Nightlight (10 page)

When he was finished I subtly removed my hands from my ears.

“I wrote that for you,” Edwart murmured, drawing me close. “It’s called Belle’s Lullaby.”

“I’ll listen to it every night!” I said. With the sound turned all the way down, it would be lovely. This was the third lullaby that had been written for me, counting the one by Carter Burwell.

After dinner, Edwart took me upstairs to see his room. At the top of the stairs was a giant wooden cross.

“Ironic, huh?” Edwart said.

“Why?” I asked with trepidation, imagining that, at any second, Edwart would turn into dust, which I would then sweep up and disperse over my furniture so he would always be with me.

“Because we’re Jewish, of course—nonpracticing.”

Three of the four walls (the fourth was glass) in Edwart’s room were covered with CDs. Rows and rows of CDs, and I didn’t recognize a single one.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, thinking I saw one I knew. “No, no, not it.”

I kept walking.

“Oh here’s—no.”

I turned to the next wall.

“Wait! No …”

I figured I should read a couple labels, instead of only
look at side-album art. That’s when I realized they were all recordings of Edwart’s music—triangle, and some recorder.

“Eva sings on my CDs,” he said with a smile. “Wanna hear? C’mon, we can dance!”

“No!” I shouted. “I will NOT dance.”

Edwart looked frightened. Probably because the last time I danced, I caused a fire in the cafeteria. Soon the whole city had erupted into riots—few could handle the radical illusion of my moonwalking feet. Half believed I was a witch.

“Not yet, at least,” I added. Soon my time would come. The revolution could wait.

“Okay, well, let’s go into my dad’s study. I’ll tell you the story of how he became a plastic surgeon. It involves hideously deformed creatures!”

Edwart showed me the “before” and “after” photos of Dr. Mullen’s patients. I assumed the “before” pictures were taken before he had bitten them, and the “after” pictures were vampire pictures. The vampires had such straight noses, nice breasts, and expressionless faces. And they were all rich!

“So, how do you make an ‘appointment’ with Dr. Mullen?”

“Why? You’re beautiful, Belle.”

“Yes, yes,” I said quickly. It was just like Edwart to not want me to go through the pain of tooth transformation. It was absurd; when my wisdom teeth grew in, it didn’t hurt at all!

“No,” he said sternly. “You shouldn’t see him.”

From Edwart’s serious expression, I could tell what he
was contemplating: should he do it himself and, more specifically, should he be chewing gum when he bit me in case he had bad breath. He was probably wondering if he should spit the gum out first, or keep it in his mouth but kind of under his tongue so I wouldn’t notice. He was probably wondering if spearmint and blood tasted okay together.

“Enough! Enough!” I said to interrupt his hypothetical thoughts. “Let’s just go back to my house, okay?” Maybe it would be easier for him to bite me in a different setting. The kitchen, perhaps. With the aromatic scent of squirrel meat sizzling in the microwave and the hunger-inducing soundtrack of scraping cutlery.

“Yeah, okay. Can I drop you off a little far away though? I’d rather not see your dad again. I haven’t thought of any new conversation topics since last time. It won’t come off as natural unless I videotape myself saying them first.”

I froze.
Jim
. I had forgotten about that complication. My dad would never let Edwart bite me unless he planned to share my blood with Claudius and Eva. Jim lived by a categorical set of ethics. Edwart would have to bite me before I got home.

“How about we walk back?
Through the cemetery?”
One thing my mom had taught me is that it’s difficult to refuse requests made in italics. That’s how she’d persuade me to buy rainbow-colored cereal, week after week.

“Okay,” he said.

“Wait, before we go … Just bite this. For practice.” I outstretched my pallid white arms to him, my hands
together, gently cupping a bright red apple that I had swiped from the fake kitchen downstairs.

Edwart’s hand was steady as he took the tempting fruit. As his mouth opened, I saw his iridescent teeth sparkle. He slowly brought the fruit to his parted lips, beads of saliva forming at the corners of his mouth. He closed his eyes. I opened my heart.

“Hey!” he exclaimed, looking at the still intact fruit and then at my still unpunctured head that rested atop my still unpunctured neck.

“It’s plastic!” I guffawed, snatching it back. I was nearly crying at the hilarious joke crafted by my superior sense of humor.

Edwart placed the apple back in a basket of fake fruit, next to a vase of fake flowers, next to the plate of likely fake bread.

I looked at him lovingly while I attached a small target to my neck.
Would he bite when it mattered?
I wondered.
Could he bite a moving target? What about a moving target fifty yards away with a wind speed of thrity-five mph?
We left the house and started walking towards the cemetery. If the desires of my heart and the predictions of my pedometer were correct, I was only 952 steps away from becoming a blood-sucker.

WE WALKED TOGETHER, OUR POINTER FINGERS
romantically linked. The cemetery loomed ahead of us covered in a dark haze of night, lit only by a sliver of moon. Twilight! I mean, Nightlight!

I could feel the excitement bubbling up inside of me. Yes, my romantic conquest was finally coming to fruition. I would prove to Edwart that I was eligible to become a vampire by bringing him to a place that sort of tangentially has to do with vampires. It was a flawless plan.

Boy, would Mom and Dad be surprised! And the people in Phoenix! By the end of the night, not only would I be a vampire, but I would
finally
have my upper-ear pierced. Before Edwart bit me, I was going to ask him to squeeze my hand tightly and stick a fang through the cartilage of my left ear. I hoped he had brought a hypoallergenic stud-earring
with him. I wondered what people at school would think when they saw the New Me. They would think:
Ahhh! Vampire! Stake her!

But as we neared the gate, Edwart began to grow uneasy, my first clue that something was terribly wrong. Our pace had slowed to a crawl, and as I looked at him I began to realize that even his walk had become abnormal. He was lurching awkwardly and holding his stomach with an odd expression on his face—the expression of a bat, lurching through a cemetery on its haunches. To be honest, that’s what most of Edwart’s expressions reminded me of.

“What’s wrong, Edwart?” I asked.

“Do we have to go through the cemetery? It’s my meds. I’ve been off them for two days now, and anything that causes fear makes me nauseated. Actually, anything that causes emotion makes me nauseated.”

Why would fear be a problem?
I wondered. We were going to a cemetery, the Chuck E. Cheese’s of vampires! But I knew I had to play the caring girlfriend.

“Let’s find a place where you can lie down,” I said maternally but also seductively. I took his hand and pulled him through the gate, but he grabbed one of the gate’s bars and clung stubbornly. I pried his fingers off, one by one, as he whimpered. Finally, using all my weight, I was able to push him through the gate. We had entered the cemetery, or, as I assumed vampires call it, the ce-marry-me-tery. (I later found out that, in fact, they call it a cemetery.)

As Edwart talked about something (Who ever knew
what he was talking about? Who ever listened? He was adorable, though), I swung our clasped hands a little, placing my other hand over his mouth affectionately. I imaged what I would be like after the transformation took place. I could probably wear leggings as pants every day, and no one would say anything because they would be afraid I’d bite them. What would my special name be? Probably Alice, because that is a vampire-sounding name. What would my special power be? Probably the power to drink blood without a chaser.

The mood was perfect. Veiled in dim light, the cemetery seemed to cry out, “Suck your girlfriend’s blood! She’s ready! She’s targeted! You don’t need to exert
any
energy—all you need to do is open your mouth and she can run into your tooth if you’re tired.” As soon as I realized that I was screaming this in Edwart’s ear, I stopped and politely apologized, stepping away to give him personal space.

After one last nervous glance at the gravestones, he pulled me close. “Don’t. Leave. My. Side,” he quavered, hanging onto my arm and burying his head below my shoulder. It felt natural.

I surveyed my surroundings and mentally formulated a description of them. Grave after grave poked up from the grass. It was like a formation of grave-soldiers, lined up in a grave phalanx of grave-like proportions. A grave sight indeed. I think there were also some trees and stuff.

As we walked along the winding paths, I had a thought. It was a little thought, spoken by a little internal voice, like the one that asks if you are afraid of it and you say no and it says
if
you ever try to get rid of me you will live to regret it
. My though was this: What if I became an incredibly bloodthirsty vampire? What if that was the sole reason Edwart hadn’t bitten me, thereby destroying my soul? What if when his mom had offered me peach cobbler, I shouldn’t have eaten piece after piece until there was none left while his family watched with hungry eyes? Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten all the hotdogs, either. But I wasn’t about to rudely let all that human food go to waste. I still don’t know why, after making a plate of food for me, Eva served the members of her vampire family as well. That was awfully presumptive. What if I didn’t feel like walking around the table, piling their food onto my plate?

“Edwart,” I said, deciding it was time to be direct. “If I were a vampire, I would have no trouble resisting people’s blood—even Lucy’s. I know I told you that if I ever became a vampire the first thing I would do is invite Lucy to an action movie in a dark, deserted theater, but I was joking. In all seriousness, the first thing I would do is bite a beautiful rhododendron, and win a Nobel Prize for engineering immortal flora that could survive even in deserts.”

“Belle,” he said, taking both my hands. “If we don’t sit down, I will barf something up. I’m not sure what because I did not eat anything other than orange soda today, but it could be anything from my kidney to my other kidney.”

“Okay.”

After twenty more minutes of moonlit stroll, we settled down on the most comfortable-looking grave I could find, which happened to be covered in plush leather. “James
C. ‘Leather-King’ Murphy, 1906–1975, King of Leather and Also Owner of a Leather Store,” it said.

We settled down and began to enjoy the romance of each other, almost like a warm glow inside of us. This is the way married grownups feel all the time.

“Edwart,” I said. “I am so grateful to be here with you. Are you feeling better?”

“Yes, Belle. Much better.”

I smiled to myself, and my future vampire-self. I was happy, remembering how embarrassed I was for this girl at 8th grade graduation because her dad was much older than all the other dads. Edwart and I would never get old. I began to reapply my grapefruit perfume so my blood wouldn’t have an unshowered-for-weeks taste when he bit me.

“What’s that smell? Is it grapefruit?” Edwart asked. I was surprised that he hadn’t lost his memory about human food, the way most vampires do. But, at the same time, I wasn’t surprised: it really smelled a lot like grapefruit.

“Don’t you just love being among all these dead people?” I asked, gesturing to the surroundings.

“Well, to be honest, I actually think that part is a little weird. I would like nothing better than to leave this cemetery, make sure you get home safely, and then curl up in my bed with a tall glass of diluted ginger ale.”

How sweet of him, to say something that didn’t make sense for a vampire to say. I casually thrust my neck towards him, bathing it in the moonlight.

“Is your neck OK?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Is it? What do you think, Edwart?” I massaged it suggestively, suggesting that I had slept on a pile of coals.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

I had to think fast. Did he want for it to hurt? Was that some kind of weird vampire thing where they prefer to bite necks that hurt, the way my mother had always told me that the way you know a piece of fruit is ripe is that it looks like it hurts?

“Um, y-yes,” I stammered, silently thanking the forces that be for the improv class I took last summer. “It hurts. It hurts terribly.”

Then something magical happened. Edwart poked my neck. Fire rushed through my entire body. I grabbed his finger, intoxicated by its caress, and gasped for air like a fish out of water gasps for less air. He patted my neck a few times. I wondered if he was putting alcohol on it, the way doctors do before giving you shots.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“Like, happy.” The truth was, it felt completely indescribable. A patch of blackberries—that’s how I would describe it.

“Okay, great!” he said, and stopped.” That was quick!”

“Oh, um, you know what?” I said, improvising again. “It hurts again. Worse. Much, much worse. Say! I have an idea! You could
bite me
, and then
I would never feel pain again.”

He gave me a look like I was crazy-crazy in love—just as the ground began to shake violently.

“What’s happening? Is this part of the transformation process?” I asked, a little unnerved.

“An earthquake?” Edwart suggested with the coldly calculating reasoning of a vampire.

Suddenly the ground split open beneath us, cracking the tombstone in half, and from the grave emerged a figure with bloodstained fangs and a black cape whose tall, curved collar was neatly pressed down in obvious defiance of the current trends.

“Are y-y-you … the Leather King?” I managed to ask.

“No,” said the figure. “You seriously don’t recognize me?”

I looked at him closely: the pale face, the cape, the red eyes, the ridiculously large fangs. I couldn’t place him.