Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [25]
Lottie’s jaw dropped. “I don’t even know you anymore, Retta.”
“Loretta.”
“Whatever,” said Lottie. “I can totally do without Loretta. Call me when Retta comes back.” She turned, arms still folded over the smiley face, hands clamped on her forearms like the mall air conditioning had just gotten way too chilly, and walked away in a hurry, leaning forward as if she were trudging uphill through driven snow.
Retta couldn’t feel the chill, though. She couldn’t feel anything, or wouldn’t allow herself, like Trevor had told her. And it wasn’t until Lottie had disappeared from sight that Retta remembered Lottie had driven them to the mall, that she was stranded.
She called her mom on her cell phone to ask if she would pick her up, but all she got was voice mail, her mother’s happy voice singing out the obvious fact that she couldn’t answer the phone. Retta looked at the time—six o’clock—and realized her parents had probably just arrived at their Friday Night Out, drinking wine in a restaurant with a bunch of people going ha ha ha, fanning their faces with their hands because something someone had just said was way too funny.
So she started walking.
Walking was what Retta did for the next few days, for the final week she would spend in that building that had housed her throughout her weekdays for the last few years of her teenaged life. She walked through her neighborhood, looking up through the new leaves at the sun, daring it, trying not to blink. She walked down the newly edged sidewalks on Monday and Tuesday, heading to school with her head hanging, watching her feet go back and forth. Lottie drove past both days, on the way to school, on the way home, but never looked at Retta, even though Retta looked at her, ready to wave. Lottie only sat in her car face forward, windows down, the wind blowing hair around her face.
Maybe it was better that way, spending the last week of classes getting used to not being around Lottie, who used those same last-minute days of their secondary education making an attempt at fast friendship with Tammie Galore, of all people, the ex-cheerleader turned vampire, which, it turned out, had been completely fabricated, as everyone had suspected. Retta supposed that Tammie’s backpedaling on her declaration of vampirism, along with her previous defection from the cheer squad, was what probably made her seem like a potential candidate for Lottie’s new best friend. In fact, by Thursday of that week, Tammie Galore was no longer Tammie but Tam-Tam, which everyone thought was cute and why hadn’t they all been calling her that for ages? Retta could have told them. Because Tam-Tam is not a cute name. Because Tam-Tam reeks of the desire to be someone you’re not.
She was walking home on Friday, taking long steps—trudging, really—when Trevor pulled alongside her in his car. She kept walking, though, so he began to follow, driving slowly, revving his Cadillac’s engine every now and then. “Hey, Lo,” he called out his window.
Retta looked over and said, “What?”
He grinned before saying, “Well, someone isn’t very happy.”
“That’s right,” said Retta. “I’m not happy. I’m not sad either, though, Trevor, I think you should know that.”
“What are you then?” said Trevor, and Retta stepped over the devil strip to the road, opened the passenger-side door even as his car idled forward, hopped in.
“I’m nothing,” she said, slamming the door shut. “I don’t feel anything. I’m affectless, a sufferer of ennui, apathetic, a-emotional.”
“That’s not true,” said Trevor. He pushed down on the gas to go faster. “I tasted your feelings. You filled me up. I was full for days.”
“There could be a banquet inside me and I wouldn’t be able to taste any of it,” said Retta. She wanted to cry, because now was the sort of moment a person would cry, at a crisis point, confessing to their own flaws and weaknesses. But she couldn’t. If she