Josie Griffin Is Not a Vampire

by Heather Swain

  “Ah, liebchen, you’re only seventeen,” said Johann.

  “For the rest of my life,” Kayla said.

  He ran his finger down the side of her face. “We have eternity together,” he told her.

  She softened. “Where’s Saskatchewan anyway? Down south?”

  Johann pulled her to his side. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “We’ll get some very nice boots and warm coats. Maybe we can start a little business there, selling moose jerky.”

  “Here.” Helios held out his keys to Johann. “Take my car. It’s parked out back.”

  Johann looked stunned. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s just a car,” Helios said with a shrug. “I can get another one.”

  “Can you get one for me?” Tarren asked.

  Johann took the keys then hugged Helios. “You are my brother.” They parted ways. He hugged Tarren then Avis. “I will miss you,” he said.

  “You sure?” Tarren asked.

  “Eh,” Johann said. “A bit anyway.”

  “You be safe now,” Avis told him.

  Then Kayla stepped forward. We all took turns hugging her, except for Tarren who stood back, thumped her hand against her heart and whispered, “Blood,” as she tried not to cry.

  Kayla grabbed her and pulled her against her chest like a little girl hugging her favorite doll. “You can come visit us anytime,” she said.

  We heard the front door open then heavy shoes against the creaking wooden floor.

  “Go,” we told them and pushed them through the open window. They flew across the backyard and left silently in Helios’s chariot. When we turned around, Thea had come back. We could hear other voices in the hall.

  “Where are all the girls?” she asked.

  “I think they’re all in the basement,” I told her, “getting a new wardrobe and trying to figure what the heck they’re doing here.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, pondering. “How are we going to explain that one?”

  “What will you do with them?” I asked her.

  “Ah, leave that one to me,” Thea said. “We will take excellent care of them. I have plenty of experience setting troubled girls on the right path.”

  Helios leaned over and whispered, “You’ve never met my crazy sisters. These girls are nothing compared to Selene and Eos.”

  Tarren, Avis, Helios, and I stood quietly on the front porch and watched as Thea ushered Bethany, Rhonda, Sadie, and the other girls into the waiting Council vans. After they pulled away, no one said anything. We stood in silence for several minutes, awkward together after everything had happened. Then the rev of a loud engine filled the street again.

  “Who could that be?” asked Tarren.

  “Oh crap,” I said when I saw a black Impala speeding toward us. “You guys should get out of here.”

  “What is it?” Avis asked.

  “My dip head, douche hat, dumb hick, demon hunter ex-boyfriend,” I said.

  Kevin drove up over the curb and into the yard, his fat tires digging ruts in the dirt. He jumped out and stood in the glare of his headlights. “Looks like your luck has run out, demons!”

  “Oh for crap’s sake, Kevin,” I yelled at him. “Would you get a life already?”

  He shielded his eyes and squinted. “Josie?” he said. “Is that you? Again? Jesus, I can’t get away from you tonight.”

  “You’re the one who’s following me, you idiot,” I said.

  He put his hands on his hips. “Jeez, Josie. I know you lost your mind when I broke up with you, but this is just pathetic. How did you get mixed up with these freaks?”

  I looked to my left at Tarren and Avis, and to Helios on my right. How did I get mixed up with them? Did Atonia Babineaux mean to send me to that first anger management meeting, or did I just walk into the wrong place?

  Tarren stepped forward. “First of all, jerkface,” she yelled at Kevin, “you never broke up with Josie. She broke up with you when she bashed in your freakin’ windshield.”

  Avis joined Tarren. “And watch who you’re calling a freak!”

  Kevin took a step forward and pointed. “These people are not what you think, Josie!”

  I crossed my arms and stood tall. “Yes, they are,” I told him. “They’re my friends. Which is more than I could have ever said for you or any of the cheerleaders.”

  I felt an arm around my shoulder and looked up to see Helios standing beside me in a sudden surge of light. “I think it’s best if you leave now,” he told Kevin calmly. “You wouldn’t want your new car to get damaged.” He clenched his fist, set his jaw, and stared at Kevin’s car. The engine revved, the lights blazed brighter, and smoke poured out of the tail pipe.

  Kevin jumped. “What the…?”

  I laughed. “Don’t you have some slut to go screw?”

  “This isn’t over,” he yelled as he scrambled into the driver’s side. “We’re on to you.” He peeled out, spitting dirt and weeds behind him as he fishtailed down the street and around the corner.

  “That guy is seriously douchey,” Tarren said.

  “How could you ever have dated him?” Avis asked.

  “Clearly her taste in men has improved considerably,” Helios said.

  I stared at all three of them. “Um, does this mean you guys aren’t mad at me anymore?”

  They looked at each other. Tarren spoke first. “I’m still pissed at you,” she admitted. “I mean, you did totally out us on the Internet. That was a jerk move.”

  “Then why did you help me?” I asked.

  “Johann came to get us,” Avis said. “And like we told you when we first met, we have each other’s backs.”

  “Even mine?” I asked, astonished.

  “Well,” said Helios. “It helped that we read your blog posts and realized that you actually said nice things about us and that you cared about what was happening at HAG. All that pep talk stuff you do is for real.”

  I blushed at the thought of Old Josie coming through so strong, but then I realized it wasn’t such a bad thing to be enthusiastic and persuasive about the right cause.

  “Plus whatever you wrote about us couldn’t be that big of a deal,” Avis said. He grabbed Tarren’s hand and they started down the stairs. Helios and I followed. “I mean, only idiots like your ex-boyfriend take that stuff seriously. Everyone else thinks it’s a joke.”

  “Humans!” Tarren said and laughed.

  “But still, I lied to you guys. Doesn’t that make you mad?” I said as we turned onto the sidewalk.

  “Perhaps we’re all learning to manage our anger better,” Helios said.

  “Charles would be so proud,” Avis snorted.

  “Yeah, right.” Tarren cracked up. “We were the picture of control in there.” She pointed back to the house—now just another rundown Victorian on a quiet Indianapolis street.

  “Dude, you’re a were-chicken!” I said to Avis.

  He laughed. “Better than a werepire.”

  “Got me there,” I said.

  Tarren laid her head on his arm. “I thought you were awesome.”

  “I froze like a Popsicle,” Helios said. “But Josie kicked some serious butt.”

  “Yeah, girl,” said Avis. “You got a mad swing.”

  I laughed. “I think I might go out for softball.”

  “Thank god,” said Tarren. “I don’t think I could hang out with you anymore if you were a cheerleader.”

  A little thrill went through me at the thought of hanging out with the paras during my senior year. Then I remembered. My parents. I still had to face their wrath. But still, it couldn’t be worse than what we’d just gone through. They’d understand, eventually. I hoped. “I’ll probably be grounded for the rest of my life, so I might not see you for a while.”

  “That’s okay, we’ll come to your house since you managed to shut down Buffy’s,” Avis said.

  “Oh no,” I groaned. “I’m so sorry!”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Helios said. “It’s happened befo
re. It’ll relocate soon.”

  We turned a corner and walked side by side under the gently glowing streetlights of Lockerby while somewhere Johann and Kayla were cruising into a new life up north.

  The next morning we would read about a kid who totaled his vintage Chevy Impala when he struck a deer that bounded into traffic on I-465. The kid would have a concussion, which would explain his ramblings about demons, but the deer would die. Those Zombie Apparel billboards would fade away by the time school started in two weeks, replaced by yet another ad campaign the mindless fashion drones would follow. And as for the rest of us, we had four more weeks of anger management to go.

  Turn the page

  to read the first chapter

  of Heather Swain’s

  ME, MY ELF & I

  chapter 1

  “ARE YOU LOST?” The man is big. Bigger than any other man I’ve ever seen in my life and for a moment I can’t say anything. My grandmother, back in Alverland, would call this man an ogre, even though he’s the only person out of all the people rushing past me in this subway station nice enough to notice that I’m completely confused.

  Everyone else just jostles on by, jabbing me with elbows and banging me with overstuffed shoulder bags. I feel as if I’m caught in the middle of a moose stampede during a forest fire. (Only instead of being surrounded by burning trees, I’m in a smelly underground passage with dirty walls covered by advertisement posters for a million things I’ve never heard of.) I hug my bag to my chest and nod without making a sound. The man leans down closer to me. It’s not just that he’s tall. I’m used to tall people. Everyone in my family is tall. He’s also wide, soft, pillowy. I think of sinking into my grandparents’ large goose-feather bed with my brothers and sisters and cousins surrounding me, anticipating my grandmother telling us a tale about giants and ogres.

  The man’s skin is dark, too, and I’m captivated. Everyone in Alverland is fair. Our hair is light and straight and our eyes are almost always green. Drake, my father, who’s been out of Alverland more than anyone else, told us that there are many kinds of erdlers (that’s what we call people who aren’t from Alverland) and you can judge them based only on their actions, not on how they look. So I know I shouldn’t stare at this guy. Or any of the people rushing past me. Especially because I know how it feels to be different.

  “Where are you trying to go?” he asks.

  It’s bad enough that I took the wrong subway three times. I mean, how was I supposed to know? I’d never even ridden a bus before today. But now that I’m finally at the right station, I can’t find my way outside. I unclutch the piece of paper wadded in my fist and show it to him. I clear my throat and try out my voice. “The Brooklyn Academy of Performing Arts High School,” I tell him, but the words come out tiny, as if I’m six years old. Great, my first time alone in Brooklyn and I can’t even talk like a regular fifteen-year-old girl. How will I ever make it through a day of high school?

  He takes the paper from me and studies it with a frown. “Never heard of it,” he mumbles, and I think he’ll walk away, leaving me stranded forever. I wonder if I give up now, could I find my way back to our house near the park? Tell my mom and dad that they were right. I’m not ready for a regular school. I should let them teach me at home like they wanted to in the first place.

  Then the man looks up and nods. “But I do know this street, Fulton Avenue. Come on. I’m walking that way. I’ll show you.” He takes off and I hesitate. Everyone back in Alverland warned us not to talk to strangers, never to go with people we don’t know, and to keep to ourselves. But this guy has my paper with the school’s address on it. So I force my legs to move and I skitter after him, weaving through the rushing people in this dingy underground passage.

  He leads me to a stairway and I can see sunlight again, although the air doesn’t smell any cleaner up there than it does down here. I press my sleeve over my nose and mouth to keep from gagging on the car fumes. He takes the steps two at a time and I run to keep up with him. He glances over his shoulder and smiles kindly at me.

  “New to the city?” he yells over the roaring traffic. I see him chuckle.

  “Yeah,” I yell back, defeated. “First day of high school.”

  “Sheez.” He shakes his head. “Rough start. But it’ll get better.” He points to a street packed with cars, trucks, motorcycles, blue-and-white buses, and bicycles. A flood of people spill out of the underground stairways. Like ants on a mission, scurrying over rocks, past sticks, through gullies just to get their crumbs, the people keep moving along the crammed sidewalks, across the streets, and into the hulking buildings surrounding us. He and I join this throng and I realize that his size is a plus because at least I won’t lose sight of him. On the opposite corner he stops and points. “This is Fulton Avenue. The address says four thirty-six, which has to be down this way on the left side. If you get lost, ask somebody. New Yorkers aren’t rude. They’re just in a hurry, but somebody’ll always help you if you ask.” He hands me my piece of paper and walks off into the crowd.

  “Thank you!” I yell after him. “Thank you for helping me!” I wave my paper over my head as he disappears beneath the shadows of skyscrapers. Then I’m alone again in the middle of hundreds of people. For a moment I consider zapping everyone around me with a hex, maybe some kind of skin pox or limping disease of the knees so that they’ll all fall down moaning and I can step over them, one by one, as if walking on rocks across a stream to find my way to school. But of course I don’t. First of all, I’m not really old enough to hex an entire crowd of moving people, and secondly, my mother warned me, No magic in Brooklyn!

  I finally find the school, but I’m late, of course, even though I left my house hours earlier. In Alverland, nothing is more than a ten-minute walk away, so spending this much time getting anyplace seems absurd. Standing in the middle of the empty hallway I wonder why I insisted, fought, begged, bartered, made promises, and endlessly cajoled my parents into letting me attend public high school in a new place. Am I out of my mind? Did somebody put the donkey hex of stupidity on me? I thought this was going to be easy. All I’d have to do is dress like an erdler and I’d fit right in. As if I could waltz into this school, playing my lute, and everything would be fine. Obviously I’m an idiot.

  I’m about to turn around and head out the big green doors of the school. Back into the chaotic, smelly street, where I’ll probably wander around lost for years before I find my way to the subway, let alone all the way home. I’m about to chuck it all, tell my parents they were right, and hole up for the rest of my existence in my new cramped bedroom at the top of the stairs in our house, when someone says, “Why are you out of class?”

  I turn around to face a tiny, angry woman scowling at me. She has small sharp features like a mouse. Her hands are balled into fists, which she holds on her hips like weapons. Plus she’s wearing all green. She looks just like the mean little pixies my grandmother used to tease us about. “I said, what are you doing out of class? Do you have a hall pass? What’s your name?” the pixie lady demands.

  That’s when I lose it. Lose it like a snot-nosed, diaper-wearing, thumb-sucking, toothless, babbling baby. I drop my bag to the floor, let my knees go weak, slump over into a heap of quivering jelly, and cry miserably. The pixie lady stares me down while I wail. I swear she checks her watch and taps her foot impatiently until I pull it together enough to lift my head and squeak, “I don’t know where to go.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Do you always get this worked up when you’re lost?”

  I suck back the snot streaming down my face, wipe my hands across my moist eyes, and say, “I’ve never been this lost before.”

  “For God’s sake, girl,” she hisses. “You’re inside a school. How hard can it be?”

  This only makes me cry harder, because I know she’s right. “But I, but I, but, but…” I sputter. “First the trains…and I went the wrong way…was it the F or the A or the 2 or 3…and who can figure out those maps with all the
colors? Red! Blue! Orange! How was I supposed to know which platform, which staircase, which end of the train I’m supposed to get on? Not to mention the subway stations! There are rats down there. And it smells. Terrible. And all those people? Where are they all going? Where could so many people be going?” I come out of my rant clutching my hair and stamping my feet as if I’m having a temper tantrum, which, actually, I am.

  The pixie grabs me by the upper arm and pulls. I scoop up my bag and go tripping behind her. “How many drama queens can one school hold?” she mutters to herself as she drags me down the empty hall.

  We pass closed doors through which I hear teachers’ voices over groups of kids laughing. I also hear music (drums, pianos, a trumpet from far away) and feet stomping in unison as if dancing. Posters cover the walls inviting me to “Join Student Government” or “Come to the First Chess Club Meeting Tonight” or “Help Plan the Halloween Dance!” I drag my feet to slow the pixie down so I can read every flyer on a large bulletin board. This weekend there’s going to be a film festival and an “open mic night,” whatever that is. And today after school I could go to a free talk about poverty in Africa or even learn how to crochet. I could never do those things in Alverland, but here, I can do anything, and that’s why I came today.

  The pixie stops and I bump into her, nearly sending her to the floor. “Good God!” she says to the ceiling. “Not even nine o’clock yet and this is my day already.” She points to a half-open door and gives me a little shove. “In you go,” she says. “Tell it all to the shrinky dink, drama queen.”

  I’m inside a bright, sunny office with a wilting jade plant in the window and sad yellow daisies in a vase. Without thinking I whisper one of the first incantations my grandmother taught us, “Flowers, flowers please don’t die, lift your heads up to the sky!” Slowly the jade plant unfurls its drooping leaves and the daisies stand tall in the vase. Then I remember that I shouldn’t be casting spells, no matter how harmless. What if someone saw me? How would I explain? I consider undoing the incantation, but that would be more magic. I have to be careful now. I must remember to act like an erdler.