal life.
“What brings you over, Jane?” Missy cooed, smooching Dick’s neck. “Do I have competition for my sweet Dickie?”
“No!” I said, too emphatically. Dick was too occupied by Missy’s full-on oral assault to look offended.
I tried to hand the box over, but Missy wound herself around Dick like a strangling vine. A strangling vine with a butt you could bounce a quarter off. “I just wanted to drop this off for you. It’s Walter’s stuff—”
“Oh, honey, I heard about that awful mess,” Missy said, pulling herself away from nipping Dick’s Adam’s apple. “You just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
Pulling her tongue out of Dick’s ear would have been a nice start.
“Don’t you have a meeting to go to, baby?” he asked, untangling himself.
“Why, yes, the Undead Realtors Association is meeting tonight. I’m the chapter president,” Missy told me. She laughed, tweaking Dick’s nipple. “Wait, are you trying to get rid of me so you can get to your next appointment? You’d better watch yourself, Jane, we may have a little catfight over my Dickie.”
Missy laughed and disappeared into the trailer. Dick caught my apparently horrified expression and said, “She’s just messing with you. We’re not dating or anything. It’s not even what you would call a relationship. We’re just…” He looked away, avoiding eye contact. “You know, sometimes you just need a lukewarm body.”
“And there’s the Dick I know and…barely tolerate,” I said, as Missy opened the door. She was wearing another slick pink dress suit and fluffing her blond curls back into their “Junior League gone slightly slutty” style.
“Well, I’m off, shug,” she said, then leaned in for another tongue bath. She winked at me. “Jane, don’t forget. Monday. Mojitos at my place. You promised you’d try. Y’all be good now.”
Did I use the word “promise”?
“I should be going, too,” I said, as Missy slid into her sporty little car. “I hope you find some use for that stuff.”
He smiled, opening the door to show me his rumpled fold-out couch. “You know, you could stick around—”
“Again, I’m going to have to ask you not to finish that sentence.”
“What’s the matter, Stretch? We could have a lot of fun, you and me.” Dick leaned in far too close and made preliminary moves to kiss me. I leaned out of it until I was bent back at a spine-breaking angle. Spicy man treat though he may be, Dick was not boyfriend material. He was just barely respectable acquaintance material.
“Dick,” I said, “I’m really flattered, but I’m not going to let you use me to piss off Gabriel.”
“But I do want you. I want to hear you whisper, pant, scream my name. I want to know what kind of panties an out-of-work librarian wears,” he said, grinning lazily. “Pissing off Gabriel would be an added side bonus.”
I laughed, hoping it would cover up the involuntary shivers Dick was giving me. I hadn’t lived a sheltered life where attractive men didn’t say that sort of thing to me, but I hadn’t had sex in three years. Do the math. “You two have no idea how alike you are. Dick, I like you. But don’t make me choose between being friends with you and doing whatever the hell I’m doing with Gabriel. My choice wouldn’t make you happy.”
Instead of taking my rejection at face value, Dick smirked. “You like me?”
“You’re mildly amusing and remotely charming, when you’re not giving me the full-on Pat O’Brien routine.” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Plus, you’re one of the few people who actually tell me what they’re thinking, even when I don’t want to know. I appreciate that.”
“And you want to be friends?” he asked, scratching his head. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been friends with someone with breasts, particularly breasts like yours. Can I still make inappropriate remarks about you and your person?”
Suddenly self-conscious, I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t think I could stop you if I tried.”
The Friends and Family of the Undead met at the Traveler’s Bowl, a restaurant featuring healthy cuisine. It was known locally as “that place where they sell hippie food.” Zeb said the FFOTU meetings were the only thing keeping the restaurant going, besides the “glass sculptures” they sold at the gift shop. (I hadn’t spent a lot of time in head shops, but I recognized a bong when I saw one.)
I bought a large mineral water and some hummus, even though I wouldn’t be able to eat it. Most chick-pea consumption is based on misplaced politeness. But I wanted to do my part for the proprietors, a nice-looking artsy couple who had sunk their life savings into overestimating Half-Moon Hollow’s palate. It was hard to get local residents to eat anything involving wheatgrass, sprouts, or lentils. If you mashed all those things together into balls and deep-fried them, you might have something going.
The FFOTU, which, given the surroundings, I kept calling TOFU, consisted of twenty or so people of all races, ages, and socioeconomic classes. They were individuals who never would have spoken in “real life” but seemed to share a strong bond within the walls of the Traveler’s Bowl. There was Carol, a cook at the Coffee Spot, whose brother, Junior, had been turned by an angry ex-girlfriend. The family had no idea what had happened until Junior flipped out in the middle of a Sunday dinner and tried to bite their uncle. Daisy’s banker husband turned in the midst of a midlife crisis. Instead of buying a sports car and nailing his receptionist to avoid thinking about death, Daisy’s husband chose to stop the aging the process altogether. Daisy was pretty angry at first, but now she was confused about whether she should let him turn her, too. She felt pressured to make a decision soon, as she aged a little every day, but he was forever forty-seven. George’s daughter was turned on a bad date, and now she refused to speak to anyone in the family. He couldn’t understand why she just cut off contact with them. He and his wife were left mourning someone they still occasionally saw at Wal-Mart.
Each of them hurt. Each of them offered understanding and sympathy to the other members. Each tried to keep a sense of humor. Carol pointed out that had she been thinking clearly, she would have aimed her brother’s fangs at her aunt Cecile, whom no one liked.
Every meeting started with the Pledge, a collection of five truths the group promised to remember:
“I will remember that a newly turned vampire is the same person with new needs.
“I will remember that a loved one’s being turned into a vampire does not reflect on me.
“I will remember to offer my vampire loved ones acceptance and love, while maintaining healthy boundaries.
“I will remember that vampirism is not contagious unless blood is exchanged.
“I will remember that I am not alone.”
Seeing my vampirism from my parents’ or even from Zeb’s perspective was sobering. A loved one had died, but there was no funeral, no chance to grieve, no chance to adjust to their complete change in lifestyle. Plus, there was the embarrassment of telling friends and family that your son/sister/friend had become “infected” with vampirism. And worrying that the new vampire would go all evil and hurt you, as in the case of Carol’s brother. It all convinced me that I was not ready to come out to my parents yet, if for nothing else than to spare them those feelings as long as possible.
Fine, it was a rationalization, but that didn’t make it any less binding.
I didn’t know if anyone in the group could tell I was a vampire. No one asked, which I found refreshing. I was the only one in the room that night, but Zeb said they had a few local vamps who attended off and on. Based on the group’s commitment to confidentiality, he refused to tell me who they were.
After discussing changes in vampire legislation, the members traded stories and tips. For instance, I learned about a company in Colorado that made SPF 500 window tinting for cars, allowing vampires to drive in full sunlight. Carol announced that she’d come up with several recipes to help make vampires feel more welcome at family meals. Even as a vampire, I had to say that Plasma Pop Jell-O Molds sounded gross. Eventually, the group broke up to socialize, which was obviously their favorite part of the meeting.
With Zeb distracted by a funny story from Carol involving her brother, a silver platter, and a confused pawn broker, Zeb’s new girlfriend bounded up to me and almost knocked me flat. Jolene was just as I had pictured her in my visions, gorgeous in an exotic way that added up to strike one against me liking her. A perfectly oval face with high cheekbones and a lush pink mouth that tilted at the corners. Extremely long, even white teeth that glinted in the low light of the restaurant. Wild curls that shifted from auburn to fiery red to strawberry blond depending on how she tilted her magnificent head. Longlidded emerald eyes fringed with sable lashes. There was something not quite right, a fierceness to the features that unsettled as much as it staggered. I imagined that males of any species would be willing to overlook that.
I consoled myself with the fact that the nasal backwoods twang that fell from those bee-stung lips strangled dead any sort of Tomb Raider fantasies Zeb might harbor. The twang was the second thing I noticed, after the weird body odor. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, just an organic punch to the system, like fresh-cut grass and apple skins. Maybe beautiful people smelled different from most?
“It’s so nice to meet you!” she squealed. She swiped at my shirt, which was now covered in crumbs from the bran muffin she’d been eating. “Zeb’s told me all about you! We’re so glad you could join us.”
“Well, Zeb said the group has been really helpful, and everyone seems so nice,” I said. “He said you’ve been coming here for a while?”
She shrugged those smooth, tanned shoulders. “Well, my best friend since high school was turned a few years back. It took her a year to come out to me. I felt like an idiot for not seeing the signs. It was hard. My family…well, they just don’t trust vampires. Never have. And it took me a while to adjust to her being undead. I’m havin’ to overcome a lot of built-in prejudice.”
“Good for you, though, for trying,” I said. “So, do you and your friend still hang out?”
Jolene’s lip trembled. Her eyes flashed, an electric glow under the green. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but they were too involved in their kale rolls. “No. Tessie—that was her name, Tessie—um, she got dusted about six months ago. Her family said it was an accident. But she was always so careful. She wouldn’t have gone out so early, with the sun still up. I miss her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, squeezing her arm.
She tilted her head and smiled. “Well, the group’s been really sweet with me. I’m sort of dealin’ with a whole ’nother round of grief. My family doesn’t really understand what I’m going through.”
“I’m glad,” I said, meaning it. I hated to think of how Zeb would feel if I’d died and he had no one to turn to for support.
“Good!” She nuzzled and kissed my cheek and bounded away to snatch some of Daisy’s pita crisps. Seriously, the woman never stopped eating. She’d gone through an entire one-pound bag of peanut butter M&M’s during the meeting and was now trying to sweet-talk a kale roll out of George. The burly trucker was happy to hand over the high-fiber treat.
Zeb wrapped an arm around me. “What do you think?”
“She’s gorgeous,” I assured him. “Charming. Very affectionate. But, um, did she just quit smoking or something?”
“No, why?” he asked.
“Well, she hasn’t stopped eating the whole time we’ve been here. And she’s not exactly a stocky gal.”
“OK, you have to promise that you’re not going to freak out,” Zeb said, pulling me away from the rest of the group.
“You’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’m going to now, but go ahead.”
“The thing is that…well, Jolene’s a werewolf,” Zeb said, his voice lowered.
“Oh, ha ha, Zeb. Halloween’s not for a few more weeks.” I laughed, mugging spookily. “Ooh, Jolene’s a werewolf. You brought me to a vampire-support-group meeting to introduce me to a werewolf. I guess that explains the long teeth and the flashing green eyes and the nuzzling…Oh, crap, you’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yep.” Zeb nodded. “Her whole family is made up of hereditary werewolves. It’s not a curse or anything. She was born like this. I was sort of surprised you didn’t guess, to be honest. I thought you creatures of the night could sense each other or something.”
“How would I possibly guess werewolf? Swimsuit model, maybe. But it makes sense. If vampires are real, then I guess werewolves, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the rest of the Universal horror-movie standards must be real, too. Wait, does that mean she already knows I’m a vampire?” I whispered.
Jolene came up behind me, tapping my back and making me jump. “Zeb told me on our first date.”
It took me a few seconds to register the different emotions I was experiencing: hurt, a little betrayal, the sting of being excluded. I finally landed on the ability to produce sarcasm, which was far more useful.
“Well, thanks for telling me,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’ve faked eating hummus all night for nothing!”
Jolene squeezed my shoulder. Ouch. She had some very strong hands. “I wasn’t lying when I said my family is antivampire. But it’s because they’re werewolves, not rednecks. Actually, they’re a little bit of both.
“I came to the FFOTU meetings to try to get a better grip on how to deal with Tessie’s being a vampire. I wanted to stay friends with her, and I knew my family, my clan, wouldn’t be happy about it. And after she died, the group members were the only people I knew who were nice about it, who could understand why I was so upset. So I kept comin’ because I wanted to help other people who were going through the same thing.”
“And then I met Zeb, and—I’m in love with your friend,” Jolene blurted out. “I know y’all have been close forever, and I want us to get along. I really do.”
“OK,” I said, at a loss to drum up any other response.
“You’re not upset?” Zeb asked, sounding suspicious.
“Why would I be upset?” I asked. “I mean, I haven’t had much time to process the information, but it’s not as if Jolene can help being what she is, any more than I can help being a vampire. In fact, you were born this way, right? You had even less of a choice than I did. It would be hypocritical of me to go all crazy just because my friend is dating a—”
“Werewolf,” Jolene said for me.
“Right.” Of course, that probably wouldn’t keep me from going all crazy later, but I had to give myself some credit for being able to string that many words together through the shock.
“I’m so glad you feel that way!” Jolene squealed, throwing her arms around me. “We’re going to be really good friends, I can just tell.”
As Jolene gave me a neck-cracking hug, I narrowed my eyes at Zeb, who smiled and shrugged. Great. My best friend was dating a werewolf, who also happened to be a hugger.