by Austin Bunn
“I’m cold,” Callie says. “Somebody warm me up.” Solvang rubs her shoulders, then nestles in for a kiss. He purses his lips like he’s drinking from a faucet, like she’s a necessary element, and Callie moans a little. I still don’t know what that feels like. I so want to know.
Just then, a van with tinted windows pulls into the lot, brights in our faces. The line of kids kinks around it, chattering at the arrival. When the driver-side door opens, mist billows out to the ground. My heart seizes a bit to know just how far Eddie has taken this. A black boot descends, buckled to the knee, and Eddie steps from the driver’s chair, in an overcoat and a cap that says “R II.” His beard has crop circles. He takes a scan of the crowd and then hits the unlock. Here’s where things get interesting, where things get different. The back doors open and a posse of vampire girls stretch their legs and follow. Last to emerge is Jess, the stake in my heart, the answer for everything. Her face is powdered to alabaster. Her eyes and lips, coal black. A charcoal cape doesn’t quite cover her blouse. She wears a plaid, pleated skirt and ripped white leggings. She’s all Catholic School except for two gray fangs. She stumbles a bit, unsure where to go until Eddie whisks her inside.
The itch says, Careful. My right hand dives in my shirt pocket to make sure the pills haven’t moved. All there, safe and unsound, a handful of white roofies for the partner of my choosing. No more waiting. Tonight, I’m Jack with the magic beans. Here comes the stalk. Here comes the climb up into the clouds.
Jess stood at the door of Kramer Photo in her remember-me best: a tight blue V-neck sweater, brown hair curtaining around her face, and J.C. on the cross nestled between her Temple Mounts. It was the same outfit she had had on before, in her first round of pictures.
“I’m here for my retakes?” she said.
“You’re an hour late,” I said from the door, giving her my good side. She ran J.C. up and down on his chain.
“Sorry,” Jess said, and shrugged. “Student Council.”
For six weeks in the fall, portraits from all over the county flood into Kramer Photo. October is yearbook season. I work in the back and out of view, retouching—clearing complexions, subtracting acne from the record. You wouldn’t guess, considering, that I am good at this particular fix. But I had the job before the accident, and Kramer kept me on after. “Nobody else looks as close as you do,” he said. And he’s right. I see all the way to the pore. The measly flare, the third-eye keloid. Our skin is where we’re judged, first and last.
I brought Jess upstairs to the studio. The door locked behind her.
Kramer and the others had already left, so it was just us in the studio. I had spent time prepping and figuring how to shade the space. She’d stay under the brights and flashes, and I’d stay behind the lens until she blacked out. The shades were drawn, but the studio felt cool and outdoorsy—that was the “Forest Glade” on the wall, a twelve-foot scrim of birch and fallen leaves. For portrait backgrounds, Kramer offers “Star Field,” “42nd Street,” and “Forest Glade.”
“I made you some coffee,” I said. I pointed to the cup, right there on the light table. Extra strong, to mask the dose.
“No thanks,” she said.
“Soda? No soda?” I offered. “Or something harder?”
I’d already had two shots myself before her arrival, to quiet my nerves. But she shook her head. At some point, girls learn they don’t have to answer every question. And like that, my plan, the careful order of things, guttered out.
Jess spun on the stool while I adjusted the lights. Kramer specializes in large format, big prints, everything adjustable. Through the viewfinder, her face was a dish of cream. Her two front teeth had a slot between them for the perfect dime. No blemishes—somehow she’d made it that far without scars. I would barely need to retouch.
“I feel like I’m in a diorama with this forest thing behind me,” she said. “I should have a papoose and a spear.”
“Didn’t your form say Forest Glade?” I said.
“I had nothing to do with the form,” she said. “My mother was all about the form.”
I felt a strange possessive surge. I didn’t want her known or noticed, possessed by a family. When you come this far, this close, the aperture closes around what you see, and you want to be the only one looking. I tested the flash. The recharging whine rose to the top of the sound register. She asked if we lost other yearbook photos along with hers.
“I bet a lot of kids want to take theirs again,” she said.
“Sure, but you don’t want to peak when you’re seventeen,” I said. “You don’t want to be fifty and look at the Rutland High School yearbook like those were the good days.”
“If I’m looking at my yearbook when I’m fifty,” she said, “claw my eyes out.” Then she thought for a moment and took J.C. off her neck and laid him on the light table.
“Got plans for Halloween?” I asked.
She told me about Eddie’s invitation, duly noted. My plan floated back from oblivion. I’d find her then.
“So what is his deal? Is he gay?” she asked. “Because he asked me to be a vampire and supposedly he’s amazing with makeup.”
“He’s not gay, he’s just really into base,” I said. She laughed then and it was like she released herself to me.
“Ready?” I said.
The smile is always the hard part, because it has nothing to do with the mouth. It’s all in the eyes. A grin lifted into her face, but it was only in the bottom half, what happens when you live with something.
“Thanks,” she said on the way out, taking the stairs two at a time. “Make me look beautiful, okay?”
Inside the Halloween firehouse, the light drops. I make out a long hallway of black-lit paintings and one cheap, low-hanging bat that won’t last the night. Then the hallway opens out onto the kitchen where a kid lies under a sheet on a table. On cue, a chainsaw cranks and Dewey Church—the guy who trims everybody’s trees—steps out from behind the door. The sound is deafening, and Solvang covers Callie’s ears. Dewey plows through the belly of the screaming kid, sending an outrageous spray and guts into the air. Solvang casually picks a piece off his flack jacket. Baked ziti. The chainsaw quiets and the disemboweled kid dips his hands into the gash to eat some. Dewey knocks the side of his head.
“Don’t play with your guts, you idiot.”
“But it’s freaky,” the kid says.
“It’s confusing,” Dewey says. “Your dying moments, and you’re going to taste yourself?”
The next room is a nonstarter. A pack of twelve-year-olds dolled up like zombies—Eddie really went for the coolie labor here—wander around and bump into each other. A preteen ghoul clings to us, almost like he’s angling for change. Callie shoves him away, but I corral the kid before he can slink off.
“Why did she push me?” The kid repaves his bald cap.
“Because you were poking her.”
“I’m supposed to poke,” he says. “Eddie told me to poke.”
He tells me Eddie is on the roof, and we zip through the rest of the building: more kids leaping out from behind chairs, mattresses. The longhair manager from Video King, way too old for the room, proudly wears a diarrhea-ass costume from Spencer Gifts, leaking all over the place. In a shower, a chick dressed in a white sheet plays a harp. Solvang fixes on her and the girl waves back. Callie pulls him on.
“Who was that?” she demands.
“I don’t know,” Solvang says.
Callie knocks him on the head with her wand. “You know her.”
“Jesus,” he says. “Your fucking wand fucking hurts.”
Out the back, past the exit, I catch the murmuring up on the roof. A training staircase runs up the back of the building, to the promising noise. Jess has to be up there. When I ask Solvang and Callie if they want to crash the party, they do that couple-deciding thing, where she’s looking to see what he wants and he’s looking to see what she wants and it takes five minutes for them to decide that they’re too tire
d to go out. But for once, Callie is game. “What’s at home?” she says. “Let the babysitter deal.”
The roof is the size of the community pool. A cloud of dope hangs over the proceedings. At the other end, groupies circle Eddie while he boasts that he “made over a thousand dollars in the first hour.” His jaw chomps and chomps, with some chemistry of his own.
I see Jess, propped up on the edge of the roof, imprinting the lip of a Styrofoam cup with her fangs. Her pupils are big as volume knobs—Eddie must have fit her with black contacts.
“Mr. Randy DiSilva!” Eddie calls out to me. “Buddy, been way too long.” He waves me over and claps me on the back. Then he tilts his head and examines my face as if I’m auditioning.
“What’d you use?” he says. “Latex glue?”
“For what?”
“For this,” he says, running his finger down the left side of his face, eye to his chin. He has no idea.
I shake my head. “No, latex.”
“Gelatin?” He asks.
“Glass,” I go. “Some fire.”
I let that sink, but Eddie’s too juiced to follow. “Huh?”
Solvang shows up, changing the subject. “So, Randy, is Amanda Jane here?”
“The girl from the stupid movie?” Eddie says. “Oh, yeah, right, she’s doing Ouija by the keg.”
Solvang scans for her and Callie watches him look for this girl, the girl who’s not her, and it pains me. She’s loyal to him the way people get when they start feeding a feral animal, leaving a plate out, expecting the animal to care. Solvang was raised in the woods. He’ll go back there eventually. I know they’re having trouble—Solvang told me that he can’t get it up since he saw her making way for the baby. “I just keep expecting other stuff to keep coming out,” he told me. “It’s your playing cards,” I told him. “They’re rotting you.”
I peel off from Eddie and head to the drinks. I pump two beers into red plastic cups and mash one of my pills on the edge of the table. It doesn’t quite powder and it gets in the foam, but I stir it in with a finger. She doesn’t need much. Jess looks up, blank and unfocused, when I approach. The itch starts up, with the sweat.
“Jess,” I go. “It’s me, the guy who took your portrait the other day.”
“Randy, right?” she says. Maybe the friendliness takes a little too long to shape into her face, but we’ll get there. Her lips don’t know what to do with the fangs, so they rest on the outside, like a rabbit. “I’m sorry. I can’t see anything. These contacts are driving me crazy.”
“I brought you a beer,” I say. She takes it, but it goes nowhere near her lips. “So what’s your costume?”
“I came as normal,” I say. “The boy next door.”
She nods. “Oh that’s a hard one, that one takes time,” she says. The fingers have been snipped off her gloves, and with bluing fingers, she accordions the pleats in her skirt. Her knees are right there, offered through the rips in her leggings. The itch says, Start there.
She holds out her hand. “You want this?” she says. A mint-colored pill rests in her palm, a fish-tank pebble. “Eddie gave it to me and told me it was aspirin.”
I have competition. I sit next to her on the edge. “That’s not aspirin.”
“It figures,” she says. “He’s a creepster.”
“Have you seen his movies?”
“I watched like ten minutes of the one about the imp and the spell and the whatever.”
“So why’d you sign up to join the vampire squad?”
“He said I could die in his next one,” she says. “Gotta start somewhere.”
“Maybe one day you’ll get to be the final girl,” I say.
Jess squeezes up her face. “She’s the one who never has sex, right? Because when you have sex in those movies you die.”
“The final girl is the last one alive, that’s all that matters,” I say. “The beautiful one nobody notices, except we do, the audience. She’s the one with the inner resources and the keys and the journey and the one weird implement that brings death. Chopsticks. Or the poker. Or hair spray on fire. And then at the end, when she looks over the railing, or into the pit, that’s the abyss looking into her. And she’s alive. And her being alive means we’re alive.”
You don’t need to be all that smart. You just have to make the girl feel like she gives off light.
“You watch a lot of movies, Randy,” she says, and it’s so much specialness that it distracts me from asking how she knows my name.
I’d just ruined the Bronco twins. Two cowlicky bullies from East Rutland whose princely poses I saw and went, Here are two people who deserve some damage. All it took was a little more cherry and less nude in the paintbrush. When I was done, Kenny Bronco looked like a flaming leper.
So I didn’t notice her at first. I almost passed her prints straight into the shipment. Almost. But then I took her in: the blue sweater, the brown hair, that crucifix nestled at the base of her neck. Her skin was trophy golden. She seemed familiar, like a sequel.
And then it wasn’t her face I was seeing, but a face I’ve seen so many times in my head that he’s my Forest Glade. Her brother’s face, in the obituaries. My mother had kept the page for me until after I was out of the hospital and could focus. Eric Denning, seventeen. He’d started his own lawn-mowing company and was planning, like half of everybody, on getting the hell out of Rutland. I was too, before I became a monster.
I went to Kramer’s catalog to confirm what I already knew: the photo in my hand was Jessica Denning. I never knew your brother, Jessica. But five years ago, drunk and bored, he bent time around me. He crossed the yellow line and splintered my life in two.
I took the digital files and dragged them into the trash. My pulse jumped when Kramer came into the room. He dove into the office fridge.
“Hey, boss, we’re missing this one girl’s prints,” I said. “Can’t find her in the bin. Some kind of error in the camera?”
Kramer popped open his soda. “Just schedule her for next week, then,” he said. “She’s all yours.”
Suddenly, sirens. Down below, in the firehouse parking lot, two police cars pull up. The blue and right lights make everybody on the roof wave the air to waft away the dope smell which, for about five seconds, seems like an idea. Then everybody runs. Eddie hitches his pants, heads to the stairs. “Remember the legend of Edward Cosimano!” he shouts.
“Cops are here,” I tell her.
“Are you serious?” she says. She tugs her cape in close. “I can’t see.”
Solvang crashes into us, throwing one arm around me. “Hey, you—you should love this guy,” he says to her. “Randy is ready for love.” I’d like to kill him right now. I see Solvang dead on a punji stick, like one of his cards.
Callie comes and catches him. He got in a drinking contest with one of the zombies, she says. Jess snaps off her fangs and says, “Let’s go.”
Sometimes you walk up to a wall and you walk through.
I lope with Solvang’s arm around my shoulder, and we work our way down the stairs until we’re ground level. Out front, I can hear Eddie arguing with the cops. Cars tear out of the lot, nipping past us. I dump Solvang in the backseat of my car. When I turn around, Callie is wiping her mouth with a bit of her gown. There’s a grim puddle at her feet.
“I think I just vomited,” Callie says, without surprise.
Jess steps around. “Shotgun.”
We drive in quiet. As we pull into Callie and Solvang’s driveway, their babysitter fumes on the wooden stairs. “I have been waiting for hours,” she goes. “I was supposed to be at a rave at ten.”
Solvang twists out the door and just spills. The babysitter, disgusted, hops on her ten-speed. “The kid’s asleep—if you care,” she says, and goes.
For a moment, we just sit there. “I’m pregnant,” Callie goes, into her hands. “I know nobody cares. I just thought somebody should know.”
Nobody says a word. I walk Solvang back to the house with Callie traili
ng behind in the silence she made. Their place is a mess, like the baby is doing the arranging. Life-size cutouts of WWF wrestling guys—Solvang is a fan—circle their living room, peopling it with goons. I roll Solvang off onto the bed in the master bedroom. It’s a waterbed, and the wave action sounds like a stomach digesting.
Solvang is a little gray in the lips. He wakes up some and pulls my head toward his, mumbling. Somebody gave him a pill on the roof, he says. One of Eddie’s aspirins. Then he takes my hand and rests it on his hard-on. He’s proud, like it’s a science project that managed to work after all.
“That’s the proof,” he says, bleary.
“Proof of what?”
“Proof I’m not dead.”
In the kitchen, Callie sits at their tiny table, a young crone. She plays with her wand, remolds the star points that have blunted.
“Callie, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go,” I say.
She taps her wand once against her belly. “Bing,” she says. “All gone.” Back at the car, Jess’s working on her eyes, trying to fish out the contacts. The rip at her knee, I swear, is bigger.
“I can’t get these things out,” she says. “And now it’s kind of scaring me.”
“Where am I taking you?” I ask.
She stops for a minute. “Not home,” she says. “Not yet.”
Just three folding chairs in twenty feet square. I was four months into my treatment, pacing the clinic courtyard. The walls of the courtyard were glass and with noonday sun, we got our reflections back. The heat made the itch so I couldn’t stay in the sun for long. I pressed my fingers on the left side of my face to feel out the tender parts. My face looked like somebody fried an egg there and forgot about it. I looked like something you’d never want to look at.
“So what happened to the other guy?” I heard behind me.
He was in jeans and sunglasses, sitting in one of the folding chairs kicked back on its rear two legs. He was a tree cowboy, one of the loggers from upstate, compact and hardy. But from the collar of his shirt rose a bright red welt, up his neck, onto his jaw.
“Sorry?” I said.
