Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“Nal Wilson? Oh dear. I wasn’t aware that you were coming …” She gave him a tight smile and shook out the empty manila envelope, as if trying to convince him that his presence here was a slightly embarrassing mistake.

“ ’S okay, I have my ticket here.” Nal waved the orange ticket, which was shot through with tiny perforations from where the gull’s beak had stabbed it. He lined up on the waffled copper of the ferry ramp. The boat captain stamped his ticket redeemed, and Nal felt that he had won a small but significant battle. On the hydrofoil, Nal sat next to Vanessa. “That’s my seat,” grumbled a stout Fijian man in a bolo tie behind him, but Nal shrugged and gestured around the hold. “Looks like there are plenty of seats to go around, sir,” he said, and was surprised when the big man floated on like some bad weather he’d dispelled with native magic. He could feel Vanessa radiating warmth beside him and was afraid to turn.

“Hey, you,” Vanessa said. “Thanks for letting me crash in your bed last night.”

“Don’t mention it. Always fun to be the maid service for my brother.”

Vanessa regarded him quietly for a moment. “I like your hair.”

“Oh,” Nal said miserably, rolling his eyes upward. “This blue isn’t really me—” and then he felt immediately stupid, because just who did he think he was, anyway? Cousin Steve refused to shave it off, saying that to do so would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath of Beauty Professionals. “Unfortunately you have an extremely lumpy head,” Cousin Steve had informed him, stern as a physician. “You need that blue to hide the contours. It’s like you’ve got golf balls buried up there.” But Vanessa, he saw with a rush of gratitude, was nodding at him.

“I know it’s not you,” she said. “But it’s a good disguise.”

Nal nodded, wondering what she might be referring to. He was thrilled by the idea that Vanessa saw past this camouflage to something hidden in him, so secret that even he didn’t know what she was seeing there.

On the long ride to Whitsunday, they talked about their families. Vanessa was the youngest of five girls, and, from what she was telling Nal, it sounded as if her adolescence had been both accelerated and prolonged. She was still playing with dolls when she watched her eldest sister, Rue Ann, guide her boyfriend to their bedroom. “We have to leave the lights on, or Vanessa will be scared. It’s fine, she’s still tiny. She doesn’t understand.” The boyfriend grinning into her playpen, twaddling his fingers. Vanessa watched with eyes round as moon pies as her sister disrobed, draping her black T-shirt over the lampshade to dim it. But she had also been babied by her four sisters, and her questions about their activities got smothered beneath a blanket of care. Her parents began treating her like the baby of the family again once the other girls were gone. Her father was a Qantas mechanic and her mother worked a series of housekeeping jobs even though she didn’t strictly need to, greeting Vanessa with a nervous “Hello!” at the end of each day.

“Which is funny, because our own house is always a mess now …”

Nal watched the way her mouth twitched; his heart and his stomach were staging some weird circus inside him.

“Yeah, that’s pretty funny.” Nal frowned. “Except that, I mean, it sounds really awful, too …”

He tried to get one arm around Vanessa’s left shoulder but felt too cowardly to lower it all the way; he stared in horror at where his arm had stopped, about an inch above Vanessa’s skin, like a malfunctioning bar in a theme park ride. When he lifted his arm again he noticed a gauzy stripe peeking out of Vanessa’s shirt.

“I’m sorry,” Nal interrupted, “Vanessa? Uh, your shirt is falling down …”

“Yeah.” She tugged at it, unconcerned. “This was Brianne’s, and she was never what you’d call petite. She’s an air hostess now and my dad always jokes that he doesn’t know how she maneuvers the aisles.” Vanessa hooked a clear nail under her neckline. “My dad can be pretty mean. He’s mad at her for leaving.”

Nal couldn’t take his eyes off the white binding. “Is that … is that a bandage?”

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s my disguise.”

Vanessa said she still held on to some childlike habits because they seemed to calm her parents. “I had to pretend I believed in Santa Claus until I was twelve,” she said. “Did Sam tell you that I was accepted to LMASS, too?”

“Oh, wow. Congratulations. When do you leave?”

“I’m not going. I mentioned that the dorms at Lake Marion were coed and my father didn’t speak to me for days.” Why her development of breasts should terrify her parents Vanessa didn’t understand, but she began wearing bulky, loose shirts and wrapping Ace bandages over her bras all the same. “I got the idea from English class,” she said. “Shakespeare’s Rosalind.” Her voice changed when she talked about this — she let out a hot, embarrassed laugh and then dove into a whisper, as if she’d been trying to make a joke and suddenly switched gears.

“Isn’t that a little weird?” Nal said.

Vanessa shrugged. “Less friction with my parents. The tape doesn’t work as good as it did last year but it’s sort of become this habit?”

Nal couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to look; he was having a hard time staying focused in the midst of all this overt discussion of Vanessa’s breasts.

“So you’re stuck there now?”

“I don’t see how I could leave my folks. I’m their last.”

Vanessa wanted out but said she felt as though the exits had vanished with her sisters. They’d each schemed or blundered their way out of Athertown — early pregnancy, nursing school, marriage, the Service Corps. Now Vanessa rumbled around the house like its last working part. Nal got an image of Mr. and Mrs. Grigalunas sitting in their kitchen with their backs to the whirlwind void opened by their daughters’ absence: reading the paper; sipping orange juice; collecting these old clothes like the shed skins of their former daughters and dressing Vanessa in them. He thought about her gloopy makeup and the urgency with which she’d kissed his brother, her thin legs knifing over the dune. Maybe she doesn’t actually like my brother at all, Nal thought, encouraged by a new theory. Maybe she treats sex like oxidizing air. Aging rapidly wherever she can manage it, like a cut apple left on a counter.

“That’s why it’s easy to be with your brother,” she said. “It’s a relief to … to get out of there, to be with someone older. But it’s not like we’re serious, you know?” She brightened as she said this last part, as if it were a wonderful idea that had just occurred to her.

What do I say now? Nal wondered. Should I ask her to explain what she means? Should I tell her Samson doesn’t love her, but I do? The homunculus typed up frantic speeches, discarded them, tore at his green sweater in anguish, gnashed the typewriter ribbon between his buckteeth. Nal could hear himself babbling — they talked about the insufferable stupidity of this year’s ninth-graders, his harem of geezers at Penny’s, Dr. J’s jump hook, Cousin Steve’s bewildering mullet. More than once, Nal watched her tug her sister’s tentlike shirt up. They spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Whitsunday Island together, cracking jokes as they filed past the flowery enclosure full of crocodiles; the dry pool of Komodo dragons with their wispy beards; and finally, just before the park’s exit, the koala who looked like a raddled veteran of war, gumming leaves at twilight. They talked about how maybe it wasn’t such a terrible thing that they’d both missed out on Lake Marion, and on the way back up the waffled ramp to the hydrofoil Vanessa let her hand slide inside Nal’s sweating palm.