Bite Me (7 page)

The next day was hard. The day after that was harder. By the time October came I was as numb as the frosted mornings.
“What’s wrong, Dianne?” Taylor asked me on the bus.
I didn’t look at her, or at anything else in particular. “Nothing.” “Are you okay?” Matt asked from across the aisle. He had a new
jacket that was almost cute enough to cut through my gloom.
Almost
being the operative word.
“Leave. Me. Alone.” I immediately regretted my growling, but if I
said anything now I would say too much. The worse thing about all this
was the secret, the hiding what had happened to Mom as though
misfortune was something to be ashamed of, like it never happened to
anyone else. Taylor’s sister had diabetes, for goodness’ sake. I squeezed
my eyes shut.
Matt lapsed into unhappy silence while Taylor returned to her usual
comatose state. The wolf inside me whined to get out. Two friends, two
parents, and nobody I could talk to. Mom was strictly business-as-usual
while Dad moped. Rifts had begun to form between the three of us;
times we couldn’t think of anything to say that hadn’t been said already. When I went home I saw Mom’s shoes by the door. I could hear her
voice from upstairs, not loud but hurt.
“Where were you last night? Di was worried.”
“I was out.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“I just went for a walk.”
“All night?”
“I wanted some time to think, okay?”
“Ferdinand, I really wanted, no, I needed you.”
“I’m sorry, I just. . . don’t cry! Selene. . .”
“Are you afraid to look at me now? Is that it? Do I make you feel
guilty?”
“You do if you sob like that!” Dad snapped. He actually snapped.
Dad had never even clicked before.
“I don’t blame you for all this. But if you’re just going to swoop out
when things get complicated, I will blame you for that.”
“I said I’m sorry. Do you want me to go to Dianne’s parent-teacher
conference tomorrow?”
“This isn’t the issue here!”
“Than what is? So I’m the villain of the piece? The emotionally
distant husband? The failure?”
“You’re not a failure, just. . . stop twisting my words! Stop making
everything I say sound like I’m accusing you!”
I noiselessly crept up to my bedroom, locked the door, and started
my homework. Fifteen minutes later I realized that I had been doodling
in the margins instead of actually doing anything. We were supposed to
stick together through this. They were the ones who are supposed to
understand me. They were the ones that I was supposed to talk to. . . Without realizing it, I had made my decision. The scene on the bus
had been one of too many. It would be the last. I went and got the
cordless phone (I had drooled on it a little in my wolf phase, but it was
okay now), took it back into my room, sprawled on my back on the bed,
and made a call.
“Hello. Is Matt there?”
A little boy had answered. “Yeah. MATT!” He yelled into the
mouthpiece rather than away from it, nearly bursting my eardrums. “Hello?”
“Hi. It’s Dianne.”
“Dianne, I’m kinda busy right now.”
My heart compressed to the size of a thimble. “I’m sorry about being
such a mood-and-rude today.”
“Just for today?”
“I’m sorry for all the days. I’m an ingrate who should be beheaded,
then grounded, then beaten to death, then forced to live on bread and
water for six weeks.”
Matt laughed, the nicest sound I had heard in weeks, giving me the
courage to continue.
“I’m finally ready to tell you what’s been causing it.”
“I am mostly ears, except for my hand because it would be really
hard to hold the phone if you were all ears, wouldn’t it?”
“I never thought about that. Before I tell you, promise to never ever
tell anyone else on pain of. . . pain.”
“The pair of us seem to be magically wittier than usual today. I
promise. Former Boy Scout’s honor.”
“I’m technically not supposed to be letting anybody know, but the
pressure is getting to be way too much. My mom’s sick.”
“Oh gosh. What is it? Is it serious?”
Once you start telling something, it’s very easy to keep doing it. In a
voice that was not my own, I whispered, “AIDS.”
“Oh.”
A long silence.
“How?”
“Bad blood transfusion.”
“I thought they screened those.”
“Not in poor countries.”
“Vacation?”
“Yeah.”
“Anybody else in the family have it?”
“You are remarkably businesslike. No.”
“I don’t tell anyone?”
“I trust you to not even tell your tarantula.”
“Okay.”
Another long silence.
Matt cleared his throat and said, “I kinda expected something like
this would be more dramatic.”
“I did too.” I was supposed to cry. Why wasn’t I crying? The world
was crazy. The most painful things I could say calmly, but I fell apart the
day before when I had lost a pencil. It had seemed unbearable at the
time.
“Is there something I can do?”
You could ask me out
, I imagined answering. “No, not really. But
thanks.”
“This may be a bad time to ask, but I completely forgot to say this earlier. My parents want to invite your parents over for dinner this Friday. Seven to eight. They just like to get to know all of our neighbors.
Can you tell them? Let me know tomorrow if you can come.” I thought for a moment. Was Friday full moon? No, I had forgotten
that it was tonight. “I think that should be okay.”
“All right. Hang in there, Di.”
“I’m hanging.” I felt a tiny, tiny, microscopic bit better.
When I hung up and poked my head out of my room, I could see
Mom and Dad downstairs. Mom was fixing up dinner and Dad was
clearing out the dishwasher—Dad did most of the chores around the
house, but we learned early on to never let a vampire cook. You end up
with everything very rare and lots of holes poked in it. They weren’t
talking, and my heart, which was already located somewhere around my
pelvis, sank further.
“I didn’t hear you come in earlier, honey,” Mom said. The smile on
her lips didn’t reach the eyes had been stained with frustration. “I can understand that,” I said quietly.
Dad looked at the two of us pleadingly and opened his mouth, but
ended up not saying anything. I took out the salad and salad dressing
and put it on the table. When did this happen, I wondered. When had
our unity and mutual comfort turned into uncomfortable emptiness?
When had we started to come apart? When had I started to come apart? Maybe if we went to Matt’s house and associated with some other
people the stress on our relations wouldn’t be so much. Claustrophobic
conditions, both emotional and physical, tend to breed dissension. Try
reading the diary of Anne Frank.
“The Spirallis have invited us over for dinner at seven on Friday,” I
announced.
Stirring the spaghetti noodles, Mom said, “How nice of them. Tell
your friend tomorrow that we can, and maybe we should buy a gift for
them. Do you think we should? Is that the proper etiquette?” “I don’t know if we can, Selene,” Dad began. “They will most likely
have mirrors.”
The comment was a bad choice, as it sparked Mom into anguish
again. “So that’s it? We can’t even get to know the neighbors? It’s too
dangerous
to make friends.”
“Sel –”
“I’m not finished!” She turned off the burner and slammed the
wooden spoon down on the counter with a loud smack. “I’ve thought about what you said. It’s not going to work. I’m also not going to quit my job. Besides us needing the money, I don’t think I can stand being with you all day and all night when you would rather be all by
yourself.”
“God damn it, Selene,
I love you!
I’m sorry! I should have been here to
support you, I know that! I’m trying to make up for it by coming up with
a way that everything won’t be so difficult. I want you to be able to keep
your strength. I know it’s hard, but we’ll find a way to manage without
you killing yourself.” His words were tripping over each other in their
desperation to get out.
“Killing myself? Excuse me; you were the one who came up with the
idea.”
“It was just a suggestion. I love you so much, and we need you. It
wouldn’t be unendurable, and you would be alive. Mostly.” He walked
up to Mom and gently grasped her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “I
just can’t watch you die,” he whispered.
Mom hesitated for a moment, as if looking up a tall cliff that she had
to climb and dreading it all the while. She finally pushed him away and
said in a low tone, “Ferdinand Anghel, I am not going to be a vampire,
and that’s final!”
I looked back and forth. Dad’s cold, white face could have sliced
through a glacier, while Mom’s was dissolving into pain. I realized–I
don’t know how I knew this, but I could feel it–that my teeth were
shifting into sharp canine jaws. If Dad tried to bite Mom, I would be
ready.
Then the anger suddenly fell away. Dad stepped back, calm as a
Buddhist monk listening to New Age music. “All right. Now, you two
had better hurry and have dinner before sundown.”
“I’m not hungry.” I ran upstairs and locked myself in my room. They tried to get me to come out or at least open the door, but after
Mom went wolfie, they were pretty busy. I was hoping to bear my
hunger grimly; I ended up tiptoeing downstairs and grabbing a
sandwich while my parents were in the basement. Tired, I went to bed
early, though it took me a long time to fall asleep. In the middle of the
night I woke up to a howl. That was strange, since Mom would put a
muzzle on herself before changing. Then came another howl. I gasped,
because it was clearly from next door.

Dad ended up caving in and going to the Spirallis’ house for dinner. It was likely an attempt to make up for the quarrel he had with Mom. My begging for half an hour didn’t hurt either. We still hadn’t figured out what to do if he stood next to a mirror, merely hoping that he could just stay away from them. I had discreetly asked Matt about the menu, and there was no garlic anywhere on it. I didn’t dare say anything about the wolf howl I had heard during full moon—I wanted my parents to focus on not crying and fighting and silent-treatment-ting each other, and not worry about any other supernatural beings in town.

Matthew was obviously nervous and trying hard to comfort me for the rest of the week. I appreciated it, especially the method that involved gently squeezing my arm while getting off the bus. Tingle tingle. Sometimes that was all that got me through a day, since somehow Taylor managed to be even more distracted and distant than before, lost in something other than my troubles.

So there we were on the doorstep at seven o’clock sharp, fidgeting in silence as Mom rang the doorbell. For the past couple days there had been no real conversation between the three of us. We had spoken, but we hadn’t talked. I wanted very badly to ask Mom why she wasn’t willing to be a vampire even if that would allow her to live, but even I could see that this was not the time.

A faraway little boy’s voice came from inside. “Uncle! They’re here!” Dad shifted from foot to foot, fingering his thermos. Mom had called over the day before to say that her husband had a nasty ulcer and couldn’t eat anything today except for a special soothing fluid that he would bring with him. He had put in his colored contact lenses for further concealment.

The door opened, revealing a man I supposed to be Matt’s uncle. He looked about the same age as Mom, fortyish and acquiring a bit of a paunch. I could see the resemblance to my crush, thinking that he was likely quite handsome when he was in his twenties. The same hair, the color of desert sand, and the same eyes, dark and devastating as an oil spill. His clothing was semiformal, a buttoned-up shirt that was once bright orange but was faded now, and black pants. While I was assessing him, I noticed the smile on his face had frozen. When he looked at Dad, I got the impression he was about to tell us Armageddon was nigh.

Mom and Dad were frozen too. The only noise was a clatter as Dad dropped his thermos and it rolled down the sidewalk, falling over the curb and stopping at the Spirallis’ car.

I decided it was my job to break the ice, or maybe the iceberg. “Um, adults? Hello? Silent ones, awake. Aren’t we supposed to be saying ‘Hi, nice to meet you, come in’?”

“I did leave you two alone, damn it,” he said. “How was I supposed to know you lived here?”
Dad clutched a spot on his stomach as if he had felt someone stab it. He let out a strained laugh, one of the most awful things I had ever heard. “You expect us to believe that you had no idea, after what you did? After you managed to follow me for months and months, taking photos and smashing windows and trying to get people to kill me?”
“Andy, calm down,” whispered Mom.
“No, I will not calm down! I’m at the absolute end of my rope. We did not move here to see him again!”
I couldn’t bear this. “Look, what’s going on here? Who is this?”
“So your parents never told you about me, little girl? Too ashamed of what your mother did, maybe?”
What was Mom ashamed of? What was her greatest regret? A picture flashed into my mind, a picture of myself tucked in my bed, Dad telling me a story, the story, year after year. Only one person had ever tried to hurt Dad. Only one person had suffered from Mom. It was the same person.
“Shawn Garamond?”
“A-plus, one hundred percent. Smart little creature you’ve got there,” he drawled.
Shawn! He was mom’s ex-boyfriend, the only werewolf she was responsible for. It had been an accident, but he had broken up with her without waiting for an explanation. When Mom and Dad started dating, he had hacked into Mom’s e-mail to send lies to Dad, threatened several times to blow their cover, convinced Mom’s younger brother that Dad was evil and should be killed, and finally proved in front of the entire graduating class what he was and nearly got Dad captured by the police.
Shawn was the villain of my bedtime stories and the monster of my nightmares. He must have been the one who howled that full moon.
And he was Matt’s uncle. I felt dizzy and nearly fell over.
His tone was insolent and aggravating. “So what are you going to do, Ferdy? Bite me?”
“Good things rarely come of that. . . but I think you should know what it feels like to have a knife in your stomach. See how you like it.” With that, Dad lunged forward, only to be stopped by an invisible barrier. He ricocheted backwards, landing right next to his forgotten thermos.
“You can’t come in!” Shawn shouted. “Now go away before I call the police!”
Mom and I snarled simultaneously. My eyes burned, and I knew they had turned yellow again. By now I could always tell when I had changed and could to a certain degree prevent it from happening when I was less angry than this, even though I still couldn’t do it on purpose.
He was taken aback. “Okay, what monster did you make your daughter, then?”
My voice was deeper and fiercer than it should have been; layered with all the anger and frustration I had felt ever since I had slapped Tammy weeks ago.
“Something better than a traitor who can’t even keep a job.”
“Yes!” Dad said, incensed, walking back up and leaning as far forward as he could. “I suppose a pathetic, sensationalized, supermarket aisle, insult-to-scum tabloid was too good for you.”
“I resent that! It wasn’t a pathetic, sensationalized, supermarket aisle, insult-to-scum tabloid. It was a respectable tabloid! They were cutting back on the staff anyway.”
Mom rolled her eyes. “This is infantile. We can settle this like adults. Now, we have been invited to have dinner with your sister—you must be Mrs. Spiralli’s brother, since you don’t have the same last name—and her family, and someone will let my husband in if you don’t. Or I will personally tear you apart like I should have done years ago.”
“May I remind you that if you do that, everyone will know what you are?”
I interjected, “‘Scuse me, Mr. Garamond, but does your family know what you are? ‘Cause if they don’t, I am quite ready to tell them.”
“Know about what?” asked Matt, who had just come up behind his uncle. “Uncle Shawn, what’s going on? Why don’t you let the neighbors in? Hi, Dianne.”
“Hi,” I said, eyes normal for one second, and then they went back to being yellow-eyed and vengeful. “We seem to have a problem: i. e. my parents and your uncle very much want to kill each other.”
“Have you made people mad again? Mom told you to stop doing that,” Matt admonished.
Shawn turned to him. “You’re friends with her?”
Mom and Dad both looked at me. “Your friend is his nephew?”
I sighed. “I officially hate my life.”
“Matt, don’t let any of them in,” warned Shawn, “especially that girl’s father. Remember that vampire I told you about? That’s him.”
“That’s him? What? You’re joking. He’s nice, and Dianne’s nice too! He doesn’t look like someone who terrorized your college.”
“So that’s what you’ve been telling people?” Dad exclaimed.
Matthew looked at me, and saw my eyes for the first time. “Um. . . Dianne. . . weird things happening. . .”
“Sorry about my eyes. I can’t help it. Did you know that your uncle’s a werewolf?”
“Yes. . . how do you know?” He sounded dazed.
“I heard him howl a few nights ago. He’s Mom’s ex-boyfriend. Mom’s one too. Yes, Dad’s a vampire. If you say he can go into your house, we promise not to hurt your uncle, as long as he promises not to stab Dad again.”
“You stabbed him?” Matt asked.
“It was self-defense. He tried to strangle me!”
“He exposed me!” Dad said.
“She bit me!” Shawn countered.
“He stalked me!” Mom retorted, sounding like she was about to cry.
“Ignore him, Matt, he’s a big fat jerk,” I said urgently.
“No! They acted holier-than-thou and are looking down on me for being unemployed!” Shawn addressed my parents again, heavily sarcastic. “I bet you’re just having a wonderful life together, aren’t you? Home of dreams? So much better than your old flame and old enemy, right?”
Mom said very quietly, but as sharply as she would have if she’d shrieked, “For your information, Shawn, I’m dying.”
A silence fell.
“What?”
There was no life in her any more. “The one person that Andy ever bit had AIDS. So now I have it, and I’m going to die. Congratulations. You got your wish. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go somewhere where I’m wanted.” She turned to go.
“Wait, Selene. . .” he suddenly sounded almost polite, “let me get something. Don’t go yet.” He went off inside the house.
Mom was crying. I held her arm and the two of us entered the house, Matt trailing behind. Once I had crossed the threshold I said, “Dad, come in.”
He did, looking very tired. “Thank you, dear.”
We sat down on the couch, Matt looking back and forth, confused and conflicted. I couldn’t blame him. Mom continued to sob, but turned away from Dad when he tried to comfort her, though she let me hug her.
Matt’s three little brothers, Mark, Luke, and John, crept down the stairway. Mark looked about ten, Luke about seven, and Matt had told me that John was five. They took a look at Dad and screamed, “It’s the vampire! It’s the vampire!” and ran back upstairs. They must have heard the commotion–indeed, I wondered if there was anyone in the neighborhood who hadn’t.
A stovetop fan, the kind you turn on to whirr away the smoke and heat of cooking, hummed loudly from the kitchen. Shawn returned with a wooden chopstick broken in half. He gave one half to Matt. “This is in case Ferdy tries anything,” he murmured.
Dad laughed with that same awful, hollow sound. “I’m very intimidated at the prospect of death by chopstick splinters.”
Matt cleared his throat, putting the chopstick in his pocket as if he didn’t know what else to do with it. “So let me get this straight. Mr. Anghel is a vampire, Mrs. Anghel is a werewolf, and Dianne is a. . . something?”
“A shapeshifter,” I said. “Parts of me change into wolf parts when I get really emotional.”
“I guess that explains a bit.”
“Yeah.”
The five of us looked at everything except for each other.
The kitchen fan turned off, and Mrs. Spiralli, a round, flushed woman with messy brown hair and a kind smile, bustled out. “Oh, you’re here already? I’m so sorry. Something is wrong with that fan and when it’s on I can’t hear anything at all. My husband unexpectedly had to stay late at work. He’ll be here in about half an hour. Would you like a drink?”
The adults all stared at her blankly. Matt seemed uncomfortable.
“I’d like a grape soda if you have any,” I said.