Chapter 28 The Second Rule of Fight Vampire Club Trope
At this point, Tiffany Amanda Blair’s past was haunting me more than my own, and that was saying something. I’d spent too much time poring over yearbooks, learning who Tiffany had been in high school. That was useful, but I needed to know who she became, not who she was as a teenager.
Curled up in an armchair, I played Google detective.
There were so many Tiffanys. Young ones doing makeup tutorials, professional Tiffanys posing in front of bookcases on LinkedIn.
Then there were volleyball Tiffanys and golf Tiffanys, not to mention obituaries for the dead ones.
Team Tiffany was larger and more loosely connected than I had imagined, though it was doubtful that any of them knew about the epiphany we were all named for.
These Tiffanys knew about Hot Topic and, apparently, golf.
I face-palmed at one entry.
Two weeks ago, local restaurant Mui Thai filed a complaint against blood donation center Plasma4Life, citing that the plasma donation business is scaring customers away.
Good times. The Plasma4Life donation line used to weave right in front of Mui Thai. If you wanted Thai food, you had to walk past the line of people waiting to donate. The plasma crowd was often asking for money or leftovers and generally getting loud.
Kulap, one of the waiters, was always swearing and yelling, “Stop blocking the entrance!” Then Lance would come out and yell at Kulap. Rinse and repeat.
To smooth things over one night, I’d ordered five hundred dollars’ worth of pad thai and spring rolls for the people in line.
The article included a picture of a guy crouched on the curb eating from a takeout carton.
You could see me in the background handing out spring rolls, blurry and out of focus beneath a streetlight.
Looking at the evidence of that one day preserved forever online filled me with a sense of belonging. It was my version of the Valentine High School yearbook. I wasn’t prom queen, I didn’t have the best smile in my class, but I’d left my mark in my own way.
When I added Valentine Vermont to the search, a few results popped up. I saw Tiffany and Jeff’s engagement announcement and then Jeff’s obituary.
Jeffrey Andrew Powers (1990–2015) is survived by his parents, Melinda and Tom Powers, and his fiancée, Tiffany Amanda Blair.
Jeff was born and raised in Valentine and graduated from Valentine High School.
He will be remembered as an easygoing and friendly pillar of the community, always willing to offer help when needed.
He loved snowboarding and will always have the high score on the Street Fighter II game at Skip’s Pizza Parlor and Arcade.
He was set to take over daily operations of the family tree farm and marry his fiancée this upcoming summer.
He will be missed. Services will be held on Friday at the Valentine Church at 3 p.m., followed by a reception in the basement.
I stared at the obituary, reading it again.
I’d bought Tiffany’s identity in 2015. Apparently, she had skipped town right after Jeff died.
I glanced over at the open yearbook lying on the floor where I’d abandoned it the other day.
Tiffany Amanda Blair stared back at me, a sweet smile curving her lips. What was this woman hiding?
Tonight, there was no wait for therapy. Dr. Rosetti ushered me into her office straightaway.
After last night’s text exchange, she was probably going to want to discuss my diet.
Me, I was hoping she could help me uncover my past. Instead of her usual cable-knit sweater, Dr. Rosetti was wearing an outfit that could transition from day to night seamlessly.
All she had to do was take off her stuffy cardigan, shake her hair out, and work on her accessories game.
“As your friend,” I said, “I think a brooch would look nice with that blouse.” Especially if she was going out. Rosetti on the town—I could see it. “Does anyone ever call you Rosé?” It was the perfect nickname.
“Tiffany,” she said, ignoring my suggestion, “before we begin, have you eaten anything since you texted?”
“Yes, I gave up on the juice cleanse.”
“Excellent.” She nodded with approval. “Do you feel better now?”
“I’m sorry I bothered you with that. I’m fine.”
“You were upset enough to text. We should talk about it. Why were you on the juice cleanse?”
“Because I don’t want to hurt someone every time I’m thirsty. I’m trying to be normal. I’m trying to fit in.”
She leaned forward with intensity and focus, like she was about to uncover my core trauma. “Who do you think you’re hurting?”
I rubbed my temple in frustration. She wanted me to realize I was hurting myself with my diet. This was not going to be a breakthrough moment.
“Dr. R, you remember that I’m a vampire?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“You understand how vampires eat, correct? Me going on a diet is good for everyone’s health but mine.” When she didn’t answer, I asked, “Did you see or read Twilight?”
“Team Jacob,” she answered without thinking.
“Really, the werewolf?” But I got it. Jacob was hot.
“Anyway, Stephenie Meyer got the feeding part right. It’s just that vampires don’t all have mansions and sparkly skin, which is too bad.
Also, I’ve never met a Jacob.” The closest thing was that fake coyote, which really was giving me hell.
I’d take a werewolf over being trapped in a cage of my own lies any day.
Dr. Rosetti made a note.
“I know you only have fifty minutes, so I’m going to get right to it.” I needed to see if I could get any information about Jeff from her. “I want to run a hypothetical by you.”
“Go on,” she said, setting her pen on her notebook and folding her hands in her lap.
“So let’s say there’s a woman with a dead husband.”
“Okay. Remember our discussion of privilege.” She looked over her glasses at me and cautioned, “Doctor-patient privilege ends if you tell me you are about to harm yourself or others.”
“I remember. This already happened.” I smiled to set her worries at ease. “So anyway, shortly after the woman’s husband dies, she sells her identity on the black market and disappears.” I let her process the basic scenario and then asked, “What does that say to you?”
“Tiffany.” She shook her head. “This is a small town. I know how Jeff died.” She gave me a look like she was staring into my soul. “Are you asking about yourself, about why you disappeared? Did you watch Jeff die?”
“No. I don’t remember. How did he die?” Dr. Rosetti might not be able to tell me much, but she was the only person I could be fully honest with, besides Vlad.
She exhaled, clearly frustrated. “It is my understanding that Jeff died in a freak accident on the ice. He crashed through. I think he might have been ice fishing. I don’t remember that part.”
A drowning. That seemed like a normal sort of tragedy, not the kind of death that would make Tiffany leave town forever.
Her face etched with sympathy, she asked, “You don’t remember his death?”
“Nothing. It’s a blank.”
She jotted down a note.
I asked, “Do you remember why Tiffany left town after?”
“I can’t say why you left town,” she answered, making uncomfortably direct eye contact.
I shrugged, frustrated with the psychobabble. I needed answers, not analysis.
“Disappearing can hurt as much as the thing that you are running from, don’t you think?”
Ouch. This was getting too real. I’d been living in the shadows for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t a quick stab of pain, but rather a long, slow numbing of the soul. Or it would have been, if I had a soul.
I leaned forward and tried to refocus her on the situation at hand. I wasn’t here to talk about my feelings tonight. I just wanted to learn the things I was expected to know, the things I couldn’t ask anyone else.
“I notice you are still talking about yourself in the third person,” Dr. Rosetti said. Her glasses had slid down her nose, and while she waited for an answer, she peered over the lenses instead of pushing them up. It was cute, one little imperfection.
There was probably no point in explaining, but I tried anyway. “Yes, I am. I am living Tiffany’s life, but I’m not her. I’m going through the motions, using her name and address, but I’m not the Tiffany Valentine remembers.”
She nodded as if I was confirming all her suspicions. “That’s a powerful statement, and I think we all feel that way sometimes. If you reconnect with yourself, you might find answers. Let people really know you instead of the Tiffany they expect.”
“I bought Tiffany’s identity on the black market. She is not me. I am not her.”
Dr. Rosetti squinted at her notebook and scribbled a note.
“Why do you think I’ve repressed this memory?” I asked, trying another tactic.
“You could be scared for any number of reasons.” She looked me in the eye. “Tiffany, did you see Jeff die? Did someone threaten you?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
My brief silence must have been enough to convince Dr. R that she had figured it out. “Watching your fiancé die would be extremely traumatic.”
I waited for her to go on, but my mind began to slip to my own past.
“Tiffany, what happened to you?” she said. “What did you see out there on the ice? Did you push him?”
“I don’t know, I was asking you.” I didn’t know anything. I twisted the hem on my shirt in frustration.
“Did you see someone die?”
I capitulated. If she wanted to hear what I’d seen, then so be it. You don’t get to be as old as me without watching the life leave someone’s body.
“I did watch someone die. It was my fault.” I stared at my knees because it was too much to meet her eyes.
“Such a senseless death.” I might not have rent her flesh myself, but I might as well have.
If I had paid attention to the Vampire Code instead of gossiping and telling her everything, Alba would have lived to be an old woman.
Dr. R leaned forward. “Go on. Let it out.”
The number one rule of every secret club is to keep it a secret. Fight Club didn’t invent that. Vampires did. A vision of Alba’s last moments, her blood blossoming into a gory flower on her nightgown, her eyes staring without seeing—it was enough to send tears streaming down my face.
“So you watched Jeff die?” she redirected me.
Tears continued running down my cheeks, which she must have taken as a yes.
Dr. R moved a box of tissues across the coffee table toward me and took her questioning a step further. “Did you kill him?”
She saw me completely, but not at all. “I’m not talking about Jeff.”
“That’s right.” Dr. R nodded like she had me all figured out. “You didn’t kill Jeff because you’re not really Tiffany?”
Again with the psychobabble. “Like I said, I am not Tiffany with a -y. I am Tiffenie, with an -ie, an immortal, cursed vampire.”
“Tiffany, I think watching your fiancé die and believing that you killed him was more trauma than you were able to handle.”
My cheeks were still damp with tears, but a laugh escaped me.
“I believe that you have dissociated because of that.”
I might have been laughing and crying at the same time, but she had missed the point of this completely. “I just wanted to get my facts right. You’re the only person I can speak freely with.”
In a measured tone, so as not to alarm me with her astute observations, she said, “You’re scared that if someone gets close to you, they’ll be hurt.”
Well, that was true.
“That must make it very difficult to make close connections.”
That was also true. Of course I couldn’t make friends. Just being myself, being a friend, had led to Alba’s death. Living for eternity with another Alba on my conscience was unimaginable.
Dr. Rosetti sat back in her chair, looking almost satisfied. “Good work tonight, Tiffany. Uncovering your trauma is a huge part of this process.”
After I collected myself and finished dabbing at my tears, I said, “Being a vampire is the source of all my problems. It is my trauma. Any mortal who I share my secrets with is at risk.” I gave her a look. “You’re the first person I’ve met who is legally bound to keep my secrets.”
“That’s any doct—”
I shushed her. “You almost feel…like a friend.” She was the first person I texted to tell about my bad day, someone whose opinion I trusted. That was friend stuff.
“We have a profe—”
Before she could finish telling me we weren’t friends, I said, “Just don’t break privilege.” Even I knew there wasn’t a statute of limitations on murder. Dateline University.
Earnestly, she said, “I would never break privilege.”
At that moment, an electric current passed between us. Maybe being a therapist was a little like being a vampire, at least in the fact that it was a club where she was duty bound to keep everyone else’s secrets. What happens in therapy stays in therapy. Just like Vegas.