Shelter (2 page)

The rest of homeroom was uneventful. Everyone chatted amongst themselves, but thankfully Van and Zach were having their own conversation and they left me alone. Jamie was the only one besides me who wasn’t prattling away. I wondered if she was purposely isolating herself, or if she was being ostracized because of her appearance.

When the bell rang, everyone got up to leave the room. I noticed something fall off Jamie’s backpack when she stood up, and instinctively I picked it up and ran after her.

“Hey!” I called.

A few people glanced at me to see whom it was I was referring to, but Jamie did not. I caught up with her and tapped her on the shoulder. She stopped and turned around to face me, looking a bit startled.

“Hey, you dropped this,” I said, extending my hand, which held the item in question.

I looked down at it, noticing it was a keychain. Several keys dangled from the end of a weird pink wiggly thing. It looked kind of like a sea urchin, but the spikes were all made of some squishy, stretchy material. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen.

“Oh, thank you,” Jamie said, taking it from me. “My mother would kill me if I lost my keys again.”

Jamie turned and walked away, staring straight down at the floor as she went. She soon disappeared in the crowd of students. I felt bad for her. I had some kind of strange kinship with her. Whether she exiled herself intentionally, or was shunned by her peers – she must have felt as out of place as I did.

Most of my classes were really boring and uneventful. Van was in my English class, and I had gym class with Jamie, Amanda, Zach, and Van. Jamie brought a note from her mother that said she must be excused from gym class because she had a bad knee. I overheard Amanda telling her friend Ashley Patterson that maybe Jamie wouldn’t be so fat if she didn’t sit out gym class. I thought that was really rude.

At lunchtime, I looked around for a table where I could be alone. Unfortunately, someone was sitting at every single table in the cafeteria. I scanned the lunchroom looking for a span of chairs where I could at least sit without someone elbowing me while I was trying to eat.

I noticed Jamie sitting by herself. As usual, her head was down. I didn’t see any other empty spots, but no one was sitting within 3 chairs of Jamie on either side of the table.

“Can I sit with you?” I asked, holding my tray and peering down at her.

She barely looked up long enough to notice it was me before saying, “I guess so.”

I sat down directly across from her and placed my tray in front of me.

“Thanks,” I said to her. “I don’t know anyone, and I really didn’t want to sit with strangers.”

Jamie poked at her hamburger with her fork, but she did not eat. She seemed to be looking longingly at the food on her tray, but she refused to take a bite. My curiosity got the better of me.

“Something wrong with your food?” I asked.

Jamie looked up at me and sighed. Instantly, I regretted saying anything. She looked hurt, and there was a loneliness behind her eyes that was startling. I cleared my throat uneasily.

“I’m not hungry,” she said, turning her eyes back toward her food.

“Oh,” I answered, accepting the obvious lie. “I’m starving.”

I picked up my hamburger and took a bite. It was dried out and hard, but I was so hungry I probably would have eaten a hockey puck if I didn’t think my teeth would all break and fall out onto my tray like a cartoon character. I tried to ignore the aching hunger for blood that lingered in the back of my mind like a constant shadow.

I noticed Jamie looking around out of the corners of her eyes. It seemed as though she was trying to see if anyone was watching her. When she was confident no one was looking, she grabbed a French fry and shoved it into her mouth. She tried to chew as inconspicuously as possible.

I couldn’t understand this. Jamie was clearly overweight. She was hardly the only overweight girl in school, or even the largest. It was obvious she didn’t often turn down food. So why would she not just eat?

Suddenly, I heard snorting noises coming from behind Jamie. I peered over her shoulder and Amanda and Ashley were sitting with several other girls staring at Jamie’s back. They giggled uproariously as they snorted, and the whole thing was almost surreal. It felt like a scene straight out of one of those pre-teen novels I’d read when I was a little kid. I couldn’t believe it could really happen. I always thought that kind of thing was purely fiction, and I never imagined people would actually behave that way. My gums tingled. I wanted to draw blood from every one of them.

Jamie sat quietly for a moment, and then she stood up so quickly her chair turned over. She fled from the lunchroom, leaving her tray sitting on the table. I watched her go, and then I turned toward Amanda and Ashley and watched them exchange knowing looks. They’d gotten to Jamie, and they thought it was riotous. The whole table exploded in laughter.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel hungry anymore. This was exactly why I had been so ambivalent about attending a human school. I thought this kind of thing was more of a caricature of human behavior made up to sell tickets to sappy teenage movies, but clearly, I was wrong. Seeing it with my own eyes made it real, and it was horrifying.

I picked up my tray and Jamie’s, and I took them to the window where other students were dumping their finished lunches, and I handed both trays to the woman wearing plastic gloves. She took both trays and slammed them against the side of a huge black trashcan and then shoved them into a black crate, which she picked up and sent through a curtain made of strips of clear plastic. She looked completely defeated. I guessed her job wasn’t the most fulfilling.

I managed to make it through the rest of the day, but I was more than ready to go home by the time the final bell rang. Thankfully, Will was already waiting for me when I got outside.

“So, how was your first day?” he asked.

“It was okay,” I said.

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Part of it hadn’t been completely horrible.

“You don’t sound so sure,” he observed.

“No, it was fine,” I said. “I just don’t understand humans.”

“Well, join the club!” he said, chuckling.

Will had never been much for human contact, either. In fact, talking to humans was downright distracting, and sometimes humorous in a creepy way. They were food, not friends. I imagined it would be a bit like a human having a polite conversation with a cow – all the while imagining the cow as a thick, juicy steak.  

Truthfully, conversing with humans hadn’t been quite as creepy as I thought it would be. I managed to make it through an entire day without sinking my fangs into one of them, though not without considerable effort. Their behavior was disturbing, nonetheless.

It occurred to me that I had to figure out a way to explain to Will why I was going to a human party that night. I had to go to school. Mother had insisted. He got that. But, he would never understand why I would willingly accept an invitation to interact with humans. I was sure of it.

“Um, Will?” I blurted out. “I’m going to a party tonight.”

For a moment, he was silent, as if he were trying to decide if he’d heard me clearly.

“You’re what?” he asked.

“Going to a party,” I repeated. “This guy asked me, and I didn’t know what to say, so I said I would go.”

“Oh,” he said. “Um… okay.”

“It’s no big deal,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Will said. He sounded sincere.

“What do you think Mother will say?” I asked.

“Who knows?” he commented, and the conversation ended.

When I got home, Mother was waiting in the parlor. She lounged on the sofa – a fire roaring in the fireplace, though it was nearly eighty degrees outdoors. She smiled at me when I walked in.

“Alice, darling,” she cooed, standing up and walking over to me. “Tell Mother about your first day!”

She put her icy cold hands on my cheeks and cocked her head to the side, eyeballing me as if she were waiting for me to make some incredible revelation. Mother was always chilly, but today her hands were particularly frosty. I guess that was why she had the fire going.

“I’m going to a party,” I blurted out, instantly wishing I hadn’t.

“That’s a lovely idea!” Mother gushed. “It’ll give you a chance to get to know some people!”

Mother was so hard to understand. She had kept my brother and me away from humans our whole lives. She refused to hire humans as servants – even though they cost far less that vampires. She escorted us on almost every trip to the store and every outing personally, and those she couldn’t attend she had our vampire nanny chaperone. Why, now, was she suddenly so determined that I be around them? It was bizarre.

“What time is the party, dear?” Mother asked.

“Eight,” I answered.

“Do you have any homework?” she wanted to know.

“No, Mother,” I said.

“Well, then you’d better go get ready for the party,” she told me. “Where is it?”

I couldn’t remember the exact address, so I set my backpack down on the coffee table and fumbled through it. I finally found the paper on which Van had written the address, and I handed it to her.

She unfolded the paper and turned it around the proper way. When she read the address, her face blanched. She suddenly became weak in the knees, and she sat down on the couch as if she were dizzy.

“Mother!” I gasped. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“What’s wrong?”

“This address, I know the people who live there,” she replied.

“I thought I recognized the address,” I admitted. “When Van wrote it down, it seemed familiar. Why?”

“Because,” she said. “That’s where your father was killed.”

I was speechless. I suddenly felt my own knees buckle, and I sat down beside her on the couch and exhaled sharply. That’s where I’d seen the address. I remembered that my mother kept a newspaper clipping in her dresser drawer about an incident that happened at that address. I never knew what it was, but I knew it must have been important for her to keep it like that.

I had always been a snoop. I was a curious child, and I went through every inch of the house on a regular basis. I’d found some dirty magazines under my brother’s mattress when I was twelve. I blackmailed him into giving me half of them in exchange for not telling Mother. Hey, I said I was a curious child!

When I found the clipping, I hadn’t understood what it meant. I had looked at it several times after that first day, but it never registered to me what it was. It was a simple story that mentioned a murder at the address, and police said it was a crime of passion. I never knew what that meant.

I couldn’t speak. I desperately wanted to ask her a million questions, but I couldn’t find the words. I opened my mouth, but the words would not form. It was like I’d been struck dumb.

“What happened?” I heard my brother ask. I’d forgotten he was in the room.

Mother got a faraway look in her eyes, and suddenly I saw tears begin to fill them. I couldn’t remember ever seeing my mother cry, and it was shocking. She sighed deeply, and she closed her eyes tightly in an effort to regain her composure. A single tear escaped her eye and fell down her cheek, but she quickly brushed it away. After another deep breath, she spoke.

“Your father and I were in love once,” she began. “It was so natural with him. Everyone said it was fate.”

Mother paused, as if the memory was too much to bear. Then she continued, “His parents and my parents arranged for us to be married, but neither of us objected. You see, back then parents still arranged marriages for their children. We had no say in the person we were to marry. We did as we were told.”

Tears filled her eyes again in remembrance, and she had to take a moment to regain her composure. The reached into the pocket of her dress and withdrew a white, lace-edged handkerchief and blotted her eyes carefully. She took another deep breath and went on.

“Fortunately, soon fell madly in love. I couldn’t stand to be away from him, and when we were married I was so relieved that I could spend every day with him. We were happy for the first three decades or so, but then things changed. Your father began to spend more time away from home, and soon he was away for months at a time. I never knew where he went – or why.”

“And you just let him go?” I asked her.

“What choice did I have?” she questioned. “He was not a slave. He could come and go as he pleased, as could I.”

“You never knew where he was going?” I asked.

“No, not at first,” I said. “It killed me to be away from him, but I had Will to look after, and we conceived you when he was home briefly. With the two of you to care for, I didn’t have much time to wonder.”

“Not at first,” I repeated. “Does that mean you found out later?”

“Yes, I found out later,” she agreed. “But not before I began having an affair with a human.”

That statement knocked the breath out of me. My mother had been having an affair with a human while my father was away. I was only a baby. This was totally unexpected. I looked over at Will, and he looked just as shocked as I.