Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story

talking about vampires. That was the gaudy image she was embroidering from all these loose threads, wasn’t it? That Doug was a vampire? It was the Niravam, certainly. She had to stop taking it — it only made her worse. Poor Indian girl — her head is full of superstitious hoodoo. It’s a culture of confusion — too many gods, all those arms — what do you expect?

'Can I talk to you a minute, Abby?' asked Emily. 'In private,' she added in the least private tone possible. It was discreet like a kazoo was discreet. The two girls rose and went off in search of some quiet corner.

'I don’t know. Some drama,' Cat told Jay. 'We’re a dramatic people.'

'Okay, so what’s the deal with Doug Lee?' said Ophelia. Sejal imagined that a less brazen version of this question might at that very moment been posed to Abby in another part of the house, but Ophelia’s seemed to be directed primarily at Sejal.

'I know, right?' said Jordan as Cat tucked the last of her slick hair under a plastic grocery bag. 'So creepy. My uncle pulled this really weird Jekyll and Hyde thing a few years ago, and that turned out to be a stroke.'

'Why are you looking at me?' Sejal asked Ophelia. 'You have known him longer.'

'Yeah, but I’ve only been paying attention to him as long as you have. And he has a huge crush on you, so maybe you got to know him. For a while some people thought you might like him, too.'

So we’re not just talking about Doug, thought Sejal. 'Maybe you should shout your questions louder,' she said, 'so Jay can hear. So Abby can hear.'

'Ophelia wants to know what’s up with Doug,' Cat said to Jay. Ophelia winced. Cat leaned away from the phone. 'Jay says nothing’s wrong with Doug, but he’s saying it in this weird way he gets whenever he’s lying. Like he’s talking in all caps. What? No, I’m just telling them what you said.'

'This is gonna sound all weird,' said Sophie, 'and if you tell anyone I said so I’ll kick your ass, but…like, I know you said you thought he was looking better, ’Felia, but does anyone think he actually looks…good? Like not good good, but…like you see some eggplant and you actually feel like trying it even though eggplant makes you throw up.'

'I know what you’re saying,' said Jordan. 'I’ll admit it. It’s like he got some kind of Guido body spray and it actually works like the commercials say it does.'

'Do you think they’ve…you know,' asked Carrie. 'Do you think he took her virginity?'

'Ha!' said Ophelia. 'He’s not a time traveler.'

Cat had by then hung up. 'Jay says he and Doug haven’t hung out much lately, but…he thinks it all has to do with Doug wanting to go with Sejal and her saying no. Doug thinks she led him on — sorry, Sejal, I don’t think you did. Maybe he’s just bitter or depressed or something.'

'I need a glass of water,' said Sejal. 'Does anyone want a glass of water?' No one did. 'Excuse me.'

She didn’t know this house well, and at the bottom of the staircase she veered away from the sibilant whispers of Abby and Emily ('Jodi thinks so, too,' Emily was saying. 'She called him evil…') and down one hall, past a loo, and into a laundry room.

'Damn,' she whispered. She turned and found Ophelia blocking the hall.

'Hi,' said Ophelia. 'Here.' Then she leaned forward, her still-sugary-brown locks breezing fragrantly past Sejal’s nose, and switched on the dryer. The empty tumble made the small, slightly chilly room inexplicably more inviting. Dapples of warm light like goldfish appeared on the blue moonlit wall behind the dryer. Ophelia half closed the door. No one would hear them speak.

'I didn’t lead Doug on,' Sejal said. 'I thought I might grow to like him, isn’t it? When I realized my mistake, I stopped it.'

'I’m sorry.'

'What I did was proper. I do not mean to lead anyone on.'

'I believe you. I’m sorry.'

They paused. Sejal listened to the warm, snoring dryer.

'I’m trying to learn to be a better person,' Sejal said. 'A stronger person.'

'You’re good. You’re strong.'

'I’m not,' Sejal insisted. 'I have the Google. Did you know that?'

'Oh,' said Ophelia, stepping back. 'That internet disease?'

'It’s not contagious.'

'Sorry.'

'It makes you forget what’s important. I lost track of myself for a while. I forgot who I was. You can do terrible things when you don’t know who you are, na?'

Ophelia shifted from one foot to the other. She shrugged slightly.

'I became a ghost, and I only cared about other ghosts. I was not available to people at school, on the street…I wasn’t there. But move your mouse like on a Ouija board and you could speak with me. You could conjure me up. I lost every one of my real friends, but I had a box full of trolls and demons, like Pandora.'

'You don’t have to tell me all this if you don’t want to,' Ophelia whispered.

'No, I don’t,' Sejal said. 'That’s true. Will you let me?' Now that she’d started, she was impatient to get it off her chest, finally. The story of it all stuck to her like wet clothes.

A second passed, then Ophelia nodded.

'There was this girl,' Sejal continued. 'A girl from my neighborhood, one of the only ones to follow me onto the web. One of the only kids I still talked to who knew me in real life. Maybe that was part of it…She had a blog. She posted videos, bad poetry. And we haunted this poor girl. Me and the other ghosts. They were awful to her, and I was awful. We posted terrible comments, things I would never say in real life. Because I only cared for the people online and for what they thought of me — and when I was mean, I was funny, and when I was funny, I could make them laugh out loud.'

Ophelia was shaking her head. 'Lots of people are meaner on the internet.'

'And those people will have to deal with what they’ve been. Or they won’t, I don’t know. But listen: This girl, Chitra, she posted a video, singing and playing the ukulele. Because pretty girls playing the ukulele was a thing then. And this girl…this poor stupid girl always left the comments on.'

'What did you say to her?'

'I wrote that she had made me pukelele with her bad singing. I–I and the other commenters suggested maybe she wasn’t really pretty enough for the pretty girls-with-ukuleles meme.'

'God.'

'Yes.' Sejal nodded. 'She singled me out — I was the only one who actually knew her. ‘Why was I being so mean?’ I had my own blog pages full of posts and videos and hundreds of comments, good and bad. Some terribly bad. In the outside world I felt numb and half dead, but then I could look at my hit counter and read the comments, and every little vicious word was like a paper cut that got my heart beating again. And this fat ukulele player wanted to know why I was being so mean?'

'Um…'

'I became something awful. I made personal attacks. I revealed all her crushes and told all her embarrassing secrets. And because I never knew her all that well, I ran out of secrets fast and began pinning her name to some of my own. Even the trolls started telling me to back off, in their way. They claimed the thread had gotten stale and I was getting boring and, besides, Chitra hadn’t said a word in days. She hadn’t posted in days because she’d tried to kill herself.'

'W-what?' said Ophelia. She covered her mouth with her hands.

'When I found out I just…I broke it off with the real world. Entirely. It could not touch me. When my mother came home that night, she found me sitting in front of my own video blog, watching myself watching myself. Like I was trying to fold right up into one single electron. My parents got me help. When Chitra’s parents found out my part in the whole thing, they tried to bring me up on charges, but I hadn’t done anything against the law. But I got help. I got better. That was the best I could do for them, for Chitra. I’m lucky in that way — I had this horrid event to tell me I was not the sort of girl I thought I was, and now I have made the decision to be good. I don’t believe most people think to make this decision, you know?'

'Uh-huh.'

Silence.