Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [20]
“Do you think we’ll ever be accepted?” said Trevor.
“Who? Vampires?”
He nodded.
“Sure,” said Retta. “There are precedents. People of color. Women. Gay people. Wiccans. I mean, I already accept you. So there you go.”
“So there you go?” said Trevor, smiling as he pulled his car against the curb.
“How did you know this was my house?” asked Retta. “How did you know this was my street?” She hadn’t given any directions.
“Inside,” said Trevor, lifting his finger to his temple and tapping. “Didn’t you notice me inside, searching?”
Retta stared at him for a long second before opening the door to climb out.
“Hey. I’m sorry,” said Trevor. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Retta closed the door and bent down to look at him through the window. From above, his fauxhawk made him look a little birdlike, a brown baby chick who knew how to drive. “You don’t scare me,” she said, and started up the walk to the front porch.
“Hey, Loretta,” Trevor called after her. “Hey, can I come in?”
“No,” said Retta, turning to look back at him. “That would not be a good idea. If you let a vampire into your house, they can come in anytime they want afterward.”
“I’m not that kind of vampire,” said Trevor, grinning, stretching farther across his seat to call out from the rolled-down passenger window.
“That’s right,” said Retta. “And I’m not that kind of girl.”
When she turned to continue on her way, she let herself smile, just a little.
Vampires had been appearing on all the news channels and in all the papers for several months by then. They were usually sad or angry, mostly because they had all lived isolated lives, misunderstood by normal people. Some were excited, though, to finally have a chance to speak about their lives in public without threat of being hunted, staked in the heart, or burned to cinders so that they could never regenerate. “As if!” one old woman vampire had said on CNN from her living-room recliner. “I wish I could regenerate!” she told the interviewer. “I would never have had my hip replaced!”
There were so many of them, and so many kinds, more than Retta had ever imagined. There were vampires who fed on the blood of others, and there were vampires who fed on feelings, like Trevor. There were vampires who fed on sunlight (they mostly lived in Florida, California, Hawaii, and at certain times of the year Alaska), and there were vampires who fed on the dark, eating their way from midnight to morning. There were vampires who fed on tree bark and vampires that fed on crustaceans, there were vampires who fed on nothing but the sound of human voices, and there were vampires who fed on any attention they could receive (they often took up karaoke, made YouTube videos, or auditioned for reality television shows). They were everywhere, once you started looking, although it wasn’t until Trevor and his friends came to speak that Retta had ever seen one in person. That she knew of, as Trevor had weakly jested. To be honest, she’d expected something different. An old-fashioned vampire with long, sharp teeth, or at least one of the less expected vampires, the sort she could watch with fascination as they ate through a meal of darkness, or one who looked as if she were carved out of ivory, with bright green eyes, or some other sexy, slightly otherworldly physical composition.
But despite the fact that they seemed harmless, over the weekend phone calls were strung from house to house, and by Sunday parents were either frowning or wide-eyed with terror. Retta’s mother came into