Vampire High Sophomore Year

2



I finished my movie and went to bed.

Lying there, I could hear Turk over my head, sweeping and moving things around. Since I couldn’t sleep, I remembered things about my cousin.

When I was seven and she was eight, she turned an old water heater into a spaceship. She painted it silver and cut out cardboard fins and stuck them on with duct tape. I mean, it was amazing work for an eight-year-old. Anyway, it amazed me.

And when she told me I could be an astronaut and go with her to the moon, I was ready. She even gave me her special Space Ranger Galaxy III helmet to wear.

“I’ve already been a couple of times,” she said. “It’s really easy if you know what you’re doing.”

So I climbed into the spaceship and lay there up by the nose, which was a cone of really heavy poster board, also painted silver.

Nothing happened. I just lay there, feeling more and more cramped and sweaty, watching my Galaxy III helmet’s faceplate start steaming up, feeling the oxygen going bye-bye.

I started to wonder: Had I already started? Was I in outer space? Why wasn’t there a window in this thing?

Then the spaceship was rocked by a cosmic bang. Then a horrible smell filled the helmet. I was crashing, I was burning, I was going to die.

I started to thrash around, rocking the ship, which just scared me more. And without thinking about it, just trying to get away from that horrible smell, I pushed myself forward and burst through the paper nose cone. When I got out, I took off running. I ran across the backyard, around the house, and up to the corner before I realized I was safe, and back on planet Earth.

I took off the good old Galaxy III. I breathed in the best air I’d ever breathed. I turned my face to the sun, and without thinking about it, I said, “Hi!”

Then I heard the sound of angry voices coming from Turk’s backyard. I walked back to find out what was going on.

I still remember Dad saying, “Where is Cody? What have you done with my son?”

It’s kind of a warm memory, actually. But not as warm as the memory of Number 3, Aunt Imelda’s husband of the year, turning Turk over his knee and paddling her.

He stopped when I came closer and said, “Let me, Uncle Jeff, let me!”

Then for two minutes it was all about Cody. Was I all right? What had happened? What had we been playing?

“I went to outer space,” I said. “But I didn’t like it.”

The spaceship looked like it had had a rough trip. The nose cone was ripped, of course. And the back end was blackened and smoking. A long electric cord ran from the house to a battery charger, the kind they have in repair garages, which Number 3 owned a couple of. The battery charger was hooked up to a battery surrounded by six other batteries, and those batteries were connected to each other by a few twists of copper wire. The spaceship’s engine, of course.

What had happened was that Turk had tried to charge the batteries all at once, off the one charger. The one in the center had heated up enough to blow the caps off the cells. That was the sound I had heard, echoing in the spaceship. The bad smell had been the cloud of sulfuric acid that rolled out of the battery once the caps had blown.

“How high did I get?” I wanted to know.

Turk explained everything. Of course she hadn’t tried out her spaceship herself. How could she start the engine if she was inside? Why hadn’t she told me I was the test pilot? Because if she had, maybe I wouldn’t have done what she wanted. It all made perfect sense.

We went home, and we didn’t get together with them again until Aunt Imelda was on husband Number 4.

By that time, I was ten and Turk was eleven. This time, it was she and Aunt Imelda and Number 4 who came to visit us. I figured I was safe enough on my own turf. I mean, she couldn’t bring her latest spaceship, or whatever she was working on, with her. So I was kind of looking forward to the visit, the way kids do. You figure, you’ve got a cousin coming, someone new to play with. Right?

Right. But the only game she wanted to play was Kidnapper, where she tied me up and left me in my own tree house for about twelve hours, until Dad climbed up and got me down. Why hadn’t I at least called for help? I had. But no one had heard me. Probably because of the gag in my mouth.

“Sorry, Cody,” she said the next morning. “I didn’t mean to leave you out there. I just sort of forgot.”

Then, when she had turned thirteen and Aunt Imelda had moved to Seattle and was revving up husband Number 6, we heard that Turk had become an artist. She sketched. She painted. She hammered together weird things out of hunks of wood. She wore a black T-shirt that said DESPAIR IS GOOD FOR YOU, and it was the only shirt she would wear. Aunt Imelda had to get her a dozen or she wouldn’t change.

Last year, when I’d been getting started here at Vlad Dracul Magnet School, she’d entered an art contest. Her art was a black urinal turned upside down. The title was Homage to Marcel Duchamp.

Aunt Imelda sent us a copy of the program. Under “Homage to Marcel Duchamp, Raquel Stone, Age 16” was the explanation of why this was Art.

“As Duchamp exhibited a urinal to express his rage and despair at the slaughter of World War I, and the inadequacy of language to describe it, this work expresses rage and despair at Duchamp’s inability to express his rage and despair adequately.”

First prize. Five thousand dollars.

“You could redo a whole bathroom for that,” Dad said when he read it. “With plenty left over for toilet paper.”

Instead, Turk bought her car, and we heard it got to be pretty well known around Seattle. Partly this was because it was always shiny black no matter what the weather was like. Partly this was because she drove it on her learner’s permit and the cops kept stopping her.

Meanwhile, she won another prize. This one for a piece called Daddy Six. It was photographs of all the guys Aunt Imelda had married, wrapped up in a net of rusty barbed wire.

Along with the prize, she got a free trip to a girls’ school in Arizona for troubled teens, which was Number 6’s idea. She was there about three weeks. Then the school sent her back with a note asking Aunt Imelda to please try somewhere else. Turk had organized the girls into a union and led them out on strike.

Now here she was in strange old New Sodom, where maybe half the population was vampires—I mean, jenti—and until a couple of months ago, nobody had ever talked about it. Not the jenti, not the gadje—which was what the jenti called us. They had lived side by side all their lives and never spoken of what everyone knew. That vampires were real. That they clustered in New Sodom. That they had been here from the beginning.

Things were more out in the open now. Things that nobody had admitted for three hundred years. But a lot of people thought things had been better the old way. And some of them probably blamed me for what I had done to change things.

So I could hardly wait to see what my cousin was going to do to me now that we were living together in the weirdest little city in America.