Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [20]
I don’t know what Chet would want me to do. I have heard nothing from him. He is due in another week.
The next day I see a scene that convinces me that it makes real sense for me to have a crush on Rebecca Schwartz. I go into the library to sit hidden in the back aisles, furtively flipping through a book entitled The Undead: Famous Real-Life Vampires. As it happens, Rebecca is sitting at a table nearby. She is drawing idle dandelions on a notepad, reading books entitled things like The Cabala: Ancient Route to Power and The Lost Spells and Incantations of Hermes Trismagistus.
Through the wide sixties windows a gray light falls. The panes are smeared with the dull newsprint rain, and down on the street I can see cars stopping monotonously at the stoplight and waiting to go. Inside, the gray light shows up small dirty details of people’s faces, like the grease in the creases of chins, and the mangy stubble on upper lips, and the limp hair, hanging like dead weeds on their heads. The stains and wrinkles on their clothes.
All but Rebecca Schwartz. The light sets her face in the matte perfection of porcelain, and she seems, even more, to be poised in the midst of monsters.
“Hi,” I say.
She says, “Hi,” and slips her eyes back down to the book.
“Too bad about the rain,” I say.
She looks up for a moment. “It’s good for the flowers,” she says.
I nod. She looks down. So I turn my back to her and crouch against the bookshelf and start flipping through the vampire book for parts I haven’t read yet.
We both read for a while. I am reading a detailed account of the life of Vlad the Impaler and she is reading The White Arts: An Introduction when Kristen Mosley walks over to Rebecca’s table. Rebecca notices her coming. I’m interested to see Rebecca smoothly shuffle some school papers over her books, those strange books of power.
“Hi,” says Kristen to Rebecca. “I’ve been thinking: Does history make, like, any sense at all?” This is quite an impressive question and one that might take a long time to answer, but Kristen continues, “God, this rain is, like, driving me crazy. It is making everything so wet. It’s hopeless. Can you do this history thing at all? I think it makes no sense. What are you reading?”
Rebecca looks startled. She shifts her papers to the side. “These?” she says. “These were here when I sat down.”
“Were you reading them?”
Rebecca squirms. “They’re sort of interesting. They’re about ancient magic.”
Kristen listens. She fixes Rebecca with a look that says, Okay. Now even my jaw is bored with you. Then she says, “Yeah. Whatever. Are you gonna come over and do the history with us, or what? The guys are like, ‘Where’s Rebecca? We need someone with, like, an actual brain at our table.’” The two of them laugh.
“Okay,” says Rebecca brightly, leaving her stack of books. “I’m there!”
She looks at me as she turns away — over Kristen’s shoulder — and suddenly I know that there is a price to her popularity. There is a silent pact between her and Kristen, one which I have witnessed and am expected not to mention. Kristen will not tell anyone that Rebecca reads strange, boring books, as long as Rebecca agrees not to talk about them and embarrass them both. She has her secret interests, too; and she doesn’t care that I know. She thinks I will keep her secret.
This makes me feel a little better.
I put the book about famous vampires back on the shelf and head out into the afternoon rain to kick pebbles on the street. I’m feeling so happy that kicking pebbles in the rain could be a wacky, hip solo on the jazz saxophone.
It’s that kind of game.
Sometimes late at night I think about Rebecca when I can’t get to sleep.
I can’t ever really get to sleep.
I think about if we were the last two people on earth, because I’ve made her into a vampire, which is very romantic, and we’ve withstood the radioactivity and all the madness of nuclear war. Outside, the ancient crumbling city is razed beneath the blood-red sunset moon.
We