Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [5]
Here’s the brief we gave to each of the writers we invited to contribute to this book:
Give us a YA vampire tale, we said, but make it smart and unusual. It can be funny, or frightening, or folkloric, or romantic; it can be quiet, or explosive, or brutal, or tender; it can even be all of these things at once. Give us a story we can (ahem) get our teeth into.
And don’t be afraid to draw blood.
Things to Know About Being Dead
by Genevieve Valentine
As it turns out, if a person dies badly, sometimes the soul can’t escape the body and will have to feed off the living forever.
Of course, I only find this out after Madison Gardner offers me a ride home in her dad’s Beemer after six shots of coconut rum and ends up shoving the car through a tree.
Madison pours herself out of the driver’s side and teeters around on her tacky platforms, mumbling and choking and being as useless as usual. I break my neck and die before the ambulance gets there.
I’m so pissed that she’s okay that it takes me a few minutes to realize I’m not dead anymore.
(Sometimes your priorities aren’t what they should be.)
Things to know about being dead:
1. You have a heartbeat when a paramedic checks for a pulse. Easy to fake. It’s like sit-ups with ventricles.
2. Your grandmother, who has been getting senile, takes one look at you and says, “So, Suyin, you’re dead,” so either something about you looks different or everyone was wrong about the senile thing.
3. Grandmother tells you you’re jiang-shi, and that it’s safe to go to school. “The winter sun shouldn’t worry you,” she says. She doesn’t mention the summer sun.
4. Your parents have no idea what’s going on. They’re just happy you’re bonding with Grandmother.
I couldn’t sleep that first night. Grandmother and I had tea and played cards (she killed at poker; I’d never known), and once I was upstairs, I checked my homework twice and clicked through every online video I could find, trying to keep my mind off it.
I started wondering if jiang-shi ever slept. If not, I’d have to develop some new hobbies. And I’d have to find something I could eat. (Grandmother said I’d be drinking blood now. That was about the point I flipped out on her and ran to my room.)
Finally I counted the shadows of leaves on my wall. It helped more than anything else had, but whenever I spaced out, I remembered Madison laughing at her own joke and reaching for the radio to find a better song, just before the tree rose up in front of us.
(I hadn’t wanted to say yes, but it was two miles home and it was dark, and you knew things happened to girls who walked home alone. Madison was one of Amber’s crowd, but she wasn’t as vicious as they were.
She could, however, drink as much as they could, which I sort of wish I had known when I got in the car.)
I didn’t want to think about that. It was bad enough that I had died; I didn’t want to relive the moments I had been dead in the car. What if I talked myself right back into being dead?
I must have gone somewhere when I died, because I remember coming back, blooming inside my body just before I opened my eyes. And I couldn’t shake the feeling I wasn’t alone; that I had brought some darkness with me.
It must have been the first night of my life I’d ever wanted to be alone.
On Monday, I saw that Amber and Company were meeting up outside the school at the picnic tables, even though it was still coat weather.
“Oh my God, Madison,” Amber was saying, “I still can’t even believe it. I mean, you could have died. Like, you could not even be here right now.”
(Madison stumbled out of the car, and when she saw me, she laughed and said, “That was awesome, right, Sue?” before she saw I wasn’t moving. Then she vomited.)
“Yeah,” I said, “that would be a shame.”
Madison snorted. “See if I ever offer you a ride again, ungrateful bitch.”
As I went inside, Madison was saying, “Seriously, you guys, it’s changed my life.”
5. People smell like their skin. Once I get a real whiff of the beef-and-cologne on the boys and the varnish-and perfume on the girls,