Sofie reaches across the table, picks up Timothy’s cup of still-hot tea, and dumps it over his head. The liquid doesn’t do him any real damage, of course—only fire or the sun can burn a vampire for more than a few uncomfortable moments—but it’s enough to make Jenny clap her hands loudly for attention.
“All right, I declare an armistice. It’s time for Min to do her English studies. Alexander, Timothy, it was… eventful to see you, as always. Timothy, you can wash your face in the bathroom if you like.”
Sofie gives her own face a desultory swipe with her napkin and stands. “I’m going out.”
“See you later,” Jenny says. Alexander can’t tell what the tone of her voice might mean; the three words have a weariness that Alex doesn’t often associate with the girl.
Sofie leaves without reply. While Timothy does his best to salvage his clothes, Alexander collects their coats, his hand pausing before he picks up the cigar box.
He wants to leave it here, to forget its existence forever. But there’s no way he could bring himself to do such a thing, to leave something so inconsequential and precious behind.
“What’s that?” Tim asks, nodding toward the box in Alexander’s hands as they walk to the car.
“What? Oh, nothing. Something Jenny found and thought I’d like,” Alexander answers, glad that his habit of collecting random curios to examine and then sell is well-established. Timothy has no reason to think that this cigar box is any different.
~
When they’re home, and it’s past the sunrise, and Timothy is sound asleep, Alexander goes to the desk where he dissects watches and repairs musical boxes. He switches on the soft light of the lamp. The brightness won’t be enough to wake Tim. It never has in the past. Alexander’s always been a restless sleeper.
The paper of the letters smells of old paper and nothing else, not even dust, and is fragile and formless along the creases of each page.
Alexander has never been the kind to keep trinkets like this himself. It isn’t that he lacks a sentimental streak—nobody could stay at Blake’s side for as long as Alex has without at least a little sentimentality; it would be impossible to tolerate Blake’s whims and intrigues without it—but mostly it’s just a practical consideration. There’s no use trying to keep a hold of little shards of the past when the future stretches on and on so far ahead. Even when he was alive, he had no time for what had been and gone.
Better to look forward to what was coming than to miss what had passed, that’s always been Alexander’s way, and so the letters from Timothy to him are long, long gone. He can remember fragments of them, words read by lamplight in distant cities, but most of what they said is lost to time.
It seems like an awful, darkly funny irony: Alexander is still here and whole, and the letters he wrote Tim are carefully preserved in a cigar box. And Timothy, whose past self is crumbled like paper blackened in a fire, has had his written words lost as well.
Alexander wants to destroy these letters, all of them. Put the past out of mind, as he’s always done. But somehow he can’t bear to. Timothy kept these letters so carefully, through so many years. They were important to him, clearly. Surely Alexander owes him this much, even now that the Timothy is question is as good as dead.
Dear Timothy
We had dinner at the Wildes’ last night, with Blake’s friend Nell and her family.
I liked Connie—the new Mrs Constance Wilde—a lot. She reminds me of myself. We both had it hard when we were young and it’s left its mark on us. And we both have that strange combination of ridiculous romanticism and wry pragmatism when it comes to the heart: she clearly adores her recent husband utterly, yet cheerfully remarks that she thinks marriages should be reviewed after one year and dissolved with no consequence if both parties wish it.
(For my part, I think love is insufferable nonsense, and even if I didn’t think it before, listening to Blake and Oscar’s attempts at wit on the subject would make anybody sick to death with all matters related to the heart. And yet I have never felt as anything as true and real as the love I feel for you.)
Nell and Oscar owned the room. Blake held himself back in a way I’ve never seen him manage (nor even attempt) before. Do you know Nell? I think the two of you would get along. She’s lively company. There’s something in her eyes which reminds me of you.
Alexander replaces the letters in their box, careful not to let his tears stain the paper and blur the ink, and goes back to bed. He rests his head against the wash-worn fabric of Tim’s shirt, listening to the slow heartbeats until sleep comes.
MICHELLE
Michelle has been a fan of Remember the Stars for long enough that the band feels like a part of her own story. She’s gone from being an adolescent to being a young adult, with their music as the soundtrack of her evolution.
Terms like ‘adolescent’ and ‘young adult’ have always seemed relatively meaningless to her in the past, but now that she’s been both she kind of gets it. She was just past her thirteenth birthday when Tommy first sent her one of the band’s mp3s, and now she’s almost sixteen, and those years have been an entire lifetime for her, really.
She’s had her first period (over Christmas vacation while she and her parents were staying with her grandma, and maybe someday she’ll stop feeling like she wants to crawl under the table and die every time she sees any of her extended family) and she’s had sex (her first wasn’t Tommy, but he’s the only one she’s wanted to do it with again afterwards) and she’s cheated on tests at school and lied to her parents and done stupid shit like hang out in sketchy neighbourhoods way past her curfew just so she could see some band that Jay had heard was good.
And she got hit on by a creepy guy at the local library once while she was trying to study, and he stuck his hand up under her skirt and she yelled at him and ran to the bathroom and made her mom come pick her up from the mall. It wasn’t like anything had actually happened but it had still been scary, and Michelle had only been fourteen, and she’d cried and cried when her mom finally came and got her and she felt safe. That had felt like a part of growing up too, a fucked-up awful angry part that shouldn’t be one of the common experiences for girls who’re turning into women, but is.
And she’s felt more fucked up and more sane than she ever did before, in these last three years. It shouldn’t make sense that both extremes are true, but the fact it doesn’t make sense doesn’t stop it from being true.
That’s something else Michelle’s learned over and over again since she went from being a skinny, anxious thirteen-year-old in dumb awkward clothes that didn’t match into being the girl she is now: lots of things don’t make sense, but they’re still real. Like, it doesn’t make sense that she’s got parents who love her and a house and friends and she does okay at school and lives in a part of town that’s safe and has never had to worry about money, but despite all those things she’s always miserable inside, always sort of hollowed-out like there’s a part of her that’s meant to make all the other parts fit together into a whole, but that part’s missing.
It doesn’t make sense that vampires are real. It doesn’t make sense that Michelle can’t imagine ever wanting to marry anybody but Tommy, which technically make him her high school sweetheart, but they’re about as far from what ‘high school sweethearts’ are supposed to act like as it’s possible to be. It doesn’t make sense that she loves him but sometimes can’t stand to be anywhere near him, and it doesn’t make sense how she doesn’t feel jealous when she sees him hitting on or kissing other people.
Michelle knows that Tommy’s sister Rose and Rose’s friend Bette used to call Tommy and Michelle and Jay slutty all the time. Michelle doesn’t know if it’s true or not. She’s had sex with a lot of different people, and didn’t love any of them except Tommy (and Jay, but that barely counts because they didn’t really have sex, it was just kissing and touching and stuff, and they were both kind of strung out on pills at the time and it was all awkward and dumb and not sexy at
all, and even if Michelle loves Jay fiercely she knows for sure that she’s not in-love with him), and having a lot of sex and not really taking it seriously is a slutty thing to do, probably, but ‘slutty’ sounds so mean and horrible and cruel, so hateful, even if it was just used in throwaway teasing by Tommy’s sister and her friend.
So maybe Michelle is slutty, but that doesn’t mean anybody’s got the right to use that word in a way that’s meant to make her feel ashamed. Jay got beat up by some fuckbags outside a club a few months ago, and Michelle knows that the assholes called him faggot and queer while they hit and kicked him, and those words are going to stick in Jay’s memory long after all the bruises and cuts are gone.
When Michelle first started going to school, her mom always used to remind her that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. It’s a nice idea, but it isn’t true. Words can be terrible weapons against a little girl with one black parent and one white parent, her skin a soft brown and her personality a little strange and dark and quiet and industrious. By the time Michelle first got called ‘slutty’, she was well aware of how much words could hurt.
That’s probably why she gets called a bitch. She gets called that even more often than she gets called slutty. All three of them do: they’re Tommy and Jay and Michelle, the bitchy haughty superior kids, the ones who don’t bother to act nicey-nice to people they don’t know, the ones who have better things to do than spend time pretending to be friendly with the world at large. They all know better than to bother with shit like that. They have each other, and there are too many wolves in sheep’s clothing lurking out there, ready with words like slut and fag at a moment’s notice. Better to be a bitch than a victim.
Michelle has had enough labels stuck to her, black girl rich girl slutty girl, that she makes an effort not to stick them on other people. So she’s still not sure how she feels about vampires, because it seems unfair to dismiss them based solely on that when she doesn’t have any other reason to go along with it. But that seems like it might be naïve and dangerous and too forgiving. She doesn’t know. It’s more complicated than any of the other shit she’s ever had to deal with, and Michelle’s pretty used to complicated shit. She’s been in psychiatric wards, for chrissakes. She should be able to handle ordinary monsters.
But even with those early constants staying true—being dark-skinned, being crazy in the head, being kind of a bitch—it still feels like these past few years have been a little bubble of time all of their own, and everything before that was just a lead-up. In the time since she heard Remember the Stars for the first time, Michelle has grown up.
And now that Russ is dead, and the band is gone forever, Michelle feels like she’s mourning more than just somebody she liked and cared about, more than just a band she enjoyed going to see. She feels like a big chunk of her life has had the flooring pulled out from underneath it. Like the bubble of time has popped before she was ready for the next stage to start.
She’d always known, in an abstract way, that someday there wouldn’t be a Remember the Stars anymore. Bands broke up, or went on hiatus and never bothered to start up again, or whatever. But she’d always kind of thought it would happen after she was already gone, already moved on to other things. She’d be in college and feel vaguely sad when she heard the news, and play one of their CDs in her dorm and smile fondly at the happy memories.
Or even still in school, a senior with too many other things to worry about to still be investing a big piece of her heart in a dumb little band. But… not now. Not like this. Not in such a sad and violent and awful way, with so much of herself still invested in all of it. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.
Michelle thinks she’ll maybe go crazy if she doesn’t find something to do, some way to stop feeling so impotent and sad and frustrated and just fucking plain old lost, lost like she hasn’t felt for years and years. Drugs won’t do it and sex won’t do it and school won’t and going to clubs won’t and painting won’t and she doesn’t know what will, except that she’s heard Lily and Anna both say that hunting makes the rest of their brains go quiet. Hunting feels so right to them that all the confusion and misery and everything falls away.
But, from what Michelle can see, that’s probably a lie. It might be a lie they don’t know they’re telling themselves, but it’s still a lie. Because Lily’s a vampire, and a vampire hunting other vampires is pretty damn far from a simple, clear-cut situation, and Anna’s the last living member of a band of four, but they might all of them have still been alive if it wasn’t for hunting. And who says that hunting vampires is even a good thing to do, anyway? They seem so certain about something that seems so uncertain from what Michelle can see. God, doesn’t Lily see the hypocrisy in thinking vampires deserve to be killed when she’s a vampire herself? It makes Michelle feel sick just thinking about it.
She can hear her parents fighting in their own bedroom, down the hall from hers. When she was younger she used to be terrified whenever she heard them argue, because almost everybody she knew had parents who were split up, and she didn’t want her family to fall apart, she didn’t want to lose one of the very few things in the world that she could trust in for stability.
Now that she’s older, she doesn’t worry as much. She knows how shitty and difficult sharing your heart with someone can be sometimes, and that it doesn’t mean you don’t love them even if you hate them sometimes.
This fight’s about her, kind of. All of the fights are, more or less. That was one of the reasons why she’d been so scared of the thought of them breaking up: for all that every after-school special in the world might say over and over again that divorces aren’t kids’ fault, Michelle knows deep in her heart that if her mom and dad broke up, it would be because of her. Because she’s crazy, because she’s not pretty enough, because she’s not the child they’d hoped for.
“I just said we should consider it. Don’t put words in my mouth!”
“It kills me to think of her going away to college in a few years! Why the hell would you try to speed that up? Boarding school, for Christ’s sake!”
Michelle’s heart lurches. No, no. What about Tommy and Jay? Don’t her parents understand—
“I think it’d do her good to be away from those boys she’s always with. She could concentrate on her schoolwork and her…” Ah, the tell-tale pause, the fucking inability her dad has, even now, to say that she’s got a mental illness. “Health. Those two aren’t a good influence. And that school she’s at now… first those boys a while ago, and now another student dead? It’s supposed to be a good school, dammit! We pay enough to send her there.”
Underneath her panic and fear at the thought of being sent away, the cynical part of Michelle wonders if her father thinks that parents at schools that aren’t expensive, aren’t “good”, wouldn’t give a shit that Jamie got killed. She thinks that’s probably exactly what her father thinks, yeah.
Because Jamie and Russ died at the same time, in the same place – an unlucky vampire victim and the unlucky hunter who tried to save the day and failed – Michelle’s had a hard time untangling the grief she feels about one from the grief she feels about the other. Jamie was a cool kid, friendly and laid back with a surprisingly filthy sense of humor. He’d been in the school musical with her, and he’d tease her for being too indie to live whenever she turned her nose up at the crap he had on his mp3 player.
Strictly speaking, she was closer with him than she was with Russ. Russ was a guy she’d have a few minutes of friendly, superficial conversation with at his shows, asking for a photo and an autograph and a set list. He was someone she read about in magazines and followed online.
Jamie was an actual friend, someone who’d make her laugh when she was feeling crappy, someone who was a part of the world she lived in.
But no matter how sick or fucked up or weird it is, the hole in her chest at the thought of Russ being dead is just as real to her, just as horrifying, as the thought of Jamie�
��s murder. She didn’t know Russ as a person, just as a musician in a band she loved, but she’ll miss him as much as she’ll miss the boy who’d played her father in the musical.
“We are absolutely not even considering it as an option. If you’re worried about her being out with the boys too much, we’ll set a stronger curfew. That’s my final word about it.”
There are more mutterings and sharp words, but Michelle can tell that the argument’s mostly done, at least for the time being. She’s not worried about the threat of a stronger curfew, because her parents work late most nights, and when they’re not working late they’re out of town completely.
And for all their hand-wringing and half-assed attempts to seem like they’re invested and worried parents, Michelle knows better. They’ve never known what to make of her, not even when she was a little kid. They try their best, most of the time, but she’s too fucked up for them to handle.
She’s surprised it’s taken this long for boarding school to be brought up as an option, frankly. They’ve been finding ways to keep her out of sight and out of mind since before she was even old enough for day school. She’d been five when her parents sent her to stay with Phenex for a month, hadn’t she?
The memory of that time makes Michelle smile, even as she’s still knotted up with worry from the argument. She’d loved Phenex at first sight.
~
Phenex and Michelle’s mother had been sorority sisters in college, classmates in courses on art history and drama. Michelle’s mother eventually became co-curator of a mid-sized international art collection and dealership, and Phenex remained Phenex, which meant a hardscrabble life of near total freedom and the constant threat of no income.
Phenex performed in dingy spaces below restaurants and above bookstores and anywhere else she could squeeze an audience of other souls as oddly-made as herself. She wrote academic articles about Victorian accounts of female lunacy, published in obscure journals that paid writers almost nothing.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 65
