13
Vampirism can lead to a wealth of new and exciting career opportunities, including overnight-delivery driver, stunt person, and custom perfume blender.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
I may be the only person in history to have a telemarketing career lasting a total of three hours. Apparently, vampire powers do not translate to phone sales.
I’d reviewed the promotional material on Greenfield Studios. Despite its claims that the company brought quality family photography to the people without the high overhead or “high-pressure sales tactics” of in-store studios, I was just as uncomfortable with the prospect of shilling for them. But I’d filled out an application and given my word. And if my Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage had blessed me with anything, it was a profound guilt-based work ethic.
Since I wasn’t going to be seen by the public, I abstained from my gal Friday look and wore jeans and my lucky blue sweater. (“Lucky” in that it was my one sweater that had never been stained.) Now sporting a lemon-yellow track suit, Sandy met me at the front entrance and led me through the lobby to a shiny pine door. It was a lot like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, only instead of a magical room where everything is made of chocolate, I got a backroom filled with headset-wearing chain-smokers. The clamor of desperately pleasant conversation was deafening. The room was as dingy and chaotic as the lobby had been spotless. Green contest entry slips exploded out from in-boxes in each cubicle. Poster-size performance charts were layered on top of each other on the wall, listing who’d made sales that night and who hadn’t. The stained floor was littered with old entry slips, crumbs, and cigarette butts. And casting an evil eye over it all was a banner that read in huge red letters, “If you don’t sell, you go home.”
Inspiring.
“Greenfield Studios is a national operation with call centers across the country,” Sandy chirped. “Half-Moon Hollow is our latest branch to open. Our field representatives pass out these entry slips at community events, school fairs, fundraisers. And if people are interested, they fill out their personal information. The slip clearly states that even if they don’t win the cruise, we reserve the right to contact them for future promotions.” Sandy handed me a neon green slip that screamed, “Win a cruise for two to the Bahamas from Greenfield Studios!” where some poor sap named Aaron Miller had traded his phone number and an evening’s worth of peace for a shot at a vacation.
“Each shift, you receive seventy five slips. You call the numbers, remind the customers that they willingly gave us their entry information, and let them know that our traveling studio is coming to their hometown.”
“Traveling studio?” I said, my heart sinking just a degree further.
“Yes, our photographers travel to mid-price hotels, where they set up a portrait studio in a conference room or suite and take family pictures by appointment. Your job is to arrange the appointments and persuade the customer to preorder one of these.” Sandy rifled through a pile of papers on a nearby desk and found what looked like a normal wall clock until she turned it so that I saw the face. Some poor family with stiff, uncomfortable smiles was frozen in time there, forever pinned beneath a minute hand that seemed to be sprouting from the mother’s chest like a grotesquely ornate spear.
“Wow.” At least I knew what the exciting new product was: the scariest freaking clock I had ever seen.
“It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” Sandy sighed. “Every year, the company comes up with a new promotional item. Last year, it was throw pillows with the family photo silk-screened on. This year, it’s kitchen clocks.
“You’re paid minimum wage plus a two-dollar commission per appointment booked. You book an average of three appointments in an hour, or you will be sent home. If less than fifty percent of your bookings follow through with their appointments, your commission will be reduced. You pay for use of your headset, phone line, and office supplies.”
My head spun as I realized the level of sleaziness I’d let myself slip to. Eyes closed, I said, “Let me get this straight. My job is to call these people at home, remind them of a contest entry they made months before, not to inform them that they’ve won but that I’m now using that information to try to talk them into bringing their family to a motel room to have their picture taken by a total stranger? In a temporary studio that will disappear in a few days?”
“And push the clocks,” Sandy reminded me. “We like to call them a ‘memory that will last through time.’”
“Is there an actual cruise?” I asked, holding up a contest entry slip.
“Yes, the CEO takes one every year,” Sandy said with a conspiratorial wink.
I looked around the room at the sadly desperate women, shuffling through their entry slips, joylessly logging their bookings on the progress charts. Each had a pleasant, cheerful voice and a face that looked like ten miles of bad road. And they all seemed to be wearing track suits in varying stages of shabbiness. Any time between calls was spent bent over their cubicles in a racking cough. Their endless streams of smoke had already stained the walls a lovely shade of nicotine gray. And if I wasn’t mistaken, one of them appeared to be taking a sponge bath in the ladies’ room with the door open.
What had I gotten myself into? In terms of looking back at how your life went horribly awry, it was possible that accepting this job was worse than stumbling into vampirism.
Waving at the tendrils of smoke curling around my head, I cast a sidelong glance at the little plaque on the wall that declared the office a “smoke-free workplace.” Sandy laughed and threaded an arm companionably through mine. “I know, it’s not really all that legal to let them smoke inside like this, but they just couldn’t work without a smoke every once in a while. And the breaks would kill our productivity. So, we just let them enjoy a nice cigarette while they work. It saves so much time, and everybody’s happy.”
“What about the nonsmokers?”
She smiled. “You know, everybody who has come to work here eventually started smoking, so it’s never come up.”
Well, there was something to look forward to. At least I knew I couldn’t get lung cancer.
Sandy led me to an empty cubicle. The ladies on either side of me never broke their stride in their pitches to acknowledge my presence. Sandy didn’t make any effort to introduce me, and I assumed that was intentional. Sandy strapped a freshly disinfected headset over my ears and handed me the script, a tip sheet titled “Never Take ‘No’ for an Answer: How to Battle Common Excuses” and a green slip containing the name and phone number of Susan Greer of Portland, Oregon. “Shouldn’t I get some sort of training before I start making calls?”
“Oh, there’s no better training than jumping right in,” she said. “And you’re a quick study, I can tell. Just take a few seconds to go over your script, and dial the number.”
I stared at the script long enough to realize that the words weren’t making any sense in my head. No matter how long I sat there reading this thing, I would never be able to translate it into a tempting sales pitch. With Sandy sitting at my side listening to every word, I dialed the number and prayed that Susan Greer wasn’t home. No such luck.
“Hello!” I shouted into the receiver when a female voice answered. “Is Susan Greer available?”
“This is Susan Greer,” the woman said, a weary note of suspicion creeping into her voice.
“My name is Jane, 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—”
“Not interested,” Susan grumbled, and hung up.
I shot a guilty look at Sandy. “It happens all the time,” she assured me. “Just try again.”
This time, I dialed Jamie Hurley of Portland, who was not much more receptive than Susan Greer. “Did you really interrupt my dinner to call me about this?” she demanded.
I closed my eyes and tried to pick back up on a spot in the script I remembered. “Our records show that you have indicated an interest in—”
“How did you even get my number, anyway? I’m supposed to be on a no-call list!”
When I stopped reading the script, I had time to process exactly how small and guilty I felt calling this poor woman. I scanned the excuses list for “How did you get my number?”
“Oh, um, well, you entered a contest to win a Caribbean crui—”
“I don’t have time for this,” she fumed. “I can’t believe you harass people at home like this. How do you live with yourself? How do losers like you even get jobs? If you call me again, I’m going to file harassment charges!”
At the sound of the phone slamming in my ear, I turned to Sandy, my jaw slack. She patted my hand. “All right, honey, that wasn’t a great call, but you get those sometimes. And it takes everyone a few calls to develop a rhythm. When someone is rude, the best thing to do is to take a deep breath and make another call.”
So I made another call, and another. I was hung up on, had an air horn blown directly into my ear, and was called a bitch in three languages. Every time I dialed a number, I prayed the phone would ring unanswered. After four hours, when Chester Zimmerman of Piedmont, North Dakota, told me to commit unspeakable acts upon my own person with a cheese grater, I turned to Sandy, defeated.
“I don’t think I’m comfortable with this.”
“And they can tell, honey,” Sandy said, patting my hand again. “You just need to relax your voice and speak in a more natural, confident tone.”
I reached for my headset and realized I would rather attempt strangling myself with the phone cord than dial another number. “I just don’t think this is going to work for me.”
Sandy smiled, despite the tension pulling at the corners of her mouth. “Well, we have other sales divisions you can try.”
“I don’t—”
“Oh, come on, Jane, nobody likes a quitter! I want to find a place for you here.” She pulled me out of my seat and motioned for me to follow her to another door, where we found another smoke-filled cubicle farm. “Greenfield Studios is just one sales arm of Greenfield Enterprises. Our sales force also sells Revita-Water, the new miracle cure that ‘they’ don’t want you know about. Revita-Water’s scientifically calibrated balance of electrolytes and nutrients, plus a selection of health supplements and ephedra-free diet aids, will prevent almost any illness, from cancer to fibromyalgia to Lyme disease. But the main benefit is this amazing product’s ability to reverse vampirism! Studies show that people who drink Revita-Water as part of their daily health regimen will not turn if they’re bitten. Just between you and me, police departments and emergency services are buying Revita-Water in huge batches for protection when the vampires finally launch their antihuman campaign. It practically sells itself.”
I stared at her. Apparently, Sandy had not yet noticed that I’d left the life-status box blank on my application. But now I knew where the company policy stood on vampires. “Beg pardon?”
“All right, so it doesn’t actually cure vampirism,” Sandy whispered. “But there’s nothing to prove that it won’t help people get healthy enough to outrun the filthy bastards. You know, I never thought, at my age, I’d have to worry about being attacked by vicious, bloodsucking monsters in my own home, but that’s the state of the world today. People are looking for protection, for assurance. And Greenfield Enterprises is here to fill that need.”
Sandy wasn’t saying anything in the way of antivampire ranting that I hadn’t heard before. Heck, my grandmother had said worse over Christmas dinner. But I’d never heard it as a vampire, and I found it hurt more than I thought it would. Being in such a small, crowded room, I’d been keeping my mind “clenched,” for lack of a better word, to keep the other women’s thoughts from bouncing around in my skull. But I imagined a little window in her head sliding open and was given a psychic slapping for my efforts. The fears and worries of every sad-eyed woman in the room came pouring into my head from all sides. Unpaid bills, cars with shoddy brakes, kids suspended from school, husbands who wouldn’t get off the couch and earn a paycheck, the soul-sucking drudgery of having to show up for this job every night and not having any other choice.
I shook the buzzing sensation out of my head and concentrated on Sandy. She may have hated vampires with a frantic and paranoid passion, but she sure liked me. She saw me doing well at Greenfield Enterprises. In fact, she saw me wearing the headset with pride, becoming a star employee, moving up in the ranks, and taking over the damned office so someone named Rico would finally let her retire. She had no idea I was a vampire; in fact, the thought never occurred to her.
I’d never been part of any minority before, unless you counted those who thought Timothy Dalton made a decent James Bond, and I didn’t particularly like people assuming that they could make rude comments about said minority because they thought I was “safe.” It was humiliating, and, worse, it really pissed me off.
“Or if you prefer something more tropical,” Sandy said, reaching toward a door labeled Greenfield Coastal Time Share Sales.
“Sandy, I’m going to have to stop you right there,” I said. “I am not going to be a good fit here. I’m sorry to have taken up your time. This has been a very enlightening experience. Please don’t call me, ever.”
“But we need a girl like you, Jane. You have the voice. With some practice, you could clear one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars a night,” she said. “We have girls quit without notice all the time because they can’t stand the work or they just decide they don’t want to come in that night. Someone like you isn’t going to do that. You’re one of those nice, responsible girls. You’re going to show up on time and ready to work. You won’t call ten minutes before your shift and tell me you can’t come in because you’ve been arrested. And you won’t try to live in your van out in the parking lot. You’ll serve as a good example to the other girls.”
“So, you need me to class up the joint?” I asked, my eyebrow arched. “That’s new.”
“Exactly.” Sandy sighed.
“Thanks, but I’m still going to say no,” I said, hustling toward the nearest fire exit. “After all, working here might interfere with my participation in the antihuman campaign.”
Sandy stared at me in bewilderment, so I flashed my fangs, rolled my eyes, and stalked out of the building. The words “bloodsucking monsters” and “filthy bastards” rang in my skull, and my cheeks burned as I stomped back to Big Bertha. I swore that if I found blood on her, I was going to go back to River Oaks, pack up, and move to Tibet.
I had one of those out-of-body automatic driving experiences, where I put the keys in the ignition, and the next thing I knew, I was turning Big Bertha around the corner to Gabriel’s road. I pulled into his driveway, climbed the stairs, and stared at the house. My hand froze in midair as I started to knock on his door.
This was nothing new. I’d been to Gabriel’s house before. Of course, I’d behaved like a screaming harridan when I was there before…and here I was, coming to his door with problems again.
I chewed my lip and considered running back to my car. Then again, Gabriel was always going on about his responsibility in leading me through my vampire growing pains. Oh, let’s be honest, I was there to get a few sympathy kisses and maybe an elder-vampire platitude or two. Something like “It’s always darkest before the dawn…and we never really see that, so why worry?” Before I could knock, the door swung open, and Gabriel was there.
“Jane!” Gabriel exclaimed with a grin that faltered at the sight of my expression. “What’s wrong?”
I tilted my head and have him a long, appraising look. “I know this is a long shot, but did you ever read a book called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?”
“No, but the title does lend itself to inference.” Gabriel nodded.
“Well, whatever you’re inferring, add cigarette smoke and desperation.”
“That explains the smell,” he said, sniffing my hair. “Where have you been?”
“Working.”
“You found a job? That’s—”
“As a telemarketer.”
He made the “ouch” face. “Oh.”
“For a company that sold, among other sleazy and dubious products, a vitamin tonic they claimed would reverse vampirism.”
Gabriel scoffed. “Well, that’s ridiculous. No one’s ever been able to accomplish that.”
“Not the point.”
“Sorry.”
“I agreed to sell this crap. Well, actually, I agreed to try to ensnare innocent families into booking appointments in questionable locations with complete strangers wielding cameras. But I was just terrible at it, because the customers could apparently smell my fear through the phone and just hung up on me, or they told me to drop dead, and we both know that horse is already out of the barn. It was hell, OK? I took a job in the stinkiest pit of minimum-wage hell.”
Gabriel gave me a blank look. “Why didn’t you ask more questions about the job before you took it?”
“I was just tired of not working. I wanted a job. Any job. Anything to make me feel useful and productive…and not doomed to move back in with my parents.”
“Jane, if it’s a question of money, I could—”
I touched a finger to his lips. “Don’t. Don’t make an offer that will change our relationship. I appreciate the thought, but I’m not comfortable when you blur that daddy/boyfriend line.”
“The offer, which you wouldn’t let me make, still stands.”
“Thank you. Anyway, when I could not lure people into these said appointments, my new boss told me all about the other stuff I could sell, including this antivampire snake oil. And then she told me that vampires are filthy, vicious creatures who are going to overthrow the human government in some bloody coup we’ve been planning for years.”
“I take it she didn’t know you were a vampire?” he said as I shook my head.
“Not only was I subjected to the general abuse that telemarketers receive—and, I now realize, deserve just the tiniest bit—but I got treated to my very first hate speech.”
“Oh, you’ll hear much worse over the years,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pressing me to his side. “I once had a drunk in a tavern tell me a delightful joke about two vampires, a priest, and a—”
“I don’t need to hear it,” I assured him. “Also, I’m pretty sure this is one of those stories that ends in ‘and then I ate him.’”
Gabriel shrugged but didn’t deny it. I laughed.
“You’re laughing. That’s always a good thing. Of course, you’re laughing at me, but I’m getting used to that,” he said.
I leaned my forehead against his. “You really need to.”
Gabriel pulled me onto his lap like a child woken by a nightmare. “Humans fear what they don’t understand. And I don’t believe that they will ever truly understand us. You will come across the stupid, the ignorant, the misinformed.”
“And I’m related to most of them,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.
“You will meet these people. And they will insult you. They may try to hurt you. You managed to escape the situation without lashing out or hurting anyone, despite your anger. You did escape without hurting anyone, right?”
“Yes,” I grumbled. “I may have made a rude gesture or two behind a closed door, though.”
“See? You left with your dignity intact, which is far better than I would have done at your age. I’m proud of you. Try not to take the things humans do so personally, Jane. You have to take the good with the bad.”
“And enjoy snacking on the bad?”
“Sometimes, yes.” He chuckled, playing with the buttons of my sweater. “Can I offer you the use of my shower?”
I rolled my eyes at him. “That is the most abrupt pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
Gabriel’s lips twisted into a half-smile, half-grimace that somehow communicated that he wasn’t just being playful and bantery.
“The smoke smell is that bad?” I cried. “I was only there for a few hours!”
“It is pungent,” he admitted. “But my nose is much more sensitive than the average man’s. And to make up for this insult, I will take you upstairs and wash you from head to toe.”
“Will there be bubbles?” I asked.
“Bubbles can be arranged.” He nodded solemnly, parting the buttons to toy with the Chinese finger trap that was my front-enclosure bra.
Gabriel peeled away my sweater. I was enjoying the novelty of being both topless and outdoors when an expression of revulsion skittered across his features. I looked down, checking my torso for any sort of disfiguring scars or moles I may have missed in the last two decades. “What?”
“It’s actually worse now,” he said, his nose wrinkling.
I choked out a shocked laugh. “Nice!”
“I can work around it,” he promised quickly, realizing he’d hurt my feelings. “I don’t need to breathe.”
“Thank you for your commitment to the task at hand.”
Gabriel went back to work with a determined air, stroking my skin as he pressed kisses along my throat. I tipped my head back. My bones seemed to become liquid as he rubbed slow circles over my spine. I looked down and saw him hesitating as he pressed his lips to my skin, as if the contact would sting. He was forcing himself to continue his path from my throat to my collarbone.
“You really shouldn’t have to try this hard,” I told him, pushing his hair back from his face. “But it’s very sweet.”
“I’m sorry. It seems to have taken up residence in your pores,” Gabriel said kindly.
“This is not the night to do this. Stinky is definitely not the note I want to start out on,” I said, sniffing my once-lucky-now-destined-for-burning sweater. “I’m going home and bathing in tomato juice. It worked when Fitz used a skunk as a chew toy last summer.”
“Stay a few moments,” he said, stroking my knees as I slipped the sweater back on. “I think I can tolerate your aromatic presence a while longer.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered. He kissed me softly, tracing the line of my mouth with his tongue before withdrawing and doing his best to hide his instinct to recoil.
“It was a valiant attempt,” I told him.
“It’s rather like licking an ashtray,” he said apologetically. “You don’t breathe. How did you get that much second-hand smoke in your mouth?”
“I talked constantly for four hours.”
“Tell me again why this job didn’t suit you?” he asked, making an undignified uhhff sound when I poked his stomach. “I’m sorry you had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Still, knowing you, you’ll turn it into some sort of learning experience.”
“Yes, I’ve learned I’m going to be a lot nicer to telemarketers from now on.” I sniffed as I snuggled into his chest.
“See? There’s a silver lining after all.”
We sat in silence and listened to frogs chirping on his front lawn. Gabriel was slowly but surely leaning his head away from me. After a minute or so, his face was as far away from me as his neck would allow.
“All right, all right,” I grumbled, getting to my feet. “I’ll go home and shower.”
“I’m sorry,” he assured me as he followed me to my car. “Otherwise, I find you irresistible.”
I glared at him halfheartedly as he leaned in for a kiss. Thinking twice when he was hit with my aura of nicotine, he reached out and shook my hand. I laughed.
“You’re laughing. That’s always a good sign,” he said again as I climbed into Big Bertha.
I kept laughing until I stopped at the end of Gabriel’s road. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a girl with a glint in her eye and a goofy grin on her face.
“Oh, Jane. You’ve got it baaaad.”