Молли Харпер - Nice Girls Dont' Live Forever

—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less Destructive Relationships

The problem with sleeping during the day is that people tend to overestimate the joys of earlymorning visits.

It started about an hour after I finally fell asleep, when Aunt Jettie sauntered into the house and discovered my carry-on by the door.

“Baby doll, you’re back!” she cried, materializing at my bedside.

“Gah!” I screamed, leaping off the bed and clinging to the ceiling. “Knocking! Aunt Jettie! We have a rule about knocking!”

My ghostly favorite aunt/roommate placed her transparent hands on her hips. “Oh, get down from the ceiling and let me look at you. I haven’t seen you in weeks. Don’t make me float up there, it makes me dizzy.”

Jettie Belle Early, sister to my grandma Ruthie, took me under her wing when I was around age six and when Ruthie and I both figured out that we were basically incompatible. (Grandma Ruthie wanted to give me a home perm and enter me in the Little Miss Half-Moon Hollow Pageant. I hid in her attic all day to avoid the perm, pretending that I was Anne Frank.) I spent entire summers with Jettie at River Oaks, which she inherited after spending her formative years caring for her elderly father. This was a great shock to Grandma Ruthie, who had already made plans to overhaul the house in time for the local historical society’s annual tour of historic homes.

Aunt Jettie was a linchpin in every major moment in my life. It was Aunt Jettie who helped me fill out financial-aid paperwork for college. It was Aunt Jettie who persuaded me to stay in school and get my master’s in library science so the local public library would have no choice but to hire me. It was Aunt Jettie who helped me through that first night as a vampire. It was Aunt Jettie whose upside-down face was now smiling up at me expectantly.

“I missed you, too, Aunt Jettie,” I grunted as I disengaged my fingernails from the plaster and hopped down to the bed. “Is Mr. Wainwright here?”

She smiled as she thought of her beau, who also happened to be my recently deceased boss. “No, he’s really beating himself up over this break-in, so he’s standing guard at the shop. I told Zeb not to bother you with it, but he insisted you’d want to. Why are your eyes all puffy?”

“Oh, it’s just the French,” I said, wiping at the oh-so-attractive bloody tear tracks drying on my cheeks. “They were so damn rude.”

“I thought you were in Brussels,” Jettie said as I climbed back into bed. Outside my bedroom window, creeping fingers of sunlight were flirting with the edges of my blackout curtains. My internal clock told me it was almost six A.M., and I was so tired I could actually feel the drag on my limbs. Aunt Jettie pulled the covers up to my chin as she asked, “Where’s Gabriel?”

“Still in Brussels,” I said. “He had some things to take care of.”

Jettie studied my face in that unnerving X-ray method of hers. Fortunately, any penetrating wisdom on her part was cut short by my mother’s sudden appearance at my bedroom door.

“Hi, baby!” Mama cried. “Thank goodness you’re back!”

“What the hell is wrong with you people?” I howled, chucking a pillow at her. “What are you doing here so early?”

“Oh, I’ve been coming by every day to check on the place,” she said, throwing her arms around me. “Let me look at you! Oh, don’t ever go away for that long again, honey. I got so nervous not being able to see you or check in on you.”

Mama’s idea of a good vacation spot was the Blue Pineapple Motel in Panama City Beach, Florida. She did not see why it was necessary for me to see the world or why it was necessary to run off “God knows where” and share hotel rooms with a man I was not married to. She insisted that the hoteliers would know that we were not a married couple and we would give people a bad impression of America. I told her that if American tourists hadn’t already done that by eating string cheese while they toured the Louvre, I doubted my premarital sleeping habits would bother them all that much. She didn’t laugh.

Mama’s predictions of travel tragedy included my getting mugged. (I have superpowers, so it wasn’t likely.) Or developing food poisoning. (I don’t eat, so that was even less likely.) Or getting a rash from hotel soap. (OK, that actually happened, but it cleared right up.) But I doubt she foresaw me getting dumped in such a halfhearted, half-assed way. She definitely would have warned me.

Wait a minute. My brain finally caught up to what she’d just said.

“You come by the house when I’m not home?” I asked.

Mama gave me her patented “Well, of course, I’m invading your privacy, silly!” expression.

“You gave us a key for emergencies. Someone has to keep your plants watered.”

“I don’t have any plants.” I pressed the pillow over my head and muttered, “I’m getting a moat.”

Mama pretended not to hear me, instead dropping a pile of envelopes onto my lap. “Here, honey, I got your mail while you were away.”

“Touch that curtain, and I won’t give you your present.” I didn’t bother looking up as Mama approached the window. Mama considered for a moment and then backed away.

In general terms, Mama had stopped trying to rehabilitate me out of being a vampire. This was good, because I was out of the coffin to most of the community. I was one of a few vampires in the Hollow who chose to live out in the open and maintain relationships with the living. Studies showed that most vampires turned since tax consultant/vampire Arnie Frink outed us with his right-to-work lawsuit dropped out of sight and moved to big cities like New York or New Orleans. They assimilated into the large populations of vampires and learned how to adjust to their new lifestyles … or their neighbors claimed to have no idea how they managed to fall into a puddle of gasoline, then trip into a burning leaf pile.

Thanks in no small part to my former supervisor, Mrs. Stubblefield, the news of my vampirism had officially made the beauty-parlor and kitchen circuit. Mama said people had stopped talking whenever she walked into the pre-church coffees on Sunday mornings, which meant the congregation of Half-Moon Hollow Baptist Church was aware as well. She took to her bed for a few days. But ever since a well-known member of the cast ofAll My Childrencame out as the parent of a vampire and Oprah did a show featuring Friends and Family of the Undead, Mama figures my being a vampire makes her “current.” She now introduces me as her “vampire daughter,” even to people I’ve known since I was a kid. She’s got a little bumper sticker with two inverted white triangles on a black background, the international symbol of support for vampire rights. She’s even insisted on attending a meeting of the Friends and Family of the Undead, which, fortunately, had suspended activities after the foreclosure of the Traveler’s Bowl, the hippie restaurant that hosted our meetings.

Of course, Mama still stocked my freezer with homemade pot pies to tempt me off my liquid diet. She showed up while I was sleeping and opened windows, hoping that I would slowly build up a tolerance to sunlight. As much as she loved me and beingen vogue,Mama was determined to have a normal daughter. Even if it killed me.

I sifted through the alarming pile of mail while Mama bustled about my room, gathering dirty clothes. I’d been approved for an obscenely high-limit credit card that I hadn’t applied for. I’d been accepted as the newest member of the Half-Moon Hollow Chamber of Commerce, which I had applied for. My letter to the editor for the American Library Association newsletter regarding the nationwide need for more vamp-friendly resources and hours was rejected. The fancy linen envelope stuck out like a sore thumb among the cheap, glossy promotions. My hands shook a little as I turned it over in my hands. Had Gabriel’s mysterious pen pal finally decided to contact me? Imagine my horror when I saw the neat printed label addressed to “Miss Jame Janeson” from the Half-Moon Hollow High Alumni Committee instead. “Miss” was underlined. Twice.