Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

  Chet holds out his hand. “We’ll be in touch,” he says.

  “Chet,” says Dr. Chasuble, shaking.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say.

  “And we’ll be in touch, too,” says Dr. Chasuble. “Hope you’ll join us during the Sad Festival of Vampires. Long reign Tch’muchgar.”

  “Long reign Tch’muchgar,” I agree hastily.

  “Hey, ditto,” says Chet the Celestial Being.

  We walk down the drive toward Chet’s car.

  Tom and Jerk are toppled in the back seat. Jerk has curled up awkwardly with his cheek on his knee, and there is drool on the denim.

  Without talking, Chet starts the car, puts it into drive, and heads back down the cracked road. We drive for a ways before we start to pass small bungalows in the woods, some of them with sagging aluminum toolsheds or car trailers for boats, resting on the pine needles.

  Chet seems mildly triumphant. “Very well done,” he says. “You cut it a bit fine there at the end. With the ‘you.’”

  “Now do you cure my vampirism?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course,” says Chet. “I’ll send someone around. I’m not authorized to do it myself. But I’ll arrange for an annulment of the curse. Do you know your social security number?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Hm,” he says, pondering as he taps on the steering wheel. “It may take a couple extra days then. But there will be someone, don’t worry.”

  “Have you figured out any more about how I got cursed?” I ask. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been bitten or anything.”

  “No, I haven’t. As to guesses? Difficult to say. It might have been years ago, and it’s just taking effect now because of puberty and hormonal changes, sort of like asthma or allergies. In any event, we’ll have you fixed up in a jiffy.”

  We approach the highway. And we are soaring along it, the wind whiffling in through the back window.

  We drive along, and I am half dazed by what I have seen. In my head I am picturing what I will be able to say to Rebecca during the Sad Festival of Vampires: We are standing by the reservoir, and the air of the summer’s night is as sweet as wine, and she’s saying, “Come on. Did you really enter Tch’muchgar’s world and set in place the seed of his destruction?”

  “Yes!” I say, laughing. “Didn’t I just say that?”

  “You did just say that, but also you were lying.”

  “I was not lying.”

  “Okay. You weren’t lying.”

  And her soft face is lit by the fireworks going off above, as the towering vampire Tch’muchgar explodes above the lake. There are vampire parts blowing up every which way, and he’s yodeling as he blows up and falls in sizzling chunks into the reservoir. People on the beaches lie together with their head in one another’s lap, or lean against one another, and when Tch’muchgar does a particularly colorful explosion, everyone says, “Oooh! Aaah!”

  And I turn to Rebecca and look at her smoky eyes and her careful lips, and I feel the warmth of her against me. We lie stretched out beneath the trees, looking up at the stars and the exploding Vampire Lord, and our thoughts are so content and similar that they rub up against each other like cats.

  I sit up. The car is idling, sitting on the dark lane near the water tower. Chet has undone his seatbelt and is twisted in his seat. His arms shoot backward, and his fingers are pressed against Tom’s and Jerk’s foreheads.

  “We’ll set them where they were. Erase their memories. Then you can rejoin them.”

  I look into the tangled woods. “What about that Thing that was stalking me? With the alien toupee?”

  “Don’t worry,” says Chet. “It can’t touch you. And anyway, it’s not in the woods anymore.”

  “Thank goodness,” I say.

  “It’s at your house.” He lifts his fingers off their foreheads. Jerk’s skin is so pasty the fingers have left red welts. “Okay, boys. Get out of the car and walk into the woods that way. Then why don’t you come to your senses. You’re looking for Christopher.”

  In a matter-of-fact kind of way, as if they were getting out to run into McDonald’s, Tom and Jerk open the doors and get out. They don’t speak, but they shake their limbs uncomfortably.

  “And take the damn dog.”

  Jerk reaches in and pulls at Bongo’s collar. Bongo is whining. It sounds like someone scrubbing a window.

  Together, they walk off into the woods.

  “What am I going to do?” I ask. “That Thing’s waiting for me!”

  Chet shakes his head. “It can’t touch you, because I have my mark on you. The Thing is just observing you. Trying to figure out what we’re up to. Are you going to get out, too? I think you’ll want to walk home with the others for company.”

  So I get out, too. I shut my door behind me.

  “Good night,” says Chet, leaning down to call through the window. “And good job. With saving the world, I mean. We’ll send someone around soon about the vampirism, and I’ll come by if I have the time.”

  Suddenly, I have a very suspicious feeling. Chet is waving and smiling. His smile is very fake.

  “Wait!” I say.

  But he is still waving, and the window is rolling up, and he pulls out onto the road and drives off.

  “Wait! Chet! I can’t sleep! Please! I can hardly eat!”

  I listen to the motor fade down the lane as the car rolls past broken stone walls.

  “Chet!”

  The lights of his car disappear.

  “Damn.”

  I walk into the woods.

  I cannot place where I am.

  Then I hear Tom and Jerk thrashing in the distance.

  I run toward them.

  They are standing in the woods, looking for the road with the flashlight.

  “Where were you?” says Tom, as I run up. He looks confused and a little frightened, as if he can’t remember something, but won’t admit it.

  “Over there,” I answer; but I don’t point anywhere.

  It takes us about half an hour to find our way home. Bongo has quieted down by now. He is exhausted. We go under the railroad bridge. We drop Jerk off at his house and tell him we’ll see him tomorrow. We hear him crooning to the dog as he goes inside that it’s feeding time for Bongo; that Bongo is a good boy.

  We walk back to Tom’s. I call my father for a ride.

  Who knows what is happening. Who knows whether Chet is on the level, and who knows whether I have just made an error and given Tch’muchgar some hideous tool for evil, and who knows when I shall be cured and be able to sleep again soundly.

  My father comes to get me.

  Now the classic rock station is playing hits from the seventies.

  My father doesn’t know the words, so he cannot sing along.

  Once the rains have stopped, the things that were dead start growing.

  The blossoms come out in the orchards. They are wrapped around the trees like great white smothering sheets. And there are streets where tree after tree is the bright unnatural pink of circus candy. You can almost hear madcap carousel music just looking at the pink trees drifting by the bus.

  The earth is giving birth to insects. At first, there are only a few mosquitoes. Then the swamp starts disgorging them as if spitting watermelon seeds. Little heat-seeking watermelon seeds, spat from between its gap-toothed grin. Flies bounce against the windows. Moths hit the screens at night. Ants are in our Life cereal, marching five by five and six by six, like in the song.

  Dead fish lap at the edges of the reservoir. I don’t understand their life cycle, but maybe they waited all winter to die, or maybe their flat corpses have been stacked under the ice all winter like TV dinners and just now floated to the top.

  I can’t believe Chet has abandoned me again. I am sure he will be back like he promised, but it would just make me feel better if I knew. I wish I could get in touch with him. Strange things are happening to my body. Things are twisting and poking in my mouth, and I have an orthodontist’s app
ointment coming up.

  The Thing with the One-Piece Hair appears and disappears without warning. Some days it is there, staring, following me to school, leaving no crushed footprints as it trudges across the grass. Sometimes I do not see it for days on end.

  At night sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I get up and go to the window. The Thing stands there, below, beneath the lamppost, on the spot where Jon Edwards broke his arm two years ago on a skateboard while saying the words, “I go as fast as spitfire!”

  When I am feeling all alone at two or three in the morning, sometimes I wave to the unmoving, unholy Thing. Hello, Mr. Thing with the One-Piece Hair!

  As Chet promised, it does nothing to harm me now. It does nothing but watch and wait.

  But still, I am wondering when it is going to make its move.

  I am almost more worried when I don’t see it there.

  Then it could be anywhere.

  Jerk is worried about me. I can see it in his eyes. He’s no longer just hurt when I ignore him and walk an alternate route so that I won’t have to speak to him. He thinks I wouldn’t do that normally.

  I hope I wouldn’t, but I feel so sleepy during the day — because I can’t sleep at night — that I don’t want to waste my energy. Of course, talking to Jerk is not a waste of energy, especially if you would like to hear an imitation of late night comedy show reruns, but I don’t see what there’s to gain from it.

  I do feel bad that Tom has abandoned him, too. Tom doesn’t have an excuse. I guess the three of us are just growing apart. Tom is hanging out more and more with the cooler crowd.

  It isn’t difficult to be a cooler crowd than Jerk. All you have to do is not sniff your own underarms at lunchtime.

  Without me, Tom just doesn’t want to be around Jerk anymore.

  Sometimes Jerk will see that Tom is talking to the other kids in that group he’s with, and Jerk will drift beside them. He’ll stand right there on the edge, behind everyone else, resting his hand nervously on one of the chair backs, and his eyes will flip from speaker to speaker, hoping one will say something he can add to. When they all start making jokes, he’ll make a quick one, too; he repeats his jokes four or five times, just to make sure everyone’s heard it. He punctuates them with “yeah!”; for example, “And then he falls and breaks his leg, yeah! Like, then he falls and breaks his leg, yeah! And then, like, he falls and breaks his leg.”

  They are polite people, so they don’t tell him to go away.

  I want to be one of them. They are good looking. They know secrets about one another’s dating lives. They laugh together in public spaces.

  Plus, Rebecca Schwartz is one of them. I wish Tom would draw me over to talk with her. He knows I have this crush on her.

  But Tom doesn’t want to be seen with me either. I still am sure he knows something, but the question is how much. He keeps saying that I haven’t been normal lately, that I’ve been completely weird. He says I need some sleep and that I’m always, like, a complete downer nowadays.

  He is right. Tom is right on these points.

  I am staring at my clock.

  It flashes. It says 3:52.

  3:52.

  3:52.

  That is no time to be awake. It is the rawest hour of the earthly day. There is no one to help you at 3:52. Many people don’t even exist at 3:52.

  A crow caws somewhere.

  My braces hurt. The ache is dull and continuous.

  I push back my covers. I’m getting too hot.

  I can’t sleep, and I’m so thirsty. I’m tired of those words, “I’m so thirsty.” They are dull, dull, dull. I don’t know what to do. That’s what I keep thinking. I don’t know whether to trust Chet. He could be a double agent. I don’t know what he’s doing if he is a double agent. I lie there wondering what he could be doing. Why would he ask me to place the Arm of Moriator, a device for the Forces of Light, in Tch’muchgar’s world if he is a servant of Darkness? Unless the Arm of Moriator is not what he said it was, and it is some dire magical engine with a dark purpose. Could be! I do not want to think about that. I writhe around in bed. I try not to think about it. Not to think about it at all.

  The space between my teeth and my cheeks is dry. I pull up saliva from under my tongue. It shoots back down the channels on either side of my jaw.

  My braces ache dully.

  The flaps on the inside of my cheeks are still dry. I suck up more saliva to wet them. It’s as sluggish as a putty shake.

  I am getting angry now. I sit up. The walls are too close around me. Somewhere there is a cool, wet, open expanse and I want to be there. I am irate at my saliva.

  I stand up. I walk over to my window and slide it open. I breathe in the night air.

  Hopeless. Thin as nothing.

  I want to pound on something and make it bleed for me. I want to tear into something. I want to tear away these walls.

  I need to go to the bathroom. There’s water there.

  The pain from my braces shoots through the bone of my jaw. My teeth are moving.

  I reach out for my door handle.

  Then I hold up my arm, close to my eyes.

  My pajama sleeve has been pressed into a slinkie of ringlets at the elbow. My forearm is bare before it.

  At the sight of my smooth white skin, fine as cream, I start to salivate. I trace the little blue veins from the wrist up to the plumper muscle.

  I lower my mouth. My open lips just nuzzle my forearm.

  The points of my canines touch the bare skin. My canines seem larger than usual. My saliva is thick.

  Helplessly, I pierce the skin; and helplessly, I start drawing and sucking as ferociously as I can, yanking blood up into my mouth. The pain jolts my elbow up and down, while I feel the blessed blood murmuring over my lips, my chin, down — in the most tantalizing trickle — my throat, a few drops, a spot, more; and I tear at my arm and slash downward with the teeth, rutting up little tracks of meat while the thick, sour tang of my own gore sweetly fills my mouth and cheeks, puffing them out. It hurts like the devil, and I’m moaning, lost in pain and wonder, but now I hack a little more at my arm with the same pleasure I’d peel a scab, so the pain is bigger, harder, cleaner, more burning, more scathing, more cleansing.

  Lost in pleasure and pain, I almost howl, slurping, licking, and my arm is red and slick and I chase every, every, every last drop.

  A half hour later, I am lying drowsily on the floor.

  My braces are just one big loopy tangle. My pajamas are twisted all around me. There are wide swaths of blood scraped across my striped arms and chest. The wounds in my left arm have clotted and started to heal. Very quickly, I notice. Unnaturally quickly. My fangs have slid back into my gums.

  I curl up like a kitten.

  For the first time in weeks I sleep, satiated.

  My teeth ground me for a week. My teeth are fine, but my braces were yanked completely off my canines. I told people it was a night-time skateboarding accident. My orthodontist says this is unlikely. He has taken the braces off entirely. My mother says she is grounding me for a week or until I tell her what really happened. She thinks I got in a fight with a gang.

  “Yes, Mom,” I say. “Luckily, I fended them off single-handedly.”

  She says, “You have got an attitude problem.”

  My orthodontist took her aside and spoke to her. That I know. I do not know what he said. She says it was serious.

  They are starting to suspect me, I can tell. Not of the right things — my father keeps leaning close to me to casually smell my breath — but they suspect me none the less.

  I want Chet to come back.

  I have a feeling he is not coming.

  The lawns are starting to smell syrupy sweet. In the next week or so, many of the blossoms on the trees change to leaves, however that works.

  The leaves are so fragile, an infant green, they look almost frightened when they first cluster at the joints and elbows of the trees in the yard.

  All I seem to see on
the news are stories about people killing inhumans. I’ve never noticed it so much before. There are still all the same stories about starvation, and fighting in the Middle East, and senators talking about the national debt — but now I notice more than I ever did before those other stories about the mobs, the lynchings, all over America.

  I see the deaths of vampires, as much as can be shown; and I watch the televised burning of witches. I see the chasing of warlocks through main streets in Iowa. And then there are the Abominations of Slanterville, a town in Florida that is found to be filled with worshippers of an alligator-god named Slundge. Federal agents were lowered in on bungee cords from helicopters and they captured the townspeople, who had bred with beasts of the swamp to produce squalling children with mongrel patches of scale and horn. The people of Slanterville, down to the rat-tailed babies, were sent to prison, and their town was burned in the night.

  “I don’t know why the Feds didn’t just kill those Abominations,” says my mother idly as she passes in front of the TV, feeding herself Cheetos. “It’s not like they could ever lead normal lives.”

  In prison, away from the swamps, the Abominations started to weaken and get sick. A fight broke out. I guess some human inmates claimed that the Abominations of Slanterville hogged the showers. The fight turned into a riot, and within fifteen minutes all the Abominations in the male ward had been beaten to death. The riot spread. More people were killed. In a prison riot, the first to die are the inhumans. The Abominations, the trolls, the changelings, the demon-possessed.

  I can’t believe I’m one of a hated race, too. It doesn’t matter that I’m a half-vampire and they’re Abominations. We are all hated. We are brethren in being hated. I watch the human inmates brandishing bloody instruments, waving them in triumph, and I can’t understand why they hate me so much. I have done nothing. It is like they are saying, “We’re coming for you next, boy. We know your zip code; we’re on our way. We’ll kill you all.”

  But then I think, I am not inhuman yet.

  I will not be a killer; I will not give them reason to hate me.