Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story

'Heh.' Victor laughed, but it sounded to Doug like no more than a polite social noise. Victor was in a serious mood. 'So how are things going with you? I’ve seen you around with Abby Dawes.'

'We’re dating.'

'Dating…' Victor intoned, as if it wasn’t the word he’d have used.

'What?'

'Nothing. And she’s doing good? What does she think about it? I mean, how much do you think she understands—'

'She thinks we’ve been messing around. That’s all. Boy, you think I’ve been blabbing to everyone, don’t you?'

'No—'

'Abby knows nothing, Jay knows nothing. Everyone’s safe.'

'I know. Forget it,' Victor said, waving his hand in the air. 'That wasn’t what I was getting at. I just wanted to know how things were going.'

'They’re going good.'

Victor nodded, and then they were silent until the next red light. 'You haven’t been having any problems dealing with people?'

'You mean recently?' Problems Dealing with People had actually been sort of a major theme of Doug’s life from the fourth through the tenth grades, but lately there had been nothing but improvement. Except with Sejal, he supposed. And Jay. 'No. Have you?'

Victor frowned. 'Everyone’s saying I’m acting different. I think they’re acting different. They’re all being stupid. Fucker!' he shouted at a sedan that had merged a little too close. He tapped the brakes and the three lemon-yellow pine trees hanging from the rearview mirror tangled their lines. 'God, I hate being in cars now. Maybe while you’re getting your license I can turn mine in.'

They parked in the DMV lot and walked up to that squat, joyless building.

'It’s like…you know how people look at you when they know they’ve got more money than you?' asked Victor. Doug didn’t, really, but he kept that to himself. 'I catch myself looking at normal people like that, now. Like I know they’re gonna be forgotten, and I’m not. We’re gonna live forever — do you realize that?'

'Are you just figuring this out?' said Doug. 'We’re always going to be as we are, right now.'

Victor stared at his feet. 'I guess I’ve always felt that way. But now it’s true.'

Doug left him reading magazines in a room where all the stiff plastic chairs had been bolted in rows into the floor. He took his driving test, screwed up the parallel parking section a little, but the administrator let him retry it. He took his paperwork to the license photographer and felt a moment of panic. What if the license came back and he wasn’t there? But a half hour later he left the DMV with a little rectangle of plastic with his picture on it, and it felt like he’d gotten away with something. He wasn’t really a year older.

Nor a year wiser, maybe. Now, outside the gates of the Polidori estate, he thought about what Victor had been trying to tell him. Doug recently had two different people suggest he wasn’t as nice a guy as he could be. You had to consider each source, of course. Jay was like a little kid — he didn’t understand how the world worked. It didn’t do him any good to be so thin-skinned. And Sejal…Sejal hadn’t been in America long. She’d learn.

He was just being funny. On television people insulted each other all the time. For laughs. Humor made the world a better place. Clever insults were the basis of all humor.

No, he realized with sudden clarity. Not insults. Control. Control was the basis of all humor. Even at its most innocent, what was a joke or a clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.

People like him — the unbeautiful, the less popular — were almost inhuman in some people’s eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. You made eye contact only by accident and then you turned quickly away. The word 'geek' had once only referred to a circus freak, hadn’t it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bite the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover.

Wasn’t this how they always tried to compensate? To overcome a girl’s disgust or another boy’s contempt and make them laugh despite themselves was to take some small measure of control. No wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny. They didn’t have to be. Why else would people find it so hilarious to see some short kid’s textbook stolen, held high above his head, out of reach? It wasn’t funny — it was pure control. Insult comedy minus the comedy.

So humor is a kind of weakness, Doug thought as he approached the house. He couldn’t understand why he’d never seen it before. Enough jokes, then. He was going to become the least funny person he knew.

The scent of cloves mixed with an oddly nostalgic smell of wet leaves. Absinthe was sitting on the front steps of the Polidori house, smoking a cigarette. She knit her brow at him as he approached.

'Hey,' said Doug.

'Oh,' said Absinthe. 'It’s you. Douglas.'

'Yeah.'

'You look different.'

'So I’ve been told.'

They studied each other for a second.

'It’s fortunate I ran into you,' said Doug. 'I was going to leave your clothes with Cassiopeia.' He held out the neat little pile.

'That is fortunate,' Absinthe agreed. 'Mama Cass probably would have had Asa burn them in the backyard.'

Doug couldn’t tell if he was supposed to laugh. He pushed a noncommittal little puff of air through his nose and sat down on the step. 'Are you having…problems with the signora?'

'Problems?' said Absinthe. 'No. No, we don’t have any problems. I’m learning so much, thank god I can command rats now — that’s going right on my college applications.'

'You can command rats?'

'Yeah. All I ever want to do is command them the hell away from me.'

Doug nodded, and looked out of the corner of his eyes at her breasts. Deep in his mind there was a space like a basement where he kept ideas he’d used once or twice but had mostly forgotten. Self-improving ideas, like exercise equipment, gathering dust. One of these was the realization that sexy people were not always, themselves, hypersexual, that just because Doug could only think of sex — sexy, hot nude intercourse sex — when he looked at Absinthe didn’t mean that it was on her mind at all. There was probably no clever conversational password that could get her making out with him at this moment. Probably.

'I can make fog,' he said.

'Hey, look, so can I,' said Absinthe. She took a drag and blew a plume through her plum lips. It smelled like Christmas.

Doug laughed. 'That’s not what I meant. I—'

'Do you like your tutor guy? Mr. David whatever?'

'Not really.'

'I can’t stand this anymore,' said Absinthe. 'I hate her! It’s like, I get to hang out with this totally hot two hundred-year-old vamp and she’s just like my mom. Worse, even — at least my mom will die someday.'

Doug managed to say, 'What’s wrong with—' before she started up again.

'I mean, what’s the point of being a vampire if everything is ‘don’t do this’ and ‘I forbid you to do that’? She’s even got the nerve to insult my clothes, like her Masterpiece Theatre wardrobe hasn’t been out of fashion for, like, ever. I’m all, like, ‘You should talk. Nice empire waist. I bet you were the belle of the Industrial Revolution, bitch.’'

Absinthe sighed.

'I totally should have said that.'

'I like your clothes,' said Doug.

'Jesus. Of course you do. You’re just another horndog boy. But Madam Polidori says I look like a hooker, and I say, no, I look like a vampire, so she says I look like a vampire hooker. Then she shows me a photo of this