Thirsty

by M. T. Anderson

I pass Paul. He has waylaid Tony, blathering, “Hey, Tony, Tony, I was thinking. I brought my camcorder. It’s out the car. I was thinking, like, I could —”

  “Yeah, great, man,” says Tony.

  “No, Tony, I could bring it in and we could make a movie. You know, it would be fun, we’d preserve this party for future generations unseen? Do some crazy video stuff?”

  “Yeah, whatever, guy,” says Tony. “My house is your house.” He turns and calls, “Chester boy! I see you standin’ there, but I don’t see you guzzlin’!”

  I look around and spot Tom standing on the other side of the room, talking with some other people from the cooler crowd in our class. One of them is Rebecca.

  I work my way through the crowd.

  “Hi, Chris,” Chuck, Andy, Kristen, and Rebecca say when I join them. We’re all a couple years younger and more timid than everyone else at the party, so I’m on their level for a few minutes. Tom sees that they’ve said hello to me, then he says hi, too, as if we’re just meeting up.

  “Great party,” says Chuck. “That girl Lolli, who’s dancing with Jenny Morturo, she says she knows you.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You know her?” Tom asks, somewhat in awe. She bucks her shiny pelvis; her tan legs kick.

  “Yes,” I repeat.

  “From where?” says Andy.

  “Around,” I say.

  Jerk has come up and stood next to us, peering at Tom and Kristen and Andy as if he were one of their crowd, but he is too shy to say hello. Rebecca says hi to him anyway — “Hi, Jerk” — which I think is nice. She gives him a quick smile.

  So we’re standing there.

  Time is running out. I feel anxious to begin, to talk to Lolli, to get on the road, to find the abandoned church again. Maybe two hours and forty five minutes left until midnight, and the final part of the Spell of Binding is cast. Rebecca first, though. She has to know. I have to tell her.

  “Rebecca?” I say. Feeling weak, I look deep into her feet. “I was wondering, I mean . . . Could . . . ?”

  Everyone waits. Tom is raising his eyebrows.

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” says Chuck. “Looks like you’ve got yourself an admirer!” he says to Rebecca.

  Andy and Chuck laugh. Tom doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to laugh or not.

  I say, “You can —” And then I feel Lolli’s soft arms wrap up around my shoulders from behind, like she’s about to do the Heimlich maneuver.

  “Hi there, Chris,” she says. “Saw you from over there and thought you might like to step upstairs for a little talk.”

  Chuck and Andy back off a step. They are blinking. Chuck whispers, “Shit . . .” Jealously.

  Rebecca is obviously disgusted. She’s looking at Kristen.

  I say, “Lolli, you. I mean, I need to talk to you, too, but first I want to talk, I mean, really talk — I’d just asked Rebecca if . . . Oh, have you met?”

  Rebecca smiles wanly. “No, you go upstairs,” she says damningly. “I’m sure we can talk some other time.”

  “Come on,” Lolli demands, pulling on my arm. “The night’s still young.”

  And I’m being pulled away through the crowd, the others staring after me, Jerk with his mouth actually open, Tom shaking his head in disbelief.

  “That was . . . ,” I start to say angrily. But I’m supposed to be convincing Lolli to take me back to the convocation of vampires. So I shut up and climb the stairs between slumped, beer-stinky figures.

  Bat is sitting at the top of the stairs, grinning a lazy grin and playing with a light-up yo-yo.

  “Heya, sucker,” says Lolli. “How’s the thing?”

  “’T’sup, suckers,” says Bat. “It’s a good thing. Good time. Good party. I’m getting a little parched. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  Lolli leads me by the hand down the hall, as if we were going to our bridal bed. The hall is low and badly lit and reeks of pot smoke. There’s a line of girls outside the bathroom. After we go past them, I can hear them saying, disgusted, “Wasn’t that Christopher what’s-his-name? From, like, the freshman class or something?”

  Now, I think, is the time to be evil. Now is wickedness time. I must agree to worship the Dark god Tch’muchgar, and Lolli must not suspect anything. Once again, I am struck — the cosmic damage I may have caused dropping the Arm into Tch’muchgar’s world — for who knows what Chet has in mind. Undo what you have done, that is what I’m thinking. Undo what you have done.

  Everything hangs on this.

  We step into what must be Kathy’s bedroom and Lolli shuts the door behind us.

  Because Kathy has been away at college, her room still has all the artifacts of girlhood in it, and some of the artifacts of womanhood. Plush bears and birds and moose are piled in a big googly-eyed Peaceable Kingdom on the bed, and awkward drawings of horses are pinned to the walls. Some bras hang on the closet door handle. There’s a lot of lavender around.

  “I’m, like, so glad you are coming,” says Lolli, hugging me quickly.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “We don’t have long until they start the spells out on the lake and in the White Hen Pantry.”

  “Chris, this is, like, so great! We were so worried you were gonna ditch!”

  “Lolli, I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  “Okay! Let’s go!”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Outta here, boy!”

  “Let us,” I say with some conviction, “burn some rubber.”

  “First thing. Right, just one thing.” She taps me naggingly on the shoulder. “You got to make a kill, brute.”

  I back one step toward the door. I can’t think. “We don’t have time,” I say.

  “No, man. You want to be part of the game, you have to be blooded.”

  “Blooded?”

  “The blood from your first kill. Like, smeared on your cheeks.” She raises her hand, and caresses first one of my cheeks, then the other, looking, the whole time, into my eyes. I look helplessly at her tan neck and the seamless way it fans out into her chest and breasts beneath the straps of her tank top. “You have to drink,” she says.

  “Oh?”

  “Chet said. He said we couldn’t trust you ’til you made your first kill. Chow time.”

  “Chet?”

  “Chet. You know, Chet. Like, Mr. bad-ass-cool agent of Hell.”

  I am aware that this confirms my worst suspicions.

  “We have to kill someone now?”

  “Ding ding, soup’s on.” She snaps her fingers and sways her slim hips.

  “You and Bat will help me? And . . . what’s-her-name you came with? Asheleighe?”

  Lolli looks at me for a moment impatiently. She is trying to decide whether I am worth the effort. She explains, “No. No, we will not be, like, aided and abetted by Hors d’oeuvre Asheleighe. We have imported Hors d’oeuvre Asheleighe specially from Pepperell, Mass., to be your victimo supremo. I made friends with her like a week ago. We shipped her in so she won’t be traced. Jenny Whatsit hardly knows us and won’t think to look when we hit the road.”

  She waits for me to reply. I am looking at her, but fidgeting with the belt loops on my jeans. I hike them up, then down. Up, then down. Panic. Quickly through my head flit squabbles — Better to kill one girl and save a world? Greatest good for the greatest number of people? — but there’s no way. Teeth in her neck. Snapping of tendons. No way I can kill. Have to think of some way around — I fiddle with my belt loops, look at Lolli, and say, “Ah . . .”

  Lolli Chasuble is getting a little angry with me. “Hello, Chris? Your problem is? Are you in or what?”

  I bite my upper lip with my lower teeth. My belt loops have not lost their interest. Up, then down. Up, then down.

  “Christ, we don’t have time for this.” She runs her hand nervously through her hair with a crackle of dried mousse. “You’re gonna have to kill sometime, dude-o’-mine. Might as well be r
ight now, tonight.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? Don’t know? Like, way to be the most annoying person on earth. Do you know the . . . Never mind! What do I have to say? Omigod! Live a little! You gonna stand there playing with your belt loops?”

  “Lolli, I’m just having —”

  “Shut up. Okay, look. You’re not like getting it through your thick head that people are killers, too — they kill to save themselves just like yours truly. Think of that? That’s what they do. That’s what we do. No difference between us. And you’re not like getting it through your thick head that it isn’t a goddamn choice for you. You’re going to be dead in a few weeks if you don’t suck some major gore and quick.” She steps forward, her hand on my arm, and her chest grazes mine. Her face is so close. So hard. “So don’t waste my time, Chris. Let us all in on the secret. You gonna come out of the coffin? What’s it going to be?”

  “There must be —”

  “Stop arguing!”

  “I am not going to kill anyone!” I yelp. “Anyone I know! Forget it!”

  “What are you up to? You’re buying time.” She’s menacing. “You have a plan, don’t you?”

  “I wasn’t . . .”

  “You lie like shit. What do you think you’re doing? Damn, man, you are . . . !”

  “I have a respect for human life and —”

  “Yeah? Go, girl! They don’t have any respect for yours!”

  “So you think I should just give up and throw in my whole life just so —”

  “I think you’re up shit’s creek, is what I think!”

  “— so I can go and dine with the damned!”

  She glares at me. Her lips pull back and reveal her fangs. “Not ‘damned,’” she hisses. “Just trying to live.” And with that she moves swiftly past me to the door. She opens it. “Bat!” she calls.

  I am used to having things happen to me, instead of me doing things. Now I realize that it is high time for me to do something quickly. Something escape-like. I have screwed up. She’s looking angry, murderous, leaning out the door, her arm spread across it to bar my way. I crouch and fling myself into the hall. Bat is thumping down the hall toward me, bellowing like a Viking. “Let’s PARTEEEEEE! PARTEEEEE! OWWOWOWOW!”

  Then he sees me.

  “What’s the —?” he asks.

  She’s pointing at me and shouting, “Dickless here isn’t going to —”

  But I’m running low, trying to pass him.

  He jabs his arm in my side. I slam against the wall and fall into a squat, but even then, I’m jumping forward toward the stairs.

  I have to get into a large crowd. They can’t risk a large crowd. He grabs at my shoe, but I’m slithering down the stairs like a snake, on my belly. Beer pools stain the carpet. Girls are screaming and standing up as I fall past them.

  “. . . so goddamn drunk!” one sneers.

  And I’m in the thick of the party at the bottom of the stairs, and Bat in his muddy Keds is clomping down toward me with the look of an animal in his face.

  My brother has gotten out his video camera and is trying to capture the essence of the party for future generations and anthropologists; big Pete Gallagher is growling, “Let me borrow it! Just one sec! Let me borrow it!”

  “Come back here, weeeeee-zull!” I hear Bat yell.

  “Let me borrow it!” says big Pete Gallagher and he yanks at it.

  “Stop!” says Paul. “You’re gonna screw up the picture!”

  “Let me borrow it!”

  “Okay, already. Here. Careful,” says Paul. “The button on the side —”

  “This?”

  “No, look. No, don’t do that one! God! No, you’ve got to push . . .”

  Bat is shoving his way through the crowd toward me. Pete swings the camera around the room, saying, “Smile, man! Say ‘Cheese!’”

  Two of Pete’s friends flex their muscles and say, “Cheese! Cheese, Petey-boy!”

  “Careful!” says Paul, tagging along at Pete’s side. “That’s, like, an expensive piece of —”

  “I’m careful! Be cool! I’m being careful!” says Pete, and he roars to Nicki Brown, “Bark! Bark like a dog! Up close and personal!” and he sticks the lens in her face and she’s so drunk she barks like a dog.

  Bat is pointing at me and only me from across the crowd.

  He mouths the word “Die.”

  “Hey, care-careful!” says Paul again.

  And I’m working my way toward the door.

  “And the lovely Miss Lolli!” says Pete. “There’s the lovely Miss Lolli! New aquaintance and playgirl of the month! Time for an up close and personal!”

  “Careful!” says Paul. “I paid for that thing!”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Lolli’s just entered the room and they’re clearing a way for her, and she’s covering her face with her hand and saying, “Don’t take pictures of me with that thing! I said: Don’t take my picture!”

  Pete has it in her face and now Bat has one eye on me but he’s working his way toward her instead, yelling, “She said she doesn’t like her goddamn picture taken! That means,” he says, grabbing Pete’s shoulder, “she doesn’t like her goddamn picture taken!”

  “Pete, please,” mewls Paul. “That’s —”

  “This is my assistant, Paul,” Pete explains to Bat, zeroing in on Lolli’s chest. “Paul likes doing films of slugs. We’re making footage for science.” Everyone is laughing at my brother.

  Paul still is hovering around the camcorder and Bat suddenly grabs it from Pete and yells at the top of his lungs, “I’M GONNA BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF YOU IF YOU KEEP TAKIN’ PICTURES OF THAT GIRL!”

  I dart out of the room — Pete’s friends screaming, “Who the hell are you?” and Lolli screeching, “Get that thing out of my face!” and Paul whining, “Please, just give me the camera!” and Pete and Bat, they’re both hollering at the top of their lungs, hardly words, just sounds.

  And I’m out through the den, where an unwatched television shows Pretty Woman, and I’m through the kitchen, tripping in the dark, and suddenly I see there’s someone in there, against the sink —

  And by the light of the moon through the window, I see Hors d’oeuvre Asheleighe, her shirt open, and Trunk McIntyre is feeding on her neck.

  For a moment, I’m transfixed in horror. Then, “Run!” I scream hoarsely. “Run!”

  Trunk and Asheleighe recoil in surprise; Trunk spins around. “Shit!” he exclaims. “You watching? You little shit!”

  And as I slam open the kitchen door and push my way through the crowd in the dining room I can hear her saying, “God, that kid is, like, can you say schitzoid?”

  And the dining room leads to the front door. I can hear them in the living room —

  “I said get it out of my face and I meant get it out of my face!”

  “What’s the problem? You jealous?”

  “Hey, please give me my —”

  “Damn!”

  “Watch — !”

  And I’m out the front door and into the night.

  It’s after ten, and I’ve blown it. I’ve blown my cover. I don’t know how I’ll find the conclave of vampires now, or how I would get there if I found it. The conclave is miles away. The town’s spells of binding will be interrupted in less than two hours.

  I am wandering around the fairground, full of the knowledge that I have endangered the world, and my body is sliding into a murderous thirst, and I can do nothing to stop either thing.

  And worse than that, I am being sought. They want my blood, one way or another. I turn around often as I skulk from tent to tent, and I make sure that Bat and Lolli aren’t slinking up behind me through the ranks of half-shirts and flip-flops.

  On the loudspeaker, we are coming to the goat part of the evening. The mayor is talking about it. “Let’s prepare the elements. Can, uh, can everyone at the other sites hear me?”

  “Yes, Ed.”

  “Sure, Ed. We’re reading you
loud and clear.”

  “Thanks. First we’ll, uh, prepare the goats. Out on the boat, we have Sal Garozzi, butcher at the Purity Supreme in Bradley. Sal has kindly offered, once again, to do the honors. You there, Sal?”

  “I am, Ed.”

  “How’s it looking, Sal?”

  Sal considers for a minute. “Well, it’s looking pretty nice out tonight. There’s a moon. Oh, you mean the lake? The lake is calm.”

  I can’t see the lake from here because of the trees, but I can see the three radio towers, their lights winking regularly like breaths softly hissed into the night.

  That is when I spy Rebecca. She is walking with Tom and Kristen toward the tilt-a-whirl. Jerk bobs along behind them. I can see Rebecca laugh deep and long.

  Above them all, there is the monotonous sound of the butcher, the mayor, and the town selectmen sacrificing a goat to cosmic forces. They say, “We cry out to you that the Dark may be bound. We cry out to you, O, shining sentinels, for strength in the night.

  “And now we shall bind the foe, by your grace. And now with the blood of this living creature, and with these malleable spirits, we follow the silver cord into Darkness,” the voice calls out.

  I feel lighter just looking at her. Rebecca, who told me she would talk to me. Rebecca, who knows spells.

  Suddenly, the screaming of the goat starts.

  “Get the goat. Get that damn goat!” someone out on the lake yells over the loudspeaker.

  It screams again.

  People stop what they’re doing — stop licking their ice creams, passing their tokens, playing their games. They look up.

  There’s a silence. Kristen has covered her ears.

  There’s a trickling noise over everything. It is brief and poignant.

  I run toward Rebecca and the rest, all of them together, while above us, strung on wires and poles, the incantations continue, booming: “Hear us, O Tch’muchgar, Melancholy One, Vampire Lord. Hear us and despair. You shall be blinded with light. You shall be bound in radiance. You shall stare, unblinking, at the light that sears you, and burns you, and claims you, for all eternity.”

  Rebecca’s step is light; and her sandaled feet arch on the grass as they did long ago, bare, that night when I saw her with her sister at Persible Dairy.

  I want to embrace her.