sometimes Retta wanted more than sitting around with Lottie discussing the uselessness of certain teachers, the annoyance brought on by certain students who actually cared about things like prom and the commencement ceremony that they would totally regret missing if they missed it, according to their parents, teachers, classmates, Hallmark greeting cards, and certain television shows modeled on the moralizing tendencies of 1980s and ’90s after-school specials. Sometimes Retta just wanted more
“Interesting?” said the head vampire. He bobbed his head from side to side, pursing his lips, weighing her statement. “I guess so,” he said. “Interesting if you’ve never met a vampire.”
“You’re the first one.”
“That you know of,” said the head vampire. His eyes widened after he said this, and Retta started to think maybe she’d made a mistake, that vampires didn’t deserve a chance at friendship after all. But then he laughed, and then he smiled. “Just a joke,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Loretta,” she said, feeling like she was giving a fake name, as if he might be a stalker, even though she’d been the one to cross the parking lot under a hot sun.
“Loretta? That’s kind of old-fashioned,” he said, and Retta said only if you think about it for a while. He said, “Why are we talking, Loretta?”
“Just thought I’d introduce myself. I liked what you had to say.”
“Are you a vampire, Loretta?” he said, narrowing his eyes, nostrils flaring.
“Me?” said Retta. “Ha ha. I don’t think so.”
“Sometimes people are and don’t realize,” he said. “Like me. I didn’t realize for a long time.”
“How can you not realize something like that?”
“Because,” he said. “I don’t drink blood.”
Retta asked what he drank instead.
“Emotions,” he said. “Feelings.”
Hearing him say those two words made her stomach flutter.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Trevor,” said the head vampire.
“Well, Trevor,” said Retta. “It was nice meeting you. Good luck with your campaign for vampire equality.”
“Wait a second,” he said as she turned to walk away. “Are you going home now?”
“Why?” she asked.
He said, “I can give you a ride.”
Retta stared at the cinnamon splash of freckles on his cheeks and tried to calculate the potential danger in accepting a ride from a vampire. In the end, she started nodding. And finally she said, “Okay.”
The ride to Retta’s house was just two miles. She could have walked it, she usually walked it, and it seemed to disappoint Trevor when he realized he only had her in his car for a total of eight minutes, almost all of which Retta didn’t look at him. Instead she rolled down the window and leaned her arms across it, her head on her arms, watching the passing houses with beds of bright flowers decorating their front yards. And when Trevor asked questions, like whether or not she was disturbed by the scene that had occurred in the gym, Retta didn’t bother to look at him when she answered. She just said, “I don’t know,” and let the wind take the words from her mouth, watched them tumble behind her, tin cans dancing across the pavement. It was only once they turned onto her street that she sat back against the hot leather.
“Do you think we’ll ever be accepted?” said Trevor.
“Who? Vampires?”
He nodded.
“Sure,” said Retta. “There are precedents. People of color. Women. Gay people. Wiccans. I mean, I
“So there you go?” said Trevor, smiling as he pulled his car against the curb.
“How did you know this was my house?” asked Retta. “How did you know this was my street?” She hadn’t given any directions.
“Inside,” said Trevor, lifting his finger to his temple and tapping. “Didn’t you notice me inside, searching?”
Retta stared at him for a long second before opening the door to climb out.
“Hey. I’m sorry,” said Trevor. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Retta closed the door and bent down to look at him through the window. From above, his fauxhawk made him look a little birdlike, a brown baby chick who knew how to drive. “You don’t scare me,” she said, and started up the walk to the front porch.
“Hey, Loretta,” Trevor called after her. “Hey, can I come in?”
“No,” said Retta, turning to look back at him. “That would not be a good idea. If you let a vampire into your house, they can come in anytime they want afterward.”
“I’m not that kind of vampire,” said Trevor, grinning, stretching farther across his seat to call out from the rolled-down passenger window.
“That’s right,” said Retta. “And I’m not that kind of girl.”
When she turned to continue on her way, she let herself smile, just a little.
Vampires had been appearing on all the news channels and in all the papers for several months by then. They were usually sad or angry, mostly because they had all lived isolated lives, misunderstood by normal people. Some were excited, though, to finally have a chance to speak about their lives in public without threat of being hunted, staked in the heart, or burned to cinders so that they could never regenerate. “As if!” one old woman vampire had said on CNN from her living-room recliner. “I wish I could regenerate!” she told the interviewer. “I would never have had my hip replaced!”
There were so many of them, and so many kinds, more than Retta had ever imagined. There were vampires who fed on the blood of others, and there were vampires who fed on feelings, like Trevor. There were vampires who fed on sunlight (they mostly lived in Florida, California, Hawaii, and at certain times of the year Alaska), and there were vampires who fed on the dark, eating their way from midnight to morning. There were vampires who fed on tree bark and vampires that fed on crustaceans, there were vampires who fed on nothing but the sound of human voices, and there were vampires who fed on any attention they could receive (they often took up karaoke, made YouTube videos, or auditioned for reality television shows). They were everywhere, once you started looking, although it wasn’t until Trevor and his friends came to speak that Retta had ever seen one in person. That she knew of, as Trevor had weakly jested. To be honest, she’d expected something different. An old-fashioned vampire with long, sharp teeth, or at least one of the less expected vampires, the sort she could watch with fascination as they ate through a meal of darkness, or one who looked as if she were carved out of ivory, with bright green eyes, or some other sexy, slightly otherworldly physical composition.
But despite the fact that they seemed harmless, over the weekend phone calls were strung from house to house, and by Sunday parents were either frowning or wide-eyed with terror. Retta’s mother came into her room after receiving a call from her best friend, whose daughter was a junior and had been at the assembly, and said, “Why didn’t you tell me about these vampires, Retta?”
She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips.
Retta said, “Oh, them. I forgot about them.”
“How can you forget about vampires, Retta? They got into an argument with a boy who was sitting behind you! Seriously, I am livid. What did Mr. Masters think he was doing by having them in for an assembly?”
“Helping to educate us about vampires?”
“Retta,” said her mother, “you are so unwitting. Listen, because I’m only going to tell you once: no vampires, young lady. Not in this house, not outside it. Understand?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Retta, closing her book and sighing.
“I know you, Retta,” said her mother. “You’re the sort of girl we call ‘susceptible.’”
When she left, Retta said, “Who’s
