Underdead (21 page)

His cry of, “Josephine! How lovely to see you at Mass today!” squelched my mother’s suspicions, just as she’d leaned over to whisper them in my ear.

I was quietly celebrating my victory when it happened. I had just turned to head down the wide, well-worn pale marble steps when my mother grabbed my sleeve and pulled me back. “Where do you think you’re going?” She dipped her index finger in the gilded bowl of holy water set in an alcove near a delicate statue of the Virgin Mary and reverently made the sign of the cross on herself. Before I could move, she dipped again and reached for my forehead like she had when I was a little girl. I panicked and ducked.

“Josephine Gartner!” she hissed in an angry whisper. “What is wrong with you?” She held my arm in an iron grip and stabbed at my forehead, my chest and both shoulders. I felt burning on my forehead where the holy water touched my skin and quickly arranged my hair to cover it.

On the way to the parking lot, my mother let loose a steady stream of sotto voce outrage over my behavior, while managing to nod, smile, and exchange pleasantries with friends and acquaintances as we passed.

“We are not done here, young lady! You’re lucky your father expects me home or…” The rest of the threat was lost to the wind as she turned to beep open her Lexus.

When she finally drove off, I climbed into my car and pulled back the oversized hood that covered my face and studied my forehead anxiously in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see myself well enough to assess the damage.

I sat there, gripping the wheel in silent frustration, until a child’s happy yell shook me out of my black study. A little girl I recognized from the bi-monthly post-Mass coffee and doughnuts mixers had won the race to the family sedan parked next to me. She called excitedly for her parents to follow, but they were deep in conversation with another couple a few cars down. I got back out of the car. Opportunity had knocked.

I bent down a little so as not to intimidate her and smiled brightly. “Hi there,” I fought for the memory and emerged triumphant, “Debbie.” She smiled back in shy recognition and squirmed shyly against the car. Her parents glanced over. We did the polite, “Hi, how ya doin’” head nod exchange, and they went back to their conversation.

I told Debbie, “I’m meeting my boyfriend in a few minutes and can’t seem to find my compact. Can you be my makeup advisor today?”

Her china blue eyes lit with interest and she nodded eagerly. I had gone from slightly intimidating grown-up to Barbie doll. She was in her element now. I pushed back my hood, brushed the hair away from my face, and bent down so she could get a good look at my forehead. “How does it look?” I asked. “Is my make-up even? Did I miss a spot anywhere?”

“Well,” she said shyly, “I think you should fix it.”

“Where? Here?” I pointed at my forehead where I could still feel a residual tingle from the holy water.

“Noooo, that part’s okay.” She was gaining confidence with every word. I was creating an Estee Lauder here. “But the rest of it’s too red. Your blush got everywhere.”

I thanked her solemnly for her expertise and left, not to get back in my car, but to go back to the church. By now, Father Stevens had gone back inside and most everyone else had left. I approached the little outdoor alcove where the holy water resided and tentatively dipped in a finger. It stung. I quickly wiped the liquid on the back of my hand and as I watched, the angry, red skin turned pale. I shoved my hand in my pocket, turned and left.

I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to schedule department meetings on Monday afternoons. Having us cap off the longest teaching day of the week with a couple hours of Roger was cruel and unusual punishment and should have been outlawed. We all had developed a strategy for enduring them. Mine was to tune out, occasionally tuning back in to make sure we hadn’t gotten to anything interesting or that required an actual response. The technique generally served me well, and if I mistakenly tuned out too long, Carol would nudge me. She always paid attention, lest Roger one day realize he was preaching to a roomful of zombies and start rubber stamping his own agenda unchecked.

During today’s meeting, I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that Carol had to nudge me three times before I realized Roger had asked me a question and was waiting for a response.

“What?” I said, subtly hiding my inattention.

He repeated the question slowly, as if to an imbecile. “I was saying we needed someone to take over the Science Olympiad, now that Bob’s…er…”

He hadn’t stopped out of delicacy. I had trained
the look
on him.

“I don’t think I’m the best candidate, Roger. Why don’t you ask someone else?” I suggested gently. I felt like Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original
Star Wars
, when he did that mind trick on the Stormtroopers outside the cantina.

Roger turned to Kendra. “Jo’s right. It’s too important for her to handle alone. Kendra, why don’t you assist her. You’ve done it several times before.”

Kendra shot me a dirty look and I groaned inwardly. That was
not
how I had wanted it to go. Either I had little control over the look or Roger was such a fiend he was immune. Probably both. The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter. Kendra and I stayed after to discuss the Science Olympiad.

It was a short discussion. She handed me a list of five of the ten categories.

“Here.” She spoke briskly, as if she wanted to get this over as quickly as possible because she couldn’t stand to be in the room with me. “You take these, I’ll take the rest. We’ll have the first meeting with the students later this week. Thursday okay?”

I nodded. Saying sorry was so inadequate as to have been insulting. The best thing I could do was not slow her down.

“They can sign up for their three activities then. We’ll take alternate weeks coaching them in our respective areas. I’ll take the first week. You’d better sit in on it, to see how I balance the training among the five areas. Since you’re such a weak candidate for the job.”

I sat there for a moment after she left, adding a little well-deserved self-flagellation to the mild upbraiding Kendra had delivered. What had I been thinking, trying to use a vampire’s trick on a coworker? I’d seen what it had done to my students, and had been rightfully horrified. How had I concluded it was okay to try it on adults? What about my plan to avoid using it, lest it pull me closer to the dark side?

That night on the way home from work I did something terrible. That doesn’t mean I can’t justify what I did. I can—and believe me I did a snow job on myself while on the way to do it—but the fact remains that I stole from a church. My church. I stole from work, too—a beaker and a rubber stopper. But compared to the other, that hardly bears mentioning, even if Bayshore is a parochial school.

Too ashamed to park in the church’s lot, I left my car on a little-used side street and skulked over to the front of the church where I ducked into the shadow of a stone column. I stayed there for ten minutes, wanting to make sure the place was deserted before I made my move. (I was sure after five minutes, but by then I had to talk myself into it all over again.) Then, moving casually as if I had legitimate business there—in front of a locked church, after dark—I made my way to the little alcove near the wide double doors of the church, where a small bowl of holy water was always kept filled.

In one smooth motion, I dipped the test tube into the bowl, filled it with holy water and plugged it tight with the stopper. Muttering a quick prayer of apology, the contents of which are between me and my maker, I tucked the vial into my pocket and strode quickly back toward my car.

The moon was high, the evening bright, and my conscience busy. If I noticed the wide gaps between the streetlights on the narrow road, they didn’t trouble me. My right hand hadn’t left my pocket after depositing its burden, and my fingers worried the stopper while my actions worried my conscience. So absorbed was I in my own dark thoughts that I didn’t realize I had come upon my car until I had nearly passed it.

Or maybe I didn’t realize it was my car because someone else was standing possessively by the driver’s door.

“Will.” I felt my mouth go dry and my legs turn to rubber. This was it. I couldn’t fight him off if he was determined. The first time I’d surprised him. The second time, Gavin had been there to intercede for me. I knew very well the reason I was alive and pilfering today was that Will hadn’t yet tried a third time. That last time I’d seen him didn’t count—he had held back out of an odd nobility that I didn’t like to think about.

He came toward me, moving smoothly on his long powerful legs, almost as if he were gliding. I stood there, unmoving, taking in his starkly handsome face as if I were having a dream. The moonlight threw his sculpted face into relief. His long, wavy hair fell in a blue-black curtain past his broad shoulders and his eyes were dark pools of shadow. When he got within a few feet of me, I stopped staring like a lovesick teen and ran.

I hadn’t gone more than a few yards before I realized the street dead-ended up ahead. I veered between two cars and doubled back to my own, circling it twice while I scrabbled for my keys. Will followed, gaining on me. Holding out the door key with both hands, I made a wild dive for the driver’s side door lock, and missed. Will closed the distance, coming so near he made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My breath came in frantic shallow gasps and tears streamed down my face. I panicked completely and tried to burrow in through the metal.

“Jo,” he said, touching my shoulder gently. I flinched as if he had shocked me and cried harder. There was no one to help me.

“Turn around.”

“No,” I said in a cracking voice I hardly recognized as my own.

He touched a hand lightly to my hair. “Please don’t cry. Everything will be all right.” He ran a finger caressingly down my cheek, wiping away the tears that soaked it. It was the tender, romantic gesture of a lover, only it was all wrong.

I pushed his hand away. “Stop that!” I turned to face him, and now the quaver in my voice was one of fury. “If you’re going to kill me, do it. But stop,” I sputtered angrily, “toying with me. Don’t pretend you care about me. It’s insulting!”

Will was taken aback. “I do care about you!”

His apparent sincerity made me even angrier. “No, you don’t! If you did, you’d notice you’re scaring the crap out of me. I don’t want to be a vampire! Do I look willing, Will? Do I? Well, I’m not!”

I pulled the test tube out of my pocket and held it up. He took a step back.

“Do you see this?” I demanded, tears of anger streaming down my face. “This is holy water I stole from my church. Stole! Why? Because I met a handsome man whom against my better judgment I kissed because he charmed me with a witty intelligent discussion about
books
. And I woke up the next morning like
this
.” I gestured down at myself and Will took another step back, wary of the test tube I was swinging wildly about. “I can no longer run or hike because the sun burns my skin, my complexion scares children, and I can’t enjoy a single stinking bite of shrimp scampi without people concluding I’m pregnant with a dead colleague’s love child!”

He held out his hands in a supplicating gesture. “Jo, I—”

“I’m not done! Do you know why I stole this?” I asked in a deceptively calm voice.

“You want to pour it on me?”

“No. Because it will heal my skin. At least I think it will. I’ve never stolen a thing in my life—except a pack of gum from the supermarket when I was four, and I felt so bad I gave it back the next day—but tonight I stole from a church to clear up my complexion. My complexion! What kind of person does that? My values are in the toilet and now I’m going to hell all because you randomly picked me out of a crowd one night and tried to turn me into a vampire.”

“It wasn’t random, Jo.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that supposed to make it better? You denied killing Bob because you said he wasn’t someone you would have wanted to spend eternity with. Did you bother to wonder what it’d be like to be stuck for all eternity with me? Don’t you least want a girl who’s willing?”

His temper flared and he yanked me away from the car. I stumbled but he caught me up against him and captured my lips in a bruising kiss. I felt a familiar warmth course through me as the kiss began to change subtly into another kind altogether.

Will thrust me away and took a step back. I fell back against the car, feeling the cool night breeze where his body had been pressed against mine. His deep blue eyes burned down into my own.

“Are you quite sure you’re not willing?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned angrily on his heel and walked away.

I got home, somehow; I couldn’t remember the drive.

Once again, Will could have bitten me, could have completed my transformation, but he hadn’t. I didn’t know why and my speculations weren’t good company.

I tried not to think about Will, but I couldn’t think of anything else. It was true, what he’d said. Part of me did want him, and it wasn’t just the vampire part. And, though I didn’t care to admit it, there was a part of me that liked him, even respected him.

I forced the thought away, horrified and scared about what it might mean, but it kept eating at me until I faced it. Maybe he was right. Maybe I did want to be with him. Wanted to let go of my resistance. Wanted, in fact, to complete the transformation, to stop living this half-life, to become, in full, a vampire.

No. I couldn’t let it happen. I wouldn’t. With shaking hands, I pulled the vial of holy water out of my pocket, wrested out the cork, and splashed some of the liquid onto my face. I gasped sharply at the pain, nearly dropping the vial. But I continued ruthlessly, almost welcoming the pain, my hot jagged tears mingling with the holy water as it burned into my cheeks, my chin, my neck. I rubbed what liquid remained onto my hands and arms, rousting him out with each of turn of my hand.

The next morning I woke abruptly before dawn. I felt funny, somehow. Different. It took me a moment to get the sleep fuzz off my brain, but when I did, I remembered my experiment with appalling clarity. Oh God! What had I done to myself? I reached a shaky hand up to touch my face, but the skin felt smooth and cool. I flicked on my bedside lamp and anxiously examined my hands.