Charlie Huston - Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I drop the cigarette in my hand into the water at the bottom of the glass and pluck the one she started on from between my lips and tally her score.

– You almost had it down, you know.

She looks up at me, the makeup smeared from her face, the teenager beneath it revealed.

– Had what down?

– Your mom’s act.

She stops wiping her face, walks around me behind the bar, drops a couple ice cubes in a glass, pours some kind of triple-distilled boutique vodka from Romania or someplace over it, and tosses the drink down her throat and pours another.

I smoke the cigarette I took from her mouth.

– See, that’s not bad. You got the drinking down pretty good. Except your mom probably wouldn’t have bothered with the ice. But you’re what, seventeen? So you got time to develop. Another twenty years and you’ll be a perfect Upper East Side white trash burnout with a real grown-up booze jones, a trophy husband, a stable of gigolos, and a perfect ass.

She sips her second drink, her breath raising mist from the ice.

– And when I’m just like my mom, will you kill me just like you killed her?

I take a drag. Taste her lipstick. Remember her mother’s kiss.

I drop the butt in the bar sink.

– One other difference, she would have offered me a drink.

She finishes her own and puts the glass on the bar.

– Well, like you said.

She starts for the door at the far end of the room, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes.

– I’m not her. Get your own drink. I’m gonna go change.

– I won’t be here when you get back.

She stops at the door and drops her blouse on the floor.

– Now who’s pretending, Joseph? I mean, of course you’ll be here. You just can’t wait to hear why I had Sela bring you up here. And to see how I’ve grown up.

And so Amanda Horde goes out of the room smiling, wearing thousand-dollar jeans, a scrap of black lace, and the handcuff I once took from my own wrist and put on hers.

Damn me. Damn me if she isn’t right.

Yeah, I killed her mom.

Sort of.

Mostly she was dead before I broke her neck. Mostly she was infected with a bacteria that was turning her into something. Something you can call a zombie. For lack of a better word that describes something that goes around eating people’s brains. Mostly she wanted to die. Afraid as she was that if she was around much longer she’d eat her own kid.

Far as I’m concerned, parents eating their kids sounds like more of the same. Doesn’t mean I want to watch it happen or anything. Killing the woman just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. The right thing, or the best option.

But she did ask me to do it.

And she did kiss me.

It was a complicated night.

Think about a night like that often enough, you’ll ask a lot of questions. Most of them about yourself. The kind of person you are. What you’ll do and why and when you’ll do it. What you believe in. What you really believe in.

In the movies, a vampire can’t see himself in a mirror. Just because I can, that don’t mean I got to like looking. What’s inside is inside for a reason. Because you’re not supposed to see it.

The girl, she’s a girl. A kid. She doesn’t know any better. And I know fuckall about what she really wants because she’s a teenage girl and who the hell knows what goes through her mind. Figure she wants everything. She wants to see everything the world has to offer. And being a rich kid, she wants to own it all.

Ah, youth.

I make myself a drink. She comes back after I’ve made a couple more.

– Sela can’t get drunk.

I watch her come to the bar; she’s kept the jeans, pulled on a tight pink tuxedo shirt with ruffles down the front, reapplied the makeup, and resprayed her retro-80s-rocker-grrl-shag cut.

I top off my bourbon and cross to the windows and look down at Park Avenue.

– Then she’s not trying.

Amanda laughs. - Seriously, she can’t.

– We can all get drunk. We just have to work real hard at it. Get enough booze in the system before the Vyrus can clean it out.

– Yeah, sure, she told me that, but I mean in a normal way she can’t get drunk. Because she’s an alcoholic. So she doesn’t drink. That’s what I really meant, she can’t drink. Alcohol, I mean. Not the other stuff. She drinks that.

I drink whiskey, pretend to watch the street while I look at her reflection in the glass, next to mine.

She crosses to the Eames and drops into it.

– But she has to drink that.

I keep my back to her.

She opens a box on the table next to the chair and takes out a clove cigarette.

– Which, it doesn’t gross me out or anything, but I do think it kinda sucks. No pun or anything. I mean, really, when you think about it, people eat cows and chickens and pigs and whatever they want, so what’s the dif ? Especially with someone like Sela who’s totally got her shit together. I mean, with what I pay her as my trainer and my bodyguard, she can just buy what she needs. She never has to think about hurting anyone. It would just be so much easier if she could go to a store or something.

She lights her clove with a silver table lighter shaped like a thorn-circled sacred heart.

– Can you imagine, like, blood boutiques ? People would get all sniffy about where they bought their blood and stuff. And someone would be making money. And, like, anyone could sell their blood and make some money and it wouldn’t matter if they were sick or anything because you guys can’t get sick.

She blows a cloud of smoke without coughing.

– But it will probably never happen that way.

She sticks her tongue out, an onyx stud dots its tip.

– Because most people are such fucking prudes. They don’t get anything. They think that if something’s different, that means it’s like it’s abnormal. Like there’s any such thing as normal.

She leans back in the chair.

– Like when people see me and Sela out. If they see us having dinner together, a teenage white chick and a big black woman, they can’t help but think it’s all fucked up. And if they notice her Adam’s apple ? If they’re clued in enough to know she was born with a penis, you can see the freak-out all over their faces. And the way they love it. The way they just love staring and whispering and thinking how much better than her they are. People just suck that way.

I don’t argue with her about it.

She pulls her bare feet up on the chair.

– So it will probably never be like that. Like with all of you getting to live like everybody else.

She hugs her legs to her chest.

– Not unless someone finds a cure.

I turn around.

She rests her cheek against the tops of her knees.

– Did you know I just won a lawsuit ? It was kind of a big deal. In the Journal and everything.

– Must have missed it on my way to the funny pages.

– Uh-huh. Well, I won and I got the terms of my trust altered.

She winks at me.

– You’re right, you know. I mean, I’m kind of surprised you remembered, but you’re right, I am seventeen. But in a couple months, I’m gonna be eighteen. Know what that means?

She bites her lower lip.

– It means that since I won my suit, I start to come into my inheritance. It means all the lawyers and all the board members and all the presidents and the CEOs and everybody has to get out of my ass. It means that all the business and finance classes I’ve been taking at prep, all the biochem courses I’ve audited online, all the tutors I’ve run circles around because they can’t keep up with how smart I am, it means that’s all gonna pay off.