Underdead

by Liz Jasper

  “Please, Jo, calm yourself.”

  I wanted to kick him. There’s nothing more infuriating than the person who’s just riled you up telling you to calm down.

  “I’m only concerned about the health of your students,” Roger said.

  That was it. “And I’m not, Roger? This is insulting, even for you. There is no gas leak. Don’t you think I would have been affected as well, especially as I spend all day in that room?” You stupid, pompous…

  Rudy came out just then, saving me from committing career suicide or homicide, or both. He paused awkwardly in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve checked the room thoroughly and found no sign of a gas leak, or any pooling of bad air. Did you want me to check out another room while I’m here?”

  Rudy and I both looked inquiringly at Roger. His face was a little flushed from arguing with me. “No, that’s fine.”

  Rudy sketched a wave and ambled out, clunking and jingling. As Roger turned to follow him out, I stopped him.

  “When my performance review comes out, I expect to receive full marks for classroom control. Right now, I’ll settle for an apology.”

  Roger drew himself up to his full five-foot-seven. “There’s no need to apologize for being concerned about our students here at Bayshore, even if a teacher’s ego may get a little bruised in the process. You’ll be a better teacher once you learn that. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get my lunch.” He turned on his heel and marched out.

  Once my temper had subsided, I followed more slowly, lost in thought. Despite what I’d said, it was hard even for me to believe how well-behaved my students had suddenly become. If Roger hadn’t gone about it so insultingly, I would have asked Rudy to check all the rooms on the hall and the one underneath me, just in case.

  After lunch I looked for signs of surreptitious text messaging or good old-fashioned note passing. Better I find it than Roger.

  But I didn’t find a thing, and believe me, I know where to look. That was the good news. The bad news was that I’d been so focused on what my students were doing, I neglected to pay attention to what I was doing, and had royally screwed up the diagram I’d been drawing on the board. “Er, let me redraw that.”

  I had my back to the class for a full two minutes trying to fix it before I heard the telltale sounds of someone blowing a bubble. Chewing gum is outlawed at Bayshore. It’s practically a criminal offense. Nonetheless, I considered it a good sign. Only a week ago, something would have been set on fire by now, or some poor schmuck would be dangling out the window. Heartened, I decided to give my classroom control a little test.

  Not turning around, I said, “Whoever is chewing gum, please put it in the trash can immediately.”

  I waited expectantly for the sounds of someone dutifully pushing back their stool and walking to the trash can in the front of the room, but heard only another loud pop and a few giggles.

  It was enough. I knew exactly who it was, Carlos, one of my students with too much personality—the kind you can’t help but like, but rather wish was in someone else’s class. I turned around and leveled my new Teacher’s Look at him. “Throw it away,” I directed softly.

  “Yes, Ms. Gartner.”

  He and those seated around him looked petrified. Like victims in a horror movie just before the crazy monster puts an ax through their heads.

  I stared back just as horrified as realization finally dawned. Oh. My. God. I was the monster! I hadn’t mastered The Teacher’s Look! I had been using my Vampire Stare on them.

  I forced a smile on my face and said something, I don’t remember what, that got the frightened look off their faces, and muddled through the rest of class, avoiding eye contact with my students, lest I scar them for life.

  I left the moment the bell rang, telling the students who’d come for extra after-school help that I had a doctor’s appointment. Somehow, I got myself home. Bundled against the bright late afternoon sunshine like a crazy street person, I ran from my car to my apartment and let myself in with shaky hands. Just inside the door, I ripped off the excesses of outerwear and stood in front of the hall mirror. I looked desperately for signs I hadn’t turned into a shriveled nearly hairless creepy thing with long fingernails and Yoda ears—a female Nosferatu—but I couldn’t see my own reflection well enough to tell one way or another, and I could feel tears of frustration course down my cheeks.

  All along, I’d treated the “almost vamp” thing as a sort of sick joke. Yes, it was awful and sometimes the side effects had sent me on a crying jag, but it was also rather exciting and a little glamorous—like being the heroine in a movie. A girl couldn’t help but be a little flattered when a man so knee-meltingly handsome as Will was doing the chasing.

  But now, as I blinked and squinted furiously, trying to force my blurry, faded reflection into the clarity I’d once taken for granted, all I felt was the horror of my situation. Gavin had described it as being balanced on a knife edge between human and vampire. But I no longer felt poised equally between the two. I was slipping irrefutably into a world I didn’t understand, into an existence that horrified me.

  Half blinded by tears, I ran into my bedroom and jumped under the covers, pulling my comforter over my head. There, I huddled clutching an old ratty teddy bear like a frightened child for minutes or hours, I didn’t know which, until blissfully, unconsciousness claimed me.

  Chapter Twenty

  * * *

  A creature with sharp talons and a flaming head was screeching gibberish at me. I was sure I was dreaming, until those sharp talons gripped my shoulder and shook me hard enough to convince me I was awake. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and the harridan resolved back into a familiar figure. Not a dream then, but maybe a deja vu.

  “Mom?” I croaked.

  “Really, Jo!” My mother’s forehead was creased in concern. “What is wrong with you? I’ve been shaking you for ages to get you awake. Did you take sleeping pills? I know sometimes a person needs them, but you should know better than to take so many.”

  I opened my mouth to correct her, but closed it instead. What was I going to say? Better for her to think I was abusing legal drugs than becoming a creature she, like any normal person, thought was a work of fiction. Sleeping pills might be far off from reality, but at least it was something she could deal with.

  Her beautifully manicured fingers moved fretfully across my chest and shoulders as she tucked the comforter tighter and tighter around me until I began to feel a little claustrophobic. “I don’t know what is wrong with you these days, Jo. First you nearly miss Christmas with the family, you never answer your phone, your skin’s still a mess, and you’ve stopped attending Mass.”

  She waited for a response, but I didn’t know where to begin. It was all absurd, ridiculously twisted or in the last case true, but for a reason that was twisted.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s seven.”

  “In the morning?” Forget that I had slept for something like fifteen hours. What was she doing in my apartment, much less waking me up, at dawn on a Saturday morning?

  “Mom, why are you here?”

  She sniffed and looked away.

  I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “Is it Dad? Is something wrong?”

  She turned back, and didn’t even comment on the fact that I had slept in my work shirt. She regarded me steadily. “Your father is fine, Jo. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  I was too horrified to speak. Oh, God, she’d figured it out. She knew her only daughter was turning into an evil bloodsucking parasite. What do you say to that?

  She cupped my cheek lightly, sniffed again and blinked back a tear, and I realized that no matter how disgusting I got, she would always love me. I thought I had cried out all the water in my body the night before, but my eyelashes got damp again.

  My mother abruptly interrupted my sweet Hallmark moment with a sniff! I knew that sniff. It was not a sound of pain but of martyrdom. It never boded well. S
he dropped my chin and shot me a hurt look. “Raphael told me about your situation.” Hurt infused her voice. She sat ramrod stiff on the edge of my bed, with the perfect posture she had tried with lesser success to instill in me. She was all of two feet away, but it felt like ten.

  “Who?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Raphael!” she repeated, as if that cleared things right up. “I had to hear that you were pregnant from my hairdresser!” She clasped a dusty pink manicured hand to her chest. “My own daughter!”

  “What? No! Mom, I am not pregnant.”

  She gave me a quick look up and down. “Of course you’re not. But I didn’t even know you were dating this Bob—I thought you were involved with that coffee shop busboy, Will. And now he’s dead!”

  “Assistant manager,” I corrected automatically, even though I’d made it up. “And Bob’s dead, not Will.” Technically, anyway.

  She flicked her hand in annoyance. “That’s what I said. The point is, Jo, this,” she paused ever so slightly, “Bob was obviously important to you, a man I’ve never met! You never even told me about him, and all of Raphael’s is buzzing with it. Mrs. Dallas knew about it before I did!”

  “Oh, dear God,” I said rolling my eyes. This was it. My mother had finally lost it. The chemicals in the hair dye (Raphael had recently transmogrified her hair from sultry magenta to flame) had finally eaten away a critical number of brain cells.

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” she snapped automatically.

  “Mom,” I said, forcing myself to be patient. “This is ridiculous. Bob was little more than an acquaintance. I was never pregnant with his or anyone else’s child. I never slept with him. I never dated him. I never wanted to. There was, for a very brief period, a rumor around school that I was pregnant, because some gossipy fool misinterpreted a brief bout of food poisoning as morning sickness, and proceeded to share that delusion with everyone in hearing distance. I never bothered to tell you about it because it was so absurd, I never imagined you’d hear it, much less break into my apartment at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning because you believed it.”

  “Well what was I supposed to do? I tried calling you several times last night, but there was no answer. Your answer machine didn’t even pick up.”

  Hmm. I vaguely remembered yanking the phone cord out of the wall sometime in the night. I stopped being defensive, and as I let my mother vent, I thought about what had happened. In the bright light of day, my meltdown over the vampire glare seemed a trifle excessive. It was just another symptom, like my extreme sensitivity to sunlight or my fading reflection. At least this one had the potential to be useful!

  What was I saying? I couldn’t use it on people! It was wrong, deceitful. Worse, it was pure vampire—what if using it was what finally pushed me over the edge?

  When my mother was done venting—and had received apologies to her satisfaction—she hustled me into the shower, picked out “a nice outfit” for me, and before I knew it we were tucking into breakfast at a ritzy little restaurant down the coast on a cliff overlooking the ocean. She demanded, and got (of course), one of the highly coveted inside tables on a platform, where diners could get the unimpeded ocean view without the wind-mussed hair (or, my case, the tiniest bit of sun exposure). We were getting along so well, Mom didn’t even vocalize her horror when I ordered the steak tartare—I didn’t even have to use the look.

  Well, not much, anyway, and surely a tiny glare wouldn’t do me in. Besides, she had her own tools of persuasion and she didn’t hesitate to use them on me, which is how I found myself, much against my better judgment, promising to go to church with her the following morning.

  I spent the rest of the day in a state of anxiety. Weren’t churches toxic to vampires? Wouldn’t I explode or melt or something? Or get flung backward, propelled by an invisible force field? On the plus side, maybe Father Stevens could perform an exorcism and de-vamp me, but on the whole, I rather doubted it.

  No, I definitely couldn’t risk it. That is, I couldn’t risk embarrassing my mother. I took the coward’s way out and left her a message later that evening, when I knew my parents would be out for their usual Saturday night dinner, telling her not to pick me up as I’d meet her there.

  My plan was to meet her under the archway after Mass and tell her I had been a little late and had sat in the back. It was a good plan. Everyone knew Father Stevens didn’t like people in the aisles after Mass had begun, and he was too nearsighted to be able to identify people in the outer pews.

  It was genius and it worked like a charm. I caught up with my mother after Mass just outside the church’s ornately carved double doors as she moved to greet Father Stevens. He was resplendent in vestments that hid his slight paunch and made his receding gray hair, thick wire-rimmed glasses, and heavy jowls look majestic. Father Stevens greeted me like a long-lost child, as he always did after even the smallest lapse in attendance.

  His cry of, “Josephine! How lovely to see you at Mass today!” squelched my mother’s suspicions, just as she’d leaned over to whisper them in my ear.

  I was quietly celebrating my victory when it happened. I had just turned to head down the wide, well-worn pale marble steps when my mother grabbed my sleeve and pulled me back. “Where do you think you’re going?” She dipped her index finger in the gilded bowl of holy water set in an alcove near a delicate statue of the Virgin Mary and reverently made the sign of the cross on herself. Before I could move, she dipped again and reached for my forehead like she had when I was a little girl. I panicked and ducked.

  “Josephine Gartner!” she hissed in an angry whisper. “What is wrong with you?” She held my arm in an iron grip and stabbed at my forehead, my chest and both shoulders. I felt burning on my forehead where the holy water touched my skin and quickly arranged my hair to cover it.

  On the way to the parking lot, my mother let loose a steady stream of sotto voce outrage over my behavior, while managing to nod, smile, and exchange pleasantries with friends and acquaintances as we passed.

  “We are not done here, young lady! You’re lucky your father expects me home or…” The rest of the threat was lost to the wind as she turned to beep open her Lexus.

  When she finally drove off, I climbed into my car and pulled back the oversized hood that covered my face and studied my forehead anxiously in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see myself well enough to assess the damage.

  I sat there, gripping the wheel in silent frustration, until a child’s happy yell shook me out of my black study. A little girl I recognized from the bi-monthly post-Mass coffee and doughnuts mixers had won the race to the family sedan parked next to me. She called excitedly for her parents to follow, but they were deep in conversation with another couple a few cars down. I got back out of the car. Opportunity had knocked.

  I bent down a little so as not to intimidate her and smiled brightly. “Hi there,” I fought for the memory and emerged triumphant, “Debbie.” She smiled back in shy recognition and squirmed shyly against the car. Her parents glanced over. We did the polite, “Hi, how ya doin’” head nod exchange, and they went back to their conversation.

  I told Debbie, “I’m meeting my boyfriend in a few minutes and can’t seem to find my compact. Can you be my makeup advisor today?”

  Her china blue eyes lit with interest and she nodded eagerly. I had gone from slightly intimidating grown-up to Barbie doll. She was in her element now. I pushed back my hood, brushed the hair away from my face, and bent down so she could get a good look at my forehead. “How does it look?” I asked. “Is my make-up even? Did I miss a spot anywhere?”

  “Well,” she said shyly, “I think you should fix it.”

  “Where? Here?” I pointed at my forehead where I could still feel a residual tingle from the holy water.

  “Noooo, that part’s okay.” She was gaining confidence with every word. I was creating an Estee Lauder here. “But the rest of it’s too red. Your blush got everywhere.”

  I
thanked her solemnly for her expertise and left, not to get back in my car, but to go back to the church. By now, Father Stevens had gone back inside and most everyone else had left. I approached the little outdoor alcove where the holy water resided and tentatively dipped in a finger. It stung. I quickly wiped the liquid on the back of my hand and as I watched, the angry, red skin turned pale. I shoved my hand in my pocket, turned and left.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  * * *

  I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to schedule department meetings on Monday afternoons. Having us cap off the longest teaching day of the week with a couple hours of Roger was cruel and unusual punishment and should have been outlawed. We all had developed a strategy for enduring them. Mine was to tune out, occasionally tuning back in to make sure we hadn’t gotten to anything interesting or that required an actual response. The technique generally served me well, and if I mistakenly tuned out too long, Carol would nudge me. She always paid attention, lest Roger one day realize he was preaching to a roomful of zombies and start rubber stamping his own agenda unchecked.

  During today’s meeting, I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that Carol had to nudge me three times before I realized Roger had asked me a question and was waiting for a response.

  “What?” I said, subtly hiding my inattention.

  He repeated the question slowly, as if to an imbecile. “I was saying we needed someone to take over the Science Olympiad, now that Bob’s…er…”

  He hadn’t stopped out of delicacy. I had trained the look on him.

  “I don’t think I’m the best candidate, Roger. Why don’t you ask someone else?” I suggested gently. I felt like Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars, when he did that mind trick on the Stormtroopers outside the cantina.

  Roger turned to Kendra. “Jo’s right. It’s too important for her to handle alone. Kendra, why don’t you assist her. You’ve done it several times before.”