Fat Vampire Value Meal (Books 1-4 in the series) (12 page)

“I mean, I’m used to it.”
 

“Gotcha.”
 

Claire sighed inside of the giant fur hood. “I shouldn’t’ve said anything. Now you’re going to think she’s a sleazy drunk. She’s not. She’s really nice. But it’s been hard on her, raising me alone, and she has to work two jobs and I think it just sometimes gets her.”
 

“It’s just the two of you?”
 

Claire nodded.
 

“Do you ever do anything together? Like, hang out?” Reginald, whose own mother was perhaps too attentive, admitted to himself that he might not have an objective frame of reference, but it seemed like all Claire’s mom did was to work and sleep. Without any father, siblings, or other family, he could imagine Claire spending hour after hour after hour alone in the ramshackle house. Watching
True Blood.

“We had a party for my birthday,” she said. “And we always eat dinner together if she’s home.”
 

This was too depressing. He opted to change the subject.

“When do you sleep?” he asked her, gesturing at the encompassing night with his eyes. Then he smirked at her. “Are you a vampire?”
 

“I got up just for you, Reginald. I’d normally sleep now, like a normal girl.”
 

“C’mon. Let me see your fangs.”
 

“I don’t have fangs.” She giggled like a little girl, because she was one despite her resilient exterior. It was perhaps the first sheen of youth he’d seen from her, he realized. The thought made him sad.
 

“I’d like to, though,” she said.
 

Reginald shook his head, not understanding.
 

“I’d like to be a vampire. Tell me… how does it happen? How do you get turned?”
 

“You wouldn’t want to be a vampire,” he said, thinking of how everywhere you went, a group in power was telling you that you weren’t good enough. At least humans had daytime to spread their intolerance around in.
 

“I would, though,” she said. “I’d be a good hunter. How is it done, Reginald?”

He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.” And he told her the story of how he’d been turned, exactly a week ago now.
 

“And now Maurice, my friend… my ‘maker,’ I guess is the word you’d know… he’s in trouble for turning me. And I’m… well…”

“You’re what?”

He sighed. “I’m a fat vampire.”
 

“So what?”
 

“I’m slow. I’m weak. I didn’t know in advance, and didn’t prepare.” Then, because he knew the sorts of things she’d say if he paused there, added playfully, “What about you, Claire? Have you done your training? Have you been hitting the weights? Make a muscle. Show me.”
 

She curled her biceps into an invisible peak. Reginald made impressed noises.
 

After a few minutes of silence, she looked him in the eyes. Reginald realized he could easily glamour her, but he no longer wanted to.
 

“I’d like you to turn me,” she said. “Not now, obviously. You’ll need to figure out how it’s done for sure, but then I want in.”
 

“You want
in
?”

“I spend all day in a stupid school that I hate and then I come home and spend nights either literally alone or pretty much alone here, watching TV. This neighborhood isn’t great. Sometimes there are shots outside at night. I’m little for my age. I get picked on.”

Reginald thought of how easily she’d bested him on the night they’d met, how she’d spun out of his grip as if his hands had been greased. He thought she must do okay, but Reginald knew what it was to be picked on — how it dug into your spirit like talons — and said nothing.

“If I were a vampire,” she said, “I’d be on top. I wouldn’t just hang out here alone. I could go out at night. I wouldn’t have to be afraid of anything.”
 

Then she looked right at him, waiting.
 

“You’re serious.”
 

“Yes. Can you find out how it’s done?”
 

“I can’t do that, Claire. Even if I wanted to.” And he explained about the training, about the reason that the only vampires anyone ever heard of were fit and thin and strong and fast and attractive. “Besides, he said, you’d never grow up. It’s bad enough to know I can never lose weight, but to know you’d be a kid forever? It gets better as you grow up, Claire. Not always a lot better, but for now, you just have to put in your time.”
 

She’d been staring past him, to the side, toward the front sidewalk. Her face didn’t move when he was done speaking, but a single tear began to fall down the side of her nose and nest in the hollow above her upper lip.
 

“Then can you come inside for a while and just sit with me? Just watch TV with me for a while?”

“Are you inviting me inside your house?” he asked.
 

“Yeah.”
 

He nodded solemnly, picked up the chair and moved it to the back porch, and entered the back door as Claire held it for him.
 

She made microwave popcorn and they sat on the threadbare couch together watching whatever came on, which just so happened to be the last half of an episode of
Columbo
. There was no stirring from elsewhere in the house, and Reginald thought how disturbing it was that a girl could invite a stranger into the living room and the only authority in the house would never know.
 

Claire curled up and put her head in his lap, and within ten minutes of finishing her popcorn, she was asleep. He slipped out from under her, replacing his lap with a pillow, and covered her with an afghan.
 

As he left, being careful not to make any noise, he looked back at the little girl who wanted to be a vampire so that she could be as strong as she tried to feel, the little girl that he couldn’t bring himself to feed on.
 

She looked very small.
 

R
UT

THE SECOND HALF OF REGINALD’S shift was far better than the first half, now that Walker was gone and his only co-workers were Maurice, who he already knew and liked, and Nikki, who seemed to loathe Walker as much as he did.
 

Over the rest of the time before his assessment by the Vampire Council, Reginald found himself falling into a nice rhythm. He’d wake as the sun was setting, eat a breakfast of human food out of habit, shower, get dressed, and head off to work. The church where he’d met Claire was on the way, so he always stopped for five minutes to say hello. Then he went to work and he, Maurice, and Nikki endured Walker until he’d gone.
 

After midnight, a new mood descended over the office. It was still work, but because there were only three of them working and all three got along, the place had a slumber party feel. Without Walker’s distractions, Reginald found himself able to complete his work well before his shift was over — and without Berger there to tell him to do more, he simply ended up with free time. Some nights, he played wastebasket basketball with Maurice and Nikki, who seemed to have discovered the same efficiency long ago and had been waiting for Reginald to catch up.
 

Each night at 2am, Reginald took his lunch break and went to visit Claire. He tried to talk her out of it, saying she needed her sleep and that her mother was bound to, at some point, come downstairs to find her daughter hanging out with a three hundred and fifty pound stranger who she could easily catch if she decided to pursue as he fled — and having promised that he’d feed on neither Claire nor her mother,
flee
he would. But Claire was having none of it. She promised him steaks and hamburger as enticement and said that besides, Reginald’s visits were the highlights of her day because he was one of the only friends she had. The notion was depressing beyond belief to Reginald.
 

He returned to the office around three. His shift was supposed to last until seven, but Nikki, who confessed she knew about the odd disease that her two co-workers coincidentally shared, offered to cover for both from six until she left at eight. So Reginald would go home while it was still dark, draw his blinds, and sit inside watching TV for a few hours, and eventually he’d fall asleep.
 

One day, when Reginald returned from lunch, he sat down in his seat and heard a loud farting noise. He looked between his legs and saw the pink lips of a Whoopee Cushion.
 

There was a low chortling, and then a head popped up from Walker’s cubicle, saying, “What, Reggie, did someone step on a duck?”
 

It was Nikki. She was holding Walker’s coffee cup, sticking her teeth out in imitation of his giant white tombstones, and letting her lower jaw hang slack. Oddly, the Walker parody did nothing to diminish her beauty.
 

Reginald laughed, hard. It was the first time he’d laughed — genuinely
laughed
, with all of his mind and body — in as long as he could remember.
 

Nikki put down the coffee cup and rested her arms across the cubicle divider.
 

“What are you doing after work, Reggie?” she said, still imitating Walker’s voice. Then, in her own voice: “I know a 24-hour piano bar. Maurice and I are getting out of here and going over at five. They’re a bit dodgy, but it’s the only piano bar in this part of town that’s open at five AM and serves waffles, so our choice is limited.”
 

Reginald loved waffles.
 

“Count me in,” he said.
 

H
OT
C
HICK

WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE piano bar, the official pianists were long asleep or drunk, so the manager, who Nikki knew (probably through the bonds that form amongst pianists) said it’d be fine if they tinkered with the piano on and off while eating their waffles — or, in Maurice’s case, while he was drinking his coffee.
 

Nikki was in her element. Upon receiving the go-ahead and before her waffles arrived, she sat down on the bench, opened one of several sheet music books from a rack beside the piano, and began to play. It was beautiful. It made
her
more beautiful. As she played, she sat taller, and Reginald could swear that something inside of her began to glow in the way he’d seen his own human blood glow that first night on the hill.
 

While she was playing, Maurice leaned over and said to Reginald, “Have you thought of feeding on her?”
 

A counterpointing thought crossed Reginald’s mind, and he was surprised to realize how deeply it bothered him. Rather than answering the question, he asked Maurice what had occurred to him. “Have
you
fed on her?” he said.

Maurice chuckled. “The only woman I feed on is my wife.”

“You have a wife?”
 

“Yes. And one thing you’ll learn is that in the vampire world, we have as many strange, nonsensical conventions as humans have. One is that if you’re pledged to another, it’s considered infidelity to feed on a human of the same sex as your spouse.”

“Your wife is a human?” Reginald said.
 

“No. She’s vampire. But both of us have to feed, and so she feeds on women and I feed on men. Mostly goth kids, who are totally into it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” said Reginald. “That would be like saying that if I were married, I couldn’t eat nachos. I could only eat cheeseburgers.”
 

“It’s probably because the act of feeding is, for us, very close to sex when we’re feeding on someone we’re attracted to. The lines blur. My wife and I feed on each other while… well, you get the idea. But drinking another vampire’s blood doesn’t nourish us, so we have to eat somewhere. This is how our society has chosen to answer that particular sticky problem. For humans, the lines don’t blur. You’re not almost having sex with nachos when you eat them.”
 

Reginald thought that Maurice had never seen him eat nachos.
 

 
“So,” Maurice said. “
Have
you thought of feeding on her?” He nodded at Nikki.
 

“Very much.”
 

“So glamour her, then feed.”
 

“I can’t,” said Reginald. “I thought of it when you went to the bathroom. She was looking right into my eyes, but I couldn’t do it.”
 

Maurice smiled. “Why?”
 

“It felt wrong.”
 

“So you’ve given up feeding on her, then?”
 

But Nikki interrupted the conversation by returning. She looked flushed and deeply pleased. Something radiated off of her and again, Reginald found himself looking longingly at her neck as her hair moved. He fought it down.
 

“Shit,” said Nikki, looking at the new arrival on the plate in front of her. “How long was I playing? My waffle is cold.”

“You know,” said Maurice, “Reginald plays piano.”
 

Reginald shook his head. “No I don’t.”
 

“Yes you do.”
 

“No I don’t,” Reginald repeated.
 

Maurice turned to Nikki. “Hey, could you do me a favor? I need a tissue, but there was no toilet paper in the men’s room and I don’t feel like blowing my nose on these cloth napkins. Could you grab me a handful from the ladies’?”
 

She nodded, got up, and walked toward the bathroom. Reginald watched her go.

Maurice slid something into Reginald’s hand. It was his phone, and the website on the screen was HowToPlayPiano.com.

“Read it,” said Maurice.
 

“I can’t learn to play piano from reading a page on a website,” said Reginald.
 

“You already know how to play the music, believe me,” said Maurice. “You just need to know what the notes mean and which keys to hit.”

“I have no idea how to play piano,” said Reginald. “Seriously.”