Six
I woke up Friday morning to a weight on my chest and the uncomfortable feeling of fingers pushing and pulling at my lips, drawing them away from my teeth.
I mumbled, “I thought we came to the agreement last year—”
“Happy birthday!” The little culprit cut me off, squirming excitedly on my chest. When I opened my eyes, blinking through brain fog, Casper was holding out what I presumed to be my birthday gift: a dental mirror, a blue toothbrush (fortunately, unopened—last year he’d tried to give me his own electric Spider-Man toothbrush), and a trial-sized tube of bubble-gum toothpaste.
Presumably, he’d nabbed them from his parents’ pediatric dentistry.
“Wow,” I said, taking the mirror and holding it far from my face, making a show of turning my head one way, flexing my jaw, turning the other way. “This is great. I’ve never looked better.”
Casper smiled proudly, showing off sharp fangs and two missing front teeth. He pulled at my top lip again, and I obliged him, baring my fangs.
“Hmm,” he contemplated. “Same as last year.”
“They really are done growing,” I told him, just like I had the year before when I’d been woken the same way. Casper had been around for the last six of my birthdays and had woken me up this way for the last three of them.
“How would you know if I didn’t check?”
He got better at arguing his case each year. Mostly because he knew more words.
“. . . Good point, Casper.”
“What are you doing”—He broke off to yawn. It was past his bedtime—“for your birthday?”
“I don’t have any plans.”
“I have an idea.”
“Is it hide-and-seek?”
“Close your eyes and count to ten.”
So I did, and Casper disappeared. He was, of course, inside the huge glazed flowerpot in the corner where I kept my linens. He always hid in that pot.
Of the many flowerpots in my room, it was the biggest. I kept my pencils, my toothbrush, and my art supplies in small painted clay pots.
My pants were folded inside a big wooden planter in my closet, my shoes lined up in an identical one next to my door.
A third, flipped upside down underneath my desk, acted as a shelf for my books.
Shallow window boxes were mounted to my walls as small shelves for school supplies and the little crochet plushies Cella had made me.
My nightstand was a large upside-down pot covered in mosaic tiles and carved to look like a human face. I used drainage saucers as coasters.
When Mom died, so did her garden. Dad had tried to keep it up for a while, but he was busy with work, and there weren’t many vampires who were willing to devote part of every day to toiling in the bright sun.
I had found my mom’s old flowerpots in the attic when I was twelve and had taken as many as I could make use of.
Cedric said it looked insane, all these pots without plants in them.
He didn’t get it. The plants were on my wall.
Pages torn from my mom’s old botanical field guides, poorly done watercolors of Oregon native flora (she hadn’t been much of an artist), and annotated cutouts from her handbook on flower meanings hung across from my bed with thumbtacks.
The wall was overcrowded, but I wanted them where I could see them before bed and first thing in the morning.
Although the morning was still dark, I kept my curtains drawn to be safe for Casper’s sake. I moved around my room making noise, wondering aloud where he was as I stripped off my tank and put on a black T-shirt, traded my sweatpants for dark denim, slid my feet into socks.
When I was dressed for school, I slammed my hands on the rim of the huge pot. Casper shrieked within.
“Found you,” I reached in to haul him out. “Shit, you’re heavy,” I groaned. It was a lie, but I knew he liked to hear it.
I didn’t get why he was in such a rush to finish getting big when, at some point in his twenties, his body would stop changing altogether if he remained Lunar.
He wrapped his arms around my neck and decided he wanted to stay there, so I washed my face and brushed my teeth with him propped on one hip like a baby.
I let him rub my sunscreen on. He insisted on helping me with my hair, so it ended up looking worse for wear, but with a passing glance at the mirror, I figured I could make the disheveled thing work.
With Casper’s interference and the sea of undead I had to fight through to get out of the house—too many vampires with their birthday wishes—I ran late to pick up Cella.
Her gift to me was a crocheted mosquito.
She had given me a wonky vampire bat for my birthday the first year she learned to crochet, a much better oxpecker the second.
I had thought she would run out of ideas after last year’s vampire finch.
“What’s next year, a leech?” I said.
“Don’t spoil the surprise.”
We ended up late to class, but we weren’t the last at our table to arrive. Mrs. Grant had already set us loose on our pastels when Mason dropped heavily into his seat.
Except, Mason was not Mason but a taller, buffer, dark-skinned boy with short dreadlocks. I recognized him as the guy Mason sat with in environmental science, his football friend.
“Team Macbeth!” he said by way of greeting.
Cella smiled uncertainly. “I think it was actually, uh, Team M-A.”
He screwed up his face. “That’s stupid.”
Mrs. Garcia hunched over Mason’s seat with questions, and the boy flashed a shockingly white smile. He introduced himself as Blake and explained that Mason, out sick, had asked Blake to come in and take notes since Blake didn’t have a first period.
“Notes for art class?” Mrs. Gardner asked dubiously. Blake nodded like it made perfect sense. He had deceptively innocent eyes. Mrs. Garfunkel let him be, apparently convinced, or at least charmed.
“I’m your gift from Mason,” Blake told me. “Happy Birthday.”
“Did he tell you to wish me that?”
“I’m taking some creative liberties,” he said. His smile was so big, topped with apricot cheeks. “He did tell me I’m free to act like him, though, since the rule of your gift is just that you can’t see him. So, uh, fuck you, Kieran. You look like that dude from that creepy Christmas movie.”
My jaw dropped. That was doubly offensive for its vagueness. Did he mean Jack Skellington? Ebenezer Scrooge? The kid from The Polar Express?
“And you.” He extended an arm across the table to Cella, palm up. Cella looked bewildered. Blake didn’t waver, wiggling his fingers. She tentatively laid her hand over his.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,” he said quietly, staring intently into her eyes. “Who is already sick and pale with grief, that thou her maid art far more fair than she.”
Cella burst out laughing, not the cute chirping laugh she used in public but a cackle like an explosion, the laugh she only ever used privately. Her hand flew from his to slap over her mouth. She snorted behind her fingers.
Blake raised his eyebrows, still smiling, at once puzzled and amused.
“Wrong play,” said Cella.
“Well, quoting Macbeth wouldn’t be very romantic, would it?”
***
Mason was absent from our fourth period too.
He had enlisted another stand in, a heavyset boy with sandy hair and a letterman jacket.
He sat in Mason’s seat next to Blake and somehow convinced the teacher that he had been transferred into the class even though the roster didn’t show his name yet.
He spent the period ripping up pages in his notebook, scribbling notes in an imitation of Mason’s atrocious handwriting, folding them up tiny, and passing them to Cella and me.
Since we sat on the opposite side of the classroom, a few slips inevitably got mixed up in transit.
Cella received a couple of highly profane, misdirected notes from the blond kid.
At the end of class, I got one clearly written by Blake that said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”
By the time we got to drama class, Cella was greeting Blake like an old friend, playing into his flirtations like they were putting on a scene. Today’s blocking lesson involved foam swords and fake fighting. Blake leveled his blade at my chest and said, “A plague on your household!”
I didn’t indulge him, but I did duck my head when I felt a laugh bubbling up in my chest. This was all so ridiculous and elaborate and utterly pointless since Mason would still be marked absent from the classes he was missing and his friends from theirs.
Where was Mason? His car had been in his spot that morning. Had he gone as far as to sit in on his friends’ classes, too?
I didn’t know what to call it. A prank? A game?
A present?
Happy birthday, huh?
***
Vampires don’t do birthday cake, for obvious reasons, but in my family, we do chug top-notch blood from a massive gold chalice. So there’s that.
It had always been my favorite drink of the year. With all of the singing and cheering, I almost wasn’t bothered by the feeling, like ants crawling beneath my skin, of life rushing into my body.
The chalice was so big, the natural response after draining the last drop—and you had to get every last drop or the goading would never end—was to dive, bloated, straight into bed, so I was able to retreat to my room unbothered. I liked birthdays for how peacefully they ended.
I was dozing off when a cold, hard feeling jolted me awake.
I felt . . . hurt. I checked myself over—I wasn’t aching anywhere, but I sensed something sharp, cringing with secondhand pain the way I sometimes did watching Annalisa’s horror movies.
I tossed in bed, but it followed me wherever I turned. It had a direction. It tugged.
I stood, slid my feet into slippers, and padded downstairs. The tug led me outside, into the crisp night in my pajamas. My breathing had become shallow, anxious.
The tug became a yank. I gave in to the force of it and broke into a run.
Perks of vampirism: we run fast.
Drawbacks: when you’re running that fast, it’s almost impossible to stop.