Jane Jones (2 page)

“Lord have mercy, Jane, is that you?” My mother, dressed in a coat not quite long enough to conceal an old blue cotton nightgown and not nearly long enough to cover her bare legs and bedroom slippers, ran toward me and squeezed me in a frantic maternal embrace. I stiffened like a humiliated piece of timber. “Sweetheart, I was scared to death. Your friends called and said you’d fainted. Are you okay?”

Then a few things happened in a rapid domino effect. As my mother buried her face in my hair, her own keen sense of vampire smell kicked in. Her head reared back and suddenly, rather than embracing me, she was holding me at arm’s length with an incredulous look on her face. “Jane Jones, is that blood I smell?” Before I could answer, out of the corner of her eye she noticed Ian, still dead to the world, with the right leg of his jeans rolled up past his knee.

“What in the world is going on here?” my mother shouted at everyone still standing around. “Would somebody like to explain this to me?”

Astrid snickered. “He was having a party. He’s drunk.”

“Oh, I see, so you all thought that you’d feed off him and get a little tipsy yourselves, right? Did you ever stop to think that someone might notice he was missing from his own party? Did you ever stop to think that when you’re drunk, you’re careless and that you risk exposing yourselves and the whole … community?”

“We were going to put him back when we were done.” Astrid shuffled her expensive shoes in the dead pine needles. “Don’t have a freak-out.”

For the first time this whole evening, I was really with Astrid. If my mom could find it in her heart not to have a freak-out just this once, I would be truly grateful. No such luck, though.

“Aren’t you the Hoffman girl? Your parents are going to hear from me. Oh, all of your parents are going to hear from me.”

“Mrs. Jones, I’m sure my parents would love to hear from you,” said Astrid. “When they get back. They’re at our home in Germany until after the New Year.” Astrid leveled a gaze at my mother that didn’t contain a hint of remorse or fear. It was strange. On the one hand, my mother was the adult in this situation. On the other hand, it was more than likely that Astrid, though having the appearance and temperament of a teenager, had actually
been on this earth for hundreds of years longer than my mother, depending on when she’d been bitten and infected with vampiritis. Either way, she certainly wasn’t intimidated by my mother’s threat. Neither was Celeste.

“Yeah, Mrs. Jones, I’m sure my parents would love to hear from you too, but they died from bubonic plague.” It was probably true, but it was difficult to feel pity for an orphan who was shaking with laughter at the mention of her own deceased family.

Realizing that her outrage was not having the sobering effect she’d intended, my mother turned on me. “And you, Jane. What were you thinking? You know you can’t drink blood.”

“I didn’t mean to, I …” But you know how it is when your mom has something to say. She’s going to say it.

“Didn’t mean to? Are you saying it was an accident?”

“Well, it wasn’t an accident, I was …”

“You were displaying incredibly poor judgment. Not to mention what you let happen to this young man.” She gestured to Ian, who had now balled himself up in a cozy-looking fetal position in the chilly September night air.

“Boys,” she said to Timothy and another guy I sometimes saw at Celeste’s locker. I mouthed a silent prayer that she wouldn’t do anything to further embarrass me in front of Timothy. “Do you think you can help
this fellow back to his house without attracting much attention?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Timothy replied.

“Good, see that you do. And no more feeding from him. Put him in bed, but don’t undress him. With any luck, he’ll be so preoccupied with his hangover when he wakes up, he won’t notice any fang marks on his leg.”

The boys stooped to hoist Ian up. They draped his flaccid arms around their shoulders and dragged him to his feet, but hesitated, awaiting further orders from my mother.

For the moment, it seemed like she didn’t have any. It seemed like she’d said her piece and was ready to let everyone go their separate ways. I’d survived an excruciating social event, a toxic blood reaction, and near death by parental mortification, and I was ready to call it a night. Too bad for me that my mother wasn’t, just yet.

“The rest of you should get to your houses,” she instructed. “Stick close to the road, but stay in the woods so that you won’t be seen. And Jane, I’d better get you home ASAP. I’m guessing you’re in for one hell of a case of diarrhea tonight.”

If it weren’t for the fact that I had technically not been alive for several decades, I would have died of humiliation right there.

“What were you thinking, Josephine?”
She tore open the glove box in front of me and grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer, which she furiously pumped into her palm and then mine. I opted not to remark on the absurdity of that precaution. You can’t catch your death much worse than we already had. I rubbed my hands together until she bellowed, “Well?”

I had been yelled at so many times in our old Volvo station wagon, but I could tell this session was going to be particularly searing. My first clue was that my mother used my real first name, Josephine, the one she gave me when I was born, the name I had before I even knew what a vampire was.

“I was just …” I had started speaking before my mother was finished.

“I mean, why would you put yourself at risk like that? You could have died … well, not
died
died, but how could you do something so stupid?”

I said “I was just …” again, but apparently,
I was just
was just not enough to stop Hurricane Ma.

“Not to mention the fact that if that boy had sobered up, you could have been discovered. We could have all been discovered. Did you think of that?” She paused, as if waiting to hear my answer before asking again. Maybe she actually wanted me to participate in this “discussion.” “Did you?”

“I didn’t think—”

“No, you didn’t think,” Ma interrupted. “Not for one second, did you?”

“Ma, I didn’t really do anything.”

“Oh, I don’t want to
hear
it! I don’t want to hear the excuses! You know what? Just sit there with your mouth shut until we get home.”

I would have been totally happy to sit there with my mouth shut for seven years if that’s what my mother really wanted. But I knew she didn’t. I knew she was about to start right back up again in five, four, three, two—

“I really want to understand what was going through your head. I really want to understand, Jo, why?” That last
why
came out kind of soft. I don’t want to give you the impression that my mother was no longer angry with me. It’s more like she had exhausted herself with the exertion of tearing me five new ones. Well, she wasn’t the only one
who had a right to be upset. So now that she’d piped down, I let her have it right back.

“
Why?
You want to know why? Because you
made
me go out with them! You ordered me to call Astrid and ask if I could hang out with all the vampire kids because you were sick of me lying around the house. You made me beg to play their vampire games. And that’s what they do, Ma! That’s their idea of fun.”

“But just because all of them were doing it doesn’t mean—”

“Doesn’t mean I had to do it too? Ma, you act like I haven’t been a teenager for the last seventy-five years. Believe me, I’ve tried just saying no to peer pressure. It doesn’t always work. Especially if your peers happen to be a-holes.” My voice was shaking with emotion, but I had more to say.

“You’re the one who put me at risk, Ma. Because even though all those vampire kids share a secret, you knew I had something else that I would have liked to keep secret from them. And now they all know, and even if I live another thousand years, I will never live it down. I’m a mutant among mutants.”

“Jo …”

“It’s Jane, Ma. At least for the next four years until we move again. In fact, you can call me Lame—it’s what my
‘friends’ call me.” From the look on my mother’s face, I could tell I’d made her feel bad. Well, good. She was such a hypocrite, trying to tell me how to run my social life, or lack of social life, when she wouldn’t be caught undead hobnobbing with any of the adults in the local vampire community. Sure,
no
matter where we lived, we were always among others like us, because there is a thriving vampire community in just about any American town, and unfortunately our numbers seem to be growing all the time. But my mother obviously didn’t trust any of them. And for good reason. So why should she expect me to be any different?

“I know how difficult this is, Jane,” she said. “I just thought things would be easier if you had some friends in your new school.”

I didn’t feel like really putting the screws to her, but the truth is, she didn’t know at all how difficult it was. She’d only ever gone to a one-room schoolhouse, and only until the eighth grade, before leaving to help out on her family farm. Then she married my dad and they had their own farm to take care of. I remember that wasn’t going so well before everything … changed for us. So, while she’s no stranger to difficulty, she has no idea what it’s like for me, a former farmer’s daughter, now a vampire, attending her fourteenth high school in a town that happens to be
filled with mortal as well as supernatural jerks.

“I know what a great girl you are, Jane. Not everyone can be popular, but I know that if you just tried a little harder, you could make a few good friends.”

“Don’t be so sure, Ma. The vampires may have to put up with me, but the regular kids … it’s like they don’t even see me.”

“I bet you’re selling yourself short, honey.”

“Ma, you know the group of super-nerdy kids who are obsessed with vampire novels and walk around the mall wearing capes? Even
they
won’t let me sit with them at lunch.” I knew I sounded pitiful now, but it was true. It was also kind of funny when I said it out loud like that. I guess it sounded funny to my mother too, because she covered her mouth to try to hide her smile before I could see it. Then she snorted.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh.”

“It’s okay. It’s funny. It’s ironic. I mean, people always say they’re doing something ironically and it’s supposed to be funny, but usually it’s not really ironic at all. But this is genuine irony!” Now we were both LOLing and I noticed that despite our cool breath, we’d managed to fog the Volvo’s windows just a bit. I wiped my hand on the glass.

“I guess we’d better get home before a policeman thinks we’re a couple of kids out parking,” she said.

Oh, God. Did she really just say that out loud? Ma can always be counted on to take a pretty decent moment and put a stop to it by saying something creepy or corny. This time was a two-fer.

We drove home in relative silence. It took a good fifteen minutes, because we lived clear across town from the Holcomb compound. Port Lincoln is a scenic town on the coast of Connecticut. The old roads are lined with old mansions built with old money. The new developments are dotted with new mansions built with new money. There’s a gorgeous river with a rowing club and the only requirements to join are that you’re gorgeous and interested in rowing.

On the other side of that river, over a quaint little bridge and in the armpit of the highway and the train tracks that can take you to New York City, there’s a little neighborhood. It’s technically in Port Lincoln, but the houses are small and old. Not in the old mansion way, more in the worn and outdated way. That’s where we lived. I don’t want to make it sound like it was skid row, because the truth is that even though the houses were straight out of the seventies, they were all in good repair, with washed curtains and lawns striped light and dark green due to frequent mowings. My theory is that was because my neighbors were the handymen, housekeepers, and landscapers
who catered to the rest of the town. Of course, it’s only a theory because I didn’t really know any of my neighbors. I didn’t really plan to. What was the point, when in a few short years, I’d have a whole new set?

We pulled into our driveway, and I trudged behind my mother up to the front door. That’s another thing about vampires. We can’t fly. We don’t have superspeed. We drive cars and we trudge when we’re tired. I was so tired.

My mother unlocked the door and flipped on the dim hallway light. She brushed my lank bangs out of my eyes and said, “Try to be quiet going upstairs. Your brother is asleep.”

I nodded and padded up the carpeted staircase to my small, dark room. My hand searched and found the light switch. From the six recessed fixtures in my ceiling, huge 800-watt bulbs—like the ones used in sunlamps—hummed to life. I know you’ve heard the stories of how sunlight will destroy a vampire as soon as it touches his skin. In real life, direct sun is more like an irritant to vampires. If we bake in it, we get burned, just like you. Okay, we might crisp up a
little
faster than the living, but then, melanomas aren’t really an issue for us either. So we cover up, we wear SPF 100, and we stay in the shade. Everyone just thinks we’re Irish or something. And since we try to exist in the regular world, most of us keep normal hours, going to work and
school during the day and sleeping at night. Vampires need the heat generated by the UV lamps to help us fight our bodies’—um, our
corpses’—
natural unnatural instincts to stay awake after sundown.

Of course, I realize this isn’t the greenest practice and the irony that I may be contributing to the eventual destruction of the Earth when I’m someone who will probably need the Earth for kind of a long time is not lost on me. Plus I feel guilty about our insanely high electric bills, especially since I require extra wattage, due to my unfortunate condition. The glow coming from my ceiling would have been too much for even the most tanorexic human. I quickly double-checked the light-blocking blinds we’d installed so that curious neighbors wouldn’t drop by to ask why daylight was radiating from our house, then I opened the curtains surrounding my canopy bed and flopped down in the warm darkness, exhausted.