Jane Jones (3 page)

I had closed my eyes for only one second before my mom’s head poked into my lair. “Are you hungry? I could defrost a little something for you.”

A little something, in my case, would be a drop of Bombay blood. It’s the rarest blood type in the world. Lots of people think the rarest blood type is AB negative, because not many people have it, but Bombay blood is even scarcer. It has something to do with things called phenotypes and
antigens. My younger brother, Zachary, could explain the exact science to you. He’s, like, a scientific genius even though he only looks ten. What I do know is that Bombay blood type was discovered in India in 1952 and I first tasted it in 1968 when my mother got her hands on some to test my brother’s theory that I could tolerate it. Fortunately, he was correct, because prior to that, after a few scary reactions to regular blood, I never fed on anything. That’s something else about vampires you might not know. We don’t absolutely need to drink blood to live. With only a few exceptions, nothing can really kill us, no matter what kind of rough shape we’re in. However, we do need blood to be healthy, but only a drop or two every day. Of course, there are vampires who can’t control their urge to have more than a drop or two … or two thousand. When you hear about a person being drained by a vampire, it’s because they were unlucky enough to meet a vampire with a real drinking problem. Since the only blood I can feed on is extremely precious—found in just four people out of every million—I can never afford to get that greedy. I eat much less frequently than others of my kind and I’ve existed off of the same bag of black-market donor blood for at least ten years. Yes, it was more expensive than I could even wrap my mind around, but it’s been a decade since we’ve had to go “grocery shopping” for me.

I shook my head no at Ma’s offer of an impromptu snack, and she leaned in to kiss my chilly cheek with her cool lips before she turned and left for the warmth of her own bedroom. It was hard enough for us to sleep at night, but I knew it was even more difficult for her since my father had taken a job as a night quality-control manager at the Fresh Meadow Farms cookie and cracker plant in the next town over. It seemed like an ideal gig for a vampire, except for the fact that he had no use for the one semi-decent job perk of unlimited free cookies and crackers. In fact, the smell of those things baking made him pretty nauseated. But who knows, that might have been the case even if he’d still been human. Fresh Meadow Farms cookies and crackers are basically made of sawdust and glue.

There was a time when my family would have been grateful to have any free food at our disposal, no matter how repugnant it was. I remember our sad little farm on the Oklahoma panhandle. I remember my father planting wheat, even though the crop had failed the year before. I remember all of us being so hungry that we thought about eating the skeletal old milk cow we had loved like a pet. Then I remember a brown cloud rolling across the plain and my mother covering our faces with wet rags as our house rattled and filled with something that looked like smoke. When it was over, dust had drifted in front of our
door like snow. The cow was dead. The wheat was gone. Both of my parents cried, and so my brother and I cried too. I thought for a while that we would pack up our things and move away after that, but we didn’t. My mother just went to work cleaning the house, and my father replanted the wheat. I couldn’t help out the way I should have, because I came down with a pretty bad case of pneumonia and almost died. Almost. From what my parents have told me, we were all closer to death than they could admit at the time.

According to Ma, even without me being able to sit up or eat, we had run out of food. We had no livestock and no dry goods and no money or credit to buy even a tin of anything to share. My parents were ashamed, but they agreed that we couldn’t go on that way. So my father set out on foot—because he’d never earned enough to buy the horse and carriage he’d planned on getting one day—to ask Mr. and Mrs. Pike if they had anything to spare. The Pikes had just settled in to the house nearest to ours, and I recall my parents being so thrilled to have neighbors. When my father arrived, he found them loading their Model A pickup truck with all of their belongings, saying they were moving on, going to try their luck out West. When my father explained our situation, the Pikes graciously drove him back to our house on their way. Ruth Pike offered to come in
and help Ma make a stew out of some of the meat and vegetables she’d packed away for the trip. Turner Pike told my father, “You ain’t never had nothing like my Ruthie’s stew.” It’s true. We never had. And we never did either. By the time the Pikes peeled away from our farm, my family was no longer dying of starvation. Also, my family was no longer officially living.

Like I said, I was worse off than anyone because of how sick I was. When I finally came around, my mother, my father, and Zachary were still trying to figure out what in the holy hell had happened to all of them. It wasn’t like the Pikes were kind enough to leave an instruction manual. From what they remembered, once Ruth and Turner had been invited across the threshold of our home, it was over within minutes. Ruth bit my father, and when my mother tried to pull her off, she was bitten by someone. My parents couldn’t bring themselves to describe what had happened to my brother, but I guessed he’d been somebody’s dessert. Nobody ever said what had happened to me either. My father did once tell me that when he woke up, Turner was squeezing drops of blood from Ruth’s fingertip into my mother’s mouth. When Ruth saw that he was awake, she just said, “Soon you’re all gonna feel right fine again.” Then they were gone.

At first, we didn’t understand what we’d become.
Eventually, though, my parents pieced together memories of the attack with scary stories they’d heard whispered around campfires. They gradually noticed that thoughts of food were slipping away, and the idea of eating something that once made us drool now repulsed us. Even though my parents had never been particularly religious, I remember my mother praying that it was all a mistake. Then I remember her trying to accept it, even saying what a blessing it was, because while we surely would have died from hunger before, now we could stay and keep trying to make the farm work, no matter how many dust storms blew through. She was in some deep denial. Soon it became apparent that even if my father could have planted a successful crop, it wasn’t practical for him to be tending fields in the hot sun every day.

Ancient instincts also started kicking in, telling my family that in order to get stronger, we would need to feed like the Pikes had. We were thin and pale and hungry in a way that was altogether different from the way we had been hungry before. When we thought about eating, our sharp canine teeth protruded like animal fangs. As a family, we made a pact that we would feed as sparingly as possible. We wouldn’t kill anyone and we wouldn’t turn anyone like we’d been turned.

It wasn’t long after that I discovered my problem. I
mean, besides the problem of being a vampire. I vanted to suck blood, I just vasn’t able to vithout nearly croaking. While my family cooked up schemes and tricks for dining on human blood as ethically as they could, I just existed, thinner and paler and hungrier than ever.

The problem with a vampire thinking about her past is that there’s so much past to think about. Once you get started down memory lane, it’s hard to stop remembering all the places you’ve been and all the people you’ve left behind. My family has been moving to a new town every four years for the past seventy-five years. It’s because we have to hide the fact that we’re not aging like regular people. I’m not sure exactly what would happen if we just decided to stay put, but I wish that we could. I would even stay here, in this place that I hate, where I will never fit in. I can’t think of anything dumber than living forever when every other thing in your life is so temporary.

If I had accepted my mother’s offer of a bedtime drop, I might have been able to sleep. My body was so tired, my limbs were rubbery, but my mind wouldn’t be quiet. I got out of bed and powered down the sunlamps. I made my way across my darkened room, sat at my desk, and opened my laptop. I logged on to my email account. Don’t think I don’t understand how sad it is that the highlight of my day is often reading a scam email from a fake Nigerian prince
who claims that he needs to borrow money from me in order to make us both rich. I get that it’s pathetic, but I set up an email account because even pathetic loners need to be reachable in order to join message boards in order to talk with other pathetic loners.

I actually like the Internet, because I can just pretend to be a regular human weirdo there. I belong to one webring where all the members are video-gamers and another one where everyone is a huge fan of this particular reality show. Honestly, I don’t give a rat’s tiny heinie about either of those things, but the people are friendly enough and I can talk for a little while without much chance of exposing who I am. What I am. Sometimes, on the gamer board, I even get a little flirty with this one guy who’s kind of funny. Once, my mom flipped out when she eavesread an exchange between us over my shoulder. She gave me this huge lecture about how the Internet is full of predators who are dangerous, especially to young girls. I completely agreed with her but couldn’t resist pointing out that I could, in theory, be considered the predator in this situation. True, a pitiful blood-intolerant vampire, but a genuine vampire nonetheless.

When I opened my email, I had four messages. No Nigerian princes, but one alert about a sale at Hot Topic and one offer to sell me some celebrity’s secrets for teeth
whitening. I briefly wondered if it would work on my fangs before hitting Delete.

The third message was slightly intriguing. When we moved to town, I had set up a Facebook page for myself, with my new alias, Jane Jones. At the time, I was fantasizing about all the new acquaintances I would make in this place. I wasn’t really taking into account the fact that after being in high school for decades on end, I had never really associated with anyone who I would want to talk to outside of school. Needless to say, I was surprised when I read, “Eli Matthews has added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Eli Matthews in order for you to be friends.” Eli Matthews was a kid whose name I thought I recognized from my American history class. Maybe. We might have had some other classes together too, but I wasn’t sure. If he was who I wasn’t 100 percent certain he was, he wasn’t exactly noteworthy. Still, he had noticed me, I guess. My hand hovered over my laptop. After the evening’s events I wasn’t sure how smart it was to establish a relationship with someone at school, no matter how virtual or casual it was. I didn’t click Confirm, but I didn’t click Ignore or Delete either. The message would be there when I decided what I should do.

The last message was a news alert I had set up for any article or blog post containing the words
vampire
and
cure.
I had originally set it up with just
vampire
, but thanks to certain movies starring certain sexy teen actors, my in-box was flooded. Once I refined my search to include the word
cure
, the notifications practically dried up. When I did get a hit, it was usually an article in which the two words had nothing to do with each other in context. Occasionally, I’d get a link to some crazy vamp fan fiction. I wasn’t expecting much when I clicked on the email or when I clicked on the link contained within. Actually, the website I was taken to didn’t say much itself, yet what it did say nearly knocked me off my chair. The headline simply said, “Local Researcher Claims Vampires Exist, and He’s Found a Cure for Their Condition.”

I scanned the article for what had to be the zillionth time since Friday night.
Of course, I’d printed it out right away so I could fold it up and hide it from my parents. Then I made sure to delete the email and erase my browser history. I had to do it. Like I said, my mom’s really into Internet safety, so I’m pretty sure that while I’m at school she looks at all the websites I’ve been on to see if I’m downloading naked pictures or something. Kind of bizarre considering I’m technically in my early nineties.