Adam Rex - Fat Vampire - A Never Coming of Age Story

Jay was looking more and more uncomfortable. He nodded gravely as if recollecting some great tragedy, until Doug finally said, "What?"

"That’s why…" said Jay, "people call you Meatball."

"What? No, it’s not."

Jay stared at the ground.

Doug was incredulous. "They call me Meatball because I’m short and…husky."

"And smell like Italian food."

"Shut up!"

"You don’t anymore!" Jay rushed to add. "But you did back then. Especially during PE. It was like you sweated garlic."

"Why didn’t you tell me? Shit!"

A fresh breeze ruffled the trees. A dead leaf caught in the hair of Jay’s heavy head.

"I don’t think anybody means anything by it anymore," he said. "It’s just something to call you. Cat isn’t being mean. She’s nice. Stuart calls you Meatball, but you guys are still friends, right? And Adam? He wasn’t even in sixth grade with us. He’s a senior."

" Adam ," Doug snarled. "That guy is completely full of shit. I saw him in Planet Comix over the summer. Twice. You were with me one of the times, for the McFadden signing."

"Yeah. I guess he doesn’t like admitting he reads comics."

"I guess he doesn’t like admitting a lot of things. You ever notice how he’s nicer to us when we’re away from school? But even then he’s still looking over his shoulder like the girls’ volleyball team is gonna jump out from behind a tree."

Jay shrugged.

"Look, never mind," said Doug. "Just…what’s next."

Jay looked at his list. "Holy water. But I couldn’t get any."

"And after that?"

"Um…here. Eat this mustard."

AT FIVE TO MIDNIGHT the boys approached the gate of the Hawthorne for the second time.

"I’m going to get in trouble for staying out this late," said Jay.

"I know."

"I’m sorry about the garlic thing."

"I know."

They unloaded Doug’s bike from the trunk and tucked it behind a hedge.

"I have my phone. I’ll call you if…something happens." Doug thought this sounded stupid as soon as he said it. Of course "something" was going to happen — he was going to walk into a house full of vampires. The thought that this alone was not necessarily going to be the lead story of the evening made him suddenly cold. He marched quickly from the car before Jay could offer any words of encouragement. His feet were damp.

The gravel driveway looped like a racetrack around spare ornamental shrubbery and an expanse of lawn so large and plain that it seemed designed to testify to how much land this woman could waste. Doug had rarely seen so much grass in one place without a soccer net at each end.

The home of Signora Polidori was huge, redbrick, and brightly shuttered, more blandly Colonial than Doug would have expected. No gargoyles. No severe, Gothic arches. No bat-shaped door knocker. He supposed that last one would have been a little on the nose, actually.

He rang a perfectly ordinary doorbell, and a few moments later the door opened onto the crepe paper face of the man from the drainpipe.

"You honor this house with your presence, dark master," he said, stepping aside to admit Doug. "Truly it has stood patiently these lonely centuries only that it could one day receive such an exalted visitant into its homely blah, blah, etcetera."

Doug blinked as he walked into the hall. He had no idea how to talk to this person.

The interior of the house was more like it. The foyer was aglow with candlelight and clad in marble and bronze. There was a grand curving staircase of the sort that promised majestic introductions. In the movies a staircase like this could only exist to provide a beautiful woman with a decent way to enter a room. This was no movie, however, and the banister was rubbed dull and dry. The center of each velvet step was bald like an old dog. But the beautiful woman was a beautiful woman.

She looked like a college girl but carried herself down the stairs with the air of a woman three times her age. For all he knew, Doug realized, she was a woman three times her age. Thirty, even. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed like she’d stepped out of a school movie about the cotton gin.

Was this the vampire who had made Victor? She wasn’t French, not with that name, but what did Victor know? He’d probably think Sejal was French.

"I am Signora Polidori. You may call me Cassiopeia," she added, with a faintly raised eyebrow like a footnote, a little legal disclaimer to explain that she wouldn’t normally permit someone like him to call her anything at all. Her voice was the sound of crisp new bills — a little British, not really Italian like Doug expected. More than anything, it had that sound of the East Coast rich that you heard so much in old movies.

She lowered a shoulder. She pointed a toe. She made the gentle tilt of her collarbone into the sort of thing that moved mothers to cover their children’s eyes. Doug decided then that, yes, she was very old. She had learned to inflame men in an era when a glimpse of leg could start swordfights.

"You are already acquainted with my thrall, Asa."

"Yeah. Hey," said Doug to the thrall.

Asa somehow managed, without twitching a muscle, to favor Doug with one last, breathtaking display of contempt before leaving the room.

"You are the first to arrive," said Cassiopeia. "How embarrassing for you."

Doug followed her through dark, wide doors into a sort of study. More candles here, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and one of those wheeled ladders on tracks that Doug had never seen in real life before. Curved steps at one end of the room rose to a platform that accommodated a small piano and three high-backed chairs.

"You may repose here and await the others. The chairs upon the dais are reserved. Each object in the drawing room is worth a small automobile. Reflect on this before you touch anything." With that, she left.

Doug stood stiffly. The air felt old, somehow, more brittle, and it smelled like books. He tried not to breathe it too deeply. He felt so terribly aware of himself here — heavier, fleshier…itchy.

Two guys who looked very much like Victor soon arrived, guys who looked like they were not so much born into this world as hiked, by quarterback, into an American flag. They took up places in the room and stared at Doug like he’d sat down at the cool kids’ table. He was certain they were vampires, too, from the smell. With so many in such close proximity the room was growing sour with an old-milk stink that filled your throat. Could regular people not smell this? He realized now that he couldn’t trust Jay to tell him he stank, though he was confident Jay’s sister would have mentioned it.

Victor himself came next, and stood at the far end of the room, and appeared to pointedly not stare at Doug; it was only for this that you might have guessed that the two boys knew each other at all. Doug fumed. They were all junior varsity vampires here, weren’t they? They’d all made the team one way or another. In a hot rush he realized that Victor had always planned to attend the gathering. He just didn’t want Doug there.

The great door opened and shut again. Finally, another girl. She was the last to arrive and the first who seemed to know how to dress for this sort of thing. She had straight green hair that just brushed her bare shoulders, and Doug imagined riding a tiny toboggan down their powder-white slopes into the foothills of her bust. She wore a black leather halter and skirt that showed a lot of everything. She looked to Doug like a video game character.

Signora Polidori returned now with another man. He was strikingly handsome in a way that looked very foreign next to all the homecoming kings in the room. Victor and his kind were big dogs, but here was a wolf, his face lean and sharp. He and Cassiopeia alighted on two of the three chairs.