Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Nal got a second job housesitting for his high school science teacher, Mr. McGowen, who was going to Lake Marion to teach an advanced chemistry course. Now Nal spent his nights in the shell of Mr. McGowen’s house. Each week Mr. McGowen sent him a check for fifty-six dollars, and his mom lived on this income plus the occasional contribution from Samson, wads of cash that Sam had almost certainly borrowed from someone else. “It helps,” she said, “it’s such a help,” and whenever she said this Nal felt his guts twist. Mr. McGowen’s two-room rental house was making slow progress down the cliffs; another hurricane would finish it. The move there hadn’t mattered in any of the ways that Nal had hoped it would. Samson had buffaloed him into giving him a spare key, and now Nal would wake up to find his brother standing in the umbilical hallway between the two rooms at odd hours:

SUNDAY: “How you living, Nal? Living easy? Easy living? You get paid yet this week? I need you to do me a solid, brotherman …” He was already peeling the bills out of Nal’s wallet.

MONDAY: “Cable’s out. I want to watch the game tonight, so I’ll probably just crash here …”

TUESDAY: “You’re out of toilet paper again. I fucking swear, I’m going to get a rash from coming over here! Some deadly fucking disease …”

WEDNESDAY: “Shit, kid, you need to get to the store. Your fridge is just desolate. What have you been eating?”

For three days, Nal hadn’t ingested anything besides black coffee and a pint of freezer-burned ice cream. Weight was tumbling from his body. Nal was living on liquid hatred now.

“Hey, Nal,” said Samson, barging through the door. “Listen, Vanessa and I were sort of hoping we could spend the night here? She lied and told Mrs. Griga-looney that she’s crashing at a friend’s spot. Cool? Although you should really pick up before she gets here, this place is gross.”

“Cool,” Nal said, his blue hair igniting in the flashing light of the TV. “I just did laundry. Fresh sheets for you guys.” Nal left Samson to root around the empty fridge and fished clean sheets out of Mr. McGowen’s dryer. He made the twin bed with hospital corners, pushed his sneakers and sweaty V-necks under the frame, filled two glasses at the sink faucet and set them on the nightstand. He lit Mr. McGowen’s orange emergency candles to provide a romantic accent. Nal knew this was not the most excellent strategy to woo Vanessa — making the bed so that she could sleep with his brother — but he was getting a sick pleasure from this seduction by proxy. The bedroom was freezing, Nal realized, and he reached over to shut the window — then screamed and leapt a full foot back.

A giant seagull was strutting along Nal’s sill, a bouquet of eelgrass dangling from its beak. Its crown feathers waggled at Nal like tiny fingers. He felt a drip of fear. “What are you doing here?” He had to flick at the webbing of its slate feet before it moved and he could shut the window. The gull cocked its head and bored into Nal with its bright eyes; it was still looking at him as he backed out of the room.

“Hey,” Vanessa greeted him shyly in the kitchen. “So this is McGowen’s place.” She was wearing thin silver bracelets up her arm and had blown out her hair. She had circled her eyes in lime and magenta powder; to Nal it looked as if she’d allowed a bag of candy to melt on her face. He thought she looked much prettier in school.

“Do you guys want chips or anything?” he asked stupidly, looking from Samson to Vanessa. “Soda? I have chips.”

Vanessa kept her eyes on the nubby carpet. “Soda sounds good.”

“He’s just leaving,” Samson said. He squeezed Nal’s shoulder as he spun him toward the door. “Thank you,” he said, leaning in so close that Nal could smell the spearmint and vodka mix on his breath, “thank you so much ”—which somehow made everything worse.

“NAL DRIVES THE LANE! Nal brings the ball upcourt with seconds to play!” Nal whispered, dribbling his ball well past midnight. He dribbled up and down the main street that led to Strong Beach, and kept spooking himself with his own image in the dark storefront windows. “Nal has the ball …” He continued down to the public courts. “Jesus! Not you again!” A giant seagull had perched on the backboard and was staring opaquely forward. “Get out of here!” Nal threw the ball until the backboard juddered, but the bird remained. Maybe it’s sick, Nal thought. Maybe it has some kind of neurological damage. He tucked the ball under his arm and walked farther down Strong Beach. The seagull flew over his head and disappeared into a dark thicket of pines, the beginnings of the National Reserve forest that lined Strong Beach. Nal was surprised to find himself jogging after it, following the bird into those shadows.

“Gull?” he called after it, his sneakers sinking into the dark leaves.

He found it settled on a low pine branch. The giant seagull had a sheriff’s build — distended barrel chest, spindly legs splayed into star-shaped feet. Nal had a sudden presentiment: “Are you my conscience?” he asked, reaching out to stroke the vane of one feather. The gull blatted at Nal and began digging around the underside of one wing with its beak like a tiny man sniffing his armpits. Okay, not my conscience, then, Nal decided. But maybe some kind of omen? Something was dangling from its lower beak — another cigarette, Nal thought at first, then realized it was a square of glossy paper. As he watched, the gull lifted off the branch and soared directly into one of the trees. In the moonlight, Nal saw a hollow there about the size of his basketball: gulls kept disappearing into this hole. Dozens of them were flying around the moon-bright leaves — they moved with the organized frenzy of bees or bats. How deep was the hollow? he wondered. Was this normal nocturnal activity for this kind of gull? The birds flew in absolute silence. Their wingtips sailed as softly as paintbrushes across the night sky; every so often single birds descended from this cloud. Each gull flapped into the hollow and didn’t reemerge for whole minutes.

Nal chucked his basketball at the hollow to see if it would disappear, go winking into another dimension, like objects did in that terrible TV movie he secretly loved, Magellan Maps the Black Hole . The basketball bounced back and caught Nal hard against his jaw. He winced and shot a look up and down Strong Beach to make sure that nobody had seen. The hollow was almost a foot above Nal’s head, and when he pushed up to peek inside it he saw nothing: just the pulpy reddish guts of the tree. No seagulls, and no passage through that he could divine. There was a nest in the tree hollow, though, a dark wet cup of vegetation. The bottom of the nest was lined with paper scraps — a few were tickets, Nal saw, not stubs or fragments but whole squares, some legible: Mary Gloster’s train tickets to Florence, a hologram stamp for a Thai Lotus Blossom day cruise, a roll of carnival-red ADMIT ONES. Nal riffled through the top layer. Mary Gloster’s tickets, he noticed, were dated two years in the future. He saw a square edge with the letters WIL beneath a wreath of blackened moss and tugged at it. My ticket, Nal thought wonderingly. WILSON. How did the gulls get this? It was his pass for the rising sophomore class’s summer trip to Whitsunday Island, a glowing ember of volcanic rock that was just visible from the Athertown marina. He was shocked to find it here; his mother hadn’t been able to pay the fee back in April, and Nal’s name had been removed from the list of participants. The trip was tomorrow.

Nal was at the marina by 8:00 a.m. He was sitting on a barrel when his teacher arrived, and he watched as she tore open a sealed envelope and distributed the tickets one by one to each of his classmates. He waited until all the other students had disappeared onto the ferry to approach her.