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

"Did she just turn into a bat?" he asked.

"Yeah. She asked me to take her clothes," said Doug, trying to make it sound like this sort of thing was always happening, girls rapidly undressing in front of him and so forth.

"You ever do that?" asked Victor. "Turn into a bat I mean?"

"Once."

"Yeah. I don’t like it much. It’s like…you know when you’re driving somewhere and you space out, and when you get where you’re going you can barely remember how you got there? Like you just went on autopilot?"

"Not really," Doug admitted. "I don’t get my license until next month."

"Oh. How you getting home?"

"Bike."

Lights blinked off in the house behind them.

"You want a ride?"

"THERE!" Alan Friendly belted. "The San Diego vampires are before us! Present Redeemers!"

Each crew member raised and leveled his stake-firing weapon and squinted down its barrel. Alan stood facing outward for the cameras, his arm extended like the commander of a firing squad. He was the commander of a firing squad, he realized with a confusing sort of delight.

"Send those mothersuckers back to hell, boys! Fire at will!"

The crew let loose a volley of stakes, a few of which hit but most of which sailed past the row of dummies on the other side of the field.

"Cut! All right, that’s good!" said Alan. "Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. You know we weren’t filming the targets anyway. We’ll get them later at close range."

The targets were dressmaker’s dummies. The art department had scoured flea markets for old ones but eventually just bought a crate full of new models and spent an afternoon staining them with tea and roughing up the edges. Then they sewed a red velvet heart in the center of each. They’d tried paper targets on hay bales but it just looked too much like something you’d seen before.

Alan met his assistant Cheryl by the only dummy that had a stake lodged firmly in its stuffing.

"How was that?" he asked. "Did we get that?"

"It looked hot."

"I said ‘mothersucker.’ Too much?"

"We’ll have to run it by Standards and Practices."

"It just popped out."

They looked in silence at the dummy, and the stake.

"Well, that’s not the heart," said Alan. "What would that be?"

"The appendix," Cheryl answered. "I have a scar there. Oh — Mike called from San Diego, wants you to call him back."

"Ooh!" Alan rushed for the phone. "He has something? Never mind, he’ll tell me." He dialed and rocked on his heels while the line rang.

"Alan," Mike answered.

"Mike! Mikey Michael! Michael P. Pfefferneuse! I don’t know your last name, Mike."

"It’s Storch."

"Mike Storch! Big Mike Storch! Tell me you have a lead. God, we need a lead."

In lieu of hiring a private detective agency Alan had left Mike and a few other staffers to keep canvasing San Diego after the hunt lost its momentum. They had a police sketch of the main vampire based on a description the girl Carrie Lawson had given, and at least one intern was wandering the Gaslamp Quarter, showing it around. Another was calling hospitals and begging for information about anyone complaining of bite marks. It was vitally important for Alan to show his producers that they could do things on the cheap at the moment, so everyone was doing jobs they hadn’t signed on for.

"I do have something," said Mike, "a very little something."

"Tell me. Tell me."

"All right. I talked to this convention center security guard today who had a run-in with a kid, a teenage kid, who had very severe polymorphous light eruption."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh," said Alan. "What?"

"A really bad skin reaction to sunlight. Kid had to hide under a poncho. It was so bad they let him and his friend in early, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line. Which is good for us, because they were the only two to pass under the CCTV cameras in the lobby at that particular time."

"And you got a look at the security tapes?" Alan was grinning and drumming on the snack table with his free hand.

"I got a look at the security tapes. And I gotta admit, the shorter of the two kids could definitely be our guy from Panda TV."

"Yes!"

"But here’s the thing: If it is him, then the sketch we have from party girl is bullshit. I think she was very generous with her description. He probably gets better looking every time she tells the story."

"Bloody hell."

"I’m having the sketch artist do a new portrait based on the security tapes, and I’ll start sending it around. But, Alan, we’re running out of money here."

"Wait," said Alan. "Why don’t we just put the security footage on next week’s show? Or online? But then, of course, someone else would find him before we do…"

"Also? It would be slander. We don’t know for certain the kid on the security tape has done anything wrong — the panda room was too dark for a positive match and the Red Cross people won’t return our calls."

"Stupid, bloody, pompous Red Cross."

"But, Alan, did you hear me? We need more money."

"You’re breaking up, Mike. I’m passing through a tunnel."

"I know you’re not driving, Alan."

DOUG’S DATE with Sejal had, somehow, become a group thing.

"How did this happen?" Doug asked Jay after lunch. "This is unacceptable."

"You asked Sejal what movie she wanted to see," said Jay, "really loud. You know you did — you wanted everyone to hear."

"I did not say it ‘ really loud.’ I said it loud ’cause it’s loud out there."

"Actually"—Jay sniffed—"I remember it being quiet and uncomfortable because you’d just told everyone about that time I threw up horseback riding."

"What, are you mad about that? It was funny."

They were nearly to the door of English class when Victor and another guy rumbled by.

"Hey, Victor," Doug said, quietly. Victor didn’t respond.

"Dude," said Victor’s friend as they walked away. "Did Poncho Villa just talk to you?"

"C’mon," Doug said to Jay. They went inside.

"Are you and Victor friends now?" asked Jay.

"I don’t know. I don’t care if we are or not, he could at least say hi when someone says hi to him."

They took their seats, wrote an in-class essay on The Metamorphosis, then broke into groups to plan their oral reports.

"It’s understandable that maybe Cat would come along," Doug said to Jay. "They live together. And maybe Sejal wants a chaperone on our first date — I don’t know how Indians do things."

"I’m Indian," said Kyle, their third partner. "I don’t need a chaperone on a date."

Doug rounded on him. "Sejal’s Indian Indian, Kyle. You were born in Scranton."

"We’re supposed to be talking about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’"

"Just… fft …go make an outline or something and give us two minutes, okay?"

"Asshole," Kyle said, and moved to an empty desk.

"What really pisses me off," Doug told Jay, "is that Adam’s inviting himself along. How did that happen?"

"I think he maybe likes Sophie," said Jay. "I think he’s going because she’s going."

"That figures. She’s his type — not as smart as him and at least two years younger. I don’t even remember how she got invited."

"Sejal invited her. After she invited Ophelia and Ophelia said no. Look, maybe I can distract them all and get you some time alone. Or we can figure out some plan to get you sitting together."

"How are you going to do that if you’re not there?"

Jay’s forehead tightened. "Cat invited me."

"Cat can’t invite you on my date! My date! And I thought you didn’t even like hanging out with this crowd."