Ellen Datlow - Teeth - Vampire Tales

But before he killed her completely, he stopped sucking her blood. He later told her he was confused by her laughing. And also, he was hallucinating, too. He stopped and looked at her and saw every girl he’d ever loved. Every girl he’d ever killed. His mother. His aunts. His sister. His niece. His wife. And they were all doing the same thing as Amy. They were laughing. At him. And that was why he stopped. He felt remorse. He wanted to ask her why she was laughing. But he couldn’t do that if she was dead. He had to turn her to get an answer.

He let her go.

Amy fell to the ground. Rolled onto her side. She could hear the fireworks.

“Is it beautiful?” she asked. She hadn’t wanted to miss them, the fireworks. She had been hoping to get back to her group of friends before they started. But now she knew that something was wrong with her. She felt funny. She felt weak. She suspected it wasn’t the acid anymore. She suspected that she was in danger.

“I’m going to turn you,” he said. “I have to ask you if you want to be turned.”

“Yes, turn me, I want a better view of the sky,” Amy said. She thought if she was going to die, she wanted to do it while seeing colors light the sky.

He propped her up, bit his wrist, and dripped his blood into her mouth. She was reborn as she watched fireworks burst red, white, and blue.

Gina was a cold baby. Very cold to the touch. Her tiny hands and feet were always icy. She was always in the smallest percentile of normal. Just on the edge of being too short or too underweight.

“She just has poor circulation” was what the doctors said to reassure her worried parents. “Nothing to be done about it. Just exercise. Sunlight. Milk. She’ll grow out of it. Probably have a growth spurt in late childhood. Everything will be fine.”

Her parents likely realized that something was wrong early on, although they didn’t want to admit it.

Gina would come inside from playing with burns that blistered and cracked her skin. At first it was just on occasion, as though it were an accumulation of too much sunshine whose toxin would finally rise and explode angrily out of her. But then, by the time she was in first grade, it was confirmed that she was full-blown allergic to the sun.

Precautions had to be taken. Thick curtains everywhere in the house. The once warm, happy family was plunged into an eternal darkness. It suffocated them. Strained their feelings to the limit. Distanced them from one another.

To help ensure that no light seeped into Gina’s skin, clothing had to be UV-proof. Sunblock was worn like skin cream. Hats, dark glasses, long pants, long sleeves, long gloves became everyday parts of Gina’s wardrobe.

As a child, she looked eccentric and weird from the get-go. Knowing that she’d never fit in, by the time middle school rolled around, Gina had fully embraced being a freak. She wore vintage clothing, old vintage hats, dresses, and gloves. Although she longed for them, Gina had no real friends.

When they got to class that first night, Amy discovered that the book they were reading was The Crucible . Amy had read it right before she’d been turned, and she was surprised to discover that she remembered the book so well. She found herself raising her hand and making comments. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t been to school for thirty years and being in such a familiar environment made her kind of miss it. Back then, in 1976, she was more interested in smoking up and giving blow jobs. She was in the loser group. Part of the tough crowd. The ones that cut class, wore halter tops, feathered their hair, listened to heavy rock, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about school.

Perhaps it was the fact that over thirty years of feeding on humans had matured her, and so after all that time, she was finally ready for school. No matter how many years went by, she still felt sixteen inside. Which was not as fun as she thought it would be. She still had all the angst. She still had all the ups and downs. She still felt interested by things that other teenagers were interested in, even though she also now knew more about the dark side of life. More than she’d ever wanted to know.

The next class was math class, and Amy found herself slightly excited about seeing whether or not she could remember any of her trigonometry. She didn’t. Not one single thing. But it was exciting to learn it all over again.

After class, she made a decision. She would officially enroll in night school. She went to the front office, used a fake name and a fake social security number. She was given a schedule and a list of textbooks she’d need.

Amy was giddy.

She didn’t tell the clan about it. Every vampire in their group had their secrets. It was understood that you did what you needed to do to make the eternal life bearable.

For some it was going to prostitutes.

For some it was eating only animals.

For some it was keeping a night job.

For Amy it was finishing high school.

There was something that Gina liked immediately about Amy. It could have been her quietness. It could have been the way she wore vintage 1970s clothes. It could have been that Amy always had such an interesting perspective and point of view on things when she talked in class. Like she knew things about the world, and people. Like she’d seen things. Like she was sophisticated .

Amy liked Gina, too. Amy liked hanging out with Gina at the breaks between classes. Amy could tell that even though Gina was eccentric and didn’t have the best social skills, she had a kindness about her. Amy was certain that if she had met Gina when she was alive, she would never have talked to her; she would only have made fun of her. But at night school, with all the others who had had something happen to them to derail them from a regular teenage life, everyone had at last found the one place where they could all be the cool girl.

Gina was a benevolent cool, welcoming everyone, including all.

It was a sharp contrast from the cool girls Amy remembered from her day. She remembered that those girls were mean. Their hair flipped perfectly, their eye shadow always the perfect shade of blue, their boyfriends always the coolest boy in school. Amy suspected that if she looked long and hard at herself, she would discover that she had been one of those mean girls. She didn’t want to be that kind of girl anymore.

Here at night school, she remained quiet. Just happy to be included in the chitchat. Cheerfully chiming in when called upon. And sharing her homework with anyone who needed help.

It wasn’t too long before Gina asked Amy if she wanted to hang out. They went to the movies. They had sleepovers. They went to shows. Gina and Amy were fast becoming best friends.

They told each other everything.

Well, almost everything.

Gina told her that she was allergic to the sun. But she didn’t know how to explain that she was dying.

Amy told her that she was a little bit older than she looked. But didn’t know how to explain that she was a vampire.

Amy had moved into the twenty-first century. Cell phone, laptop, social network profiles.

Her relationship to killing altered because now she had a friend and socialized with humans. The other vampires in her clan had told her that would happen if she mixed. It happened to all of them after a while. It was inevitable. She hadn’t believed them. But in the end she had to admit that it was true.

She didn’t turn to only eating animals, or working in a hospital or blood bank to get her fix, like the others. She didn’t stop eating humans; they tasted too good to her. But now she ate less often, and only when people were already bleeding out, from a gunshot wound or a car accident or a stabbing or a suicide. She rationalized that those people were already dead, with no hope for life, the blood, just flowing out of them, going to waste. Feeding on them eased her conscience.