Teeth: Vampire Tales

Best Friends Forever by CECIL CASTELLUCCI

They both smiled at each other, the way that best friends do.

Their smiles revealed different things. Gina’s teeth were gray and almost translucent. They looked soft and loose. Amy’s teeth gleamed bright and white even in the dimly lit room. And of course there were the canines. Long and pointy. Hollow at the tip, perfectly made for the sucking of blood.

“Would you?” Gina asked.

“Would you?” Amy asked back.

The first time Amy and Gina met was two years prior. At night school.

Amy had gone there to feed. Gina was there to get her equivalency diploma.

Amy thought she could get her feed on easily in the tunnel that linked the parking garage to the campus. Gina was the perfect prey. She was walking, oblivious to everything around her. She was listening to music much too loudly on her iPod, the sound turned up all the way spilling over and echoing thinly in the tunnel. And she was singing along. Off-key.

Even the loud clicking of Amy’s go-go boots didn’t make Gina notice that there was someone else in the tunnel with her.

Best kind of kill, Amy thought. Easy and there’s no taste of fear in the blood. That’s the sweetest.

But as Amy began to change her gait from skulking to running to go in for the kill, she gagged.

At first she chalked it up to the terrible human smells in the tunnel: the stale air, the body odor, the cigarettes, and the pee. But as she moved in, it was clear that it was the girl who stank. The rank rot smell was coming from her. Amy realized that something was wrong with the girl.

Gina turned around.

Amy doubled over and gagged again.

That was how they met.

“Hi,” Gina said, pulling out one of the earbuds and letting it dangle. The music spilled out a little louder into the tunnel now. Amy recognized the song. It was old, one that Amy used to like.

“It totally smells down here, right?” Gina continued.

Amy nodded. Her teeth were extended, so she kept her face hidden, placed her hand on the tunnel wall to steady herself as she tried to calm her frenzy and coax her teeth back down.

“I almost threw up last week,” Gina overshared.

Amy nodded again. It was difficult to be understood when her mouth changed. Usually she didn’t have to talk — she just ate.

“You going to be okay? I’ve got water in my bag if you need some.”

“I just need a minute,” Amy said as clearly as she could manage. “I’ll be fine.”

And she would. This had happened before, a stunted kill. It happened. Not all easy marks turned out to be easy. That was part of the thrill of being a hunter.

Composed, expression set back to normal, Amy stood up and turned to face Gina.

Amy noticed that Gina was very small and very thin and very pale. Even paler than her. Even paler than any vampire she’d ever known. Gina’s skin was more ivory than bone. Her veins so blue that they showed uncomfortably bright through her skin. Her hair was reddish once, but it was so lifeless and dead that it lacked any prettiness to it.

Amy knew one thing for sure. This girl was a dead girl. Not actually dead. But dead soon.

“You taking a class here?” Amy asked. It was the most normal thing she could think to ask of the girl who was supposed to be her dinner.

Gina nodded.

“I’m getting my high school diploma,” Gina said.

Gina extended her slender hand. Amy took it. The hand was as cold as hers. It made her shudder. She’d never felt a human with no warmth.

“I’m Gina,” the girl said. “And I love your boots. Even though I’m not so into the seventies.”

Gina was wearing a royal blue velvet dress with a high neck and many tiny little buttons. It was vintage 1910. It had a lace collar. She wore white patterned thick tights and vintage boots.

“I’m Amy,” Amy said.

Now that Gina had given Amy her true name, she would never feed on her. Amy had long ago decided that she couldn’t feed on anyone she humanized. She could only feed on someone she thought of as an animal. They were just human meat. If they were human, like she was once before, if they had a name, she couldn’t feed. Gina was no longer meat; she was now Gina, a human.

Amy was surprised to discover that they had been walking together, side by side, and that now they had arrived at the campus.

Amy knew that tonight she was not going to eat.

So she went with Gina to class.

That’s how come Amy finally finished high school. It was because of her chance meeting with Gina.

Amy as a human died and was reborn as undead in 1976. She didn’t want to, it just happened, in an alley in New York City. It was Independence Day and she was watching the tall boats come up the Hudson River. That night she was tripping on acid with her friends down by the Battery. She left the group alone to go find a bathroom. When she saw the vampire coming toward her, she laughed. She thought it was just a part of the trip. A great hallucination. He was cute, and she welcomed him coming close to her. He started kissing her neck. It tickled at first. Until he bit. Bit hard. Amy was still laughing when the blood was being drained out of her. Even though it hurt like hell. Even though there were explosions in the sky. Even though she was tripping like mad.

But before he killed her completely, he stopped sucking her blood. He later told her he was confused by her laughing. And also, he was hallucinating, too. He stopped and looked at her and saw every girl he’d ever loved. Every girl he’d ever killed. His mother. His aunts. His sister. His niece. His wife. And they were all doing the same thing as Amy. They were laughing. At him. And that was why he stopped. He felt remorse. He wanted to ask her why she was laughing. But he couldn’t do that if she was dead. He had to turn her to get an answer.

He let her go.

Amy fell to the ground. Rolled onto her side. She could hear the fireworks.

“Is it beautiful?” she asked. She hadn’t wanted to miss them, the fireworks. She had been hoping to get back to her group of friends before they started. But now she knew that something was wrong with her. She felt funny. She felt weak. She suspected it wasn’t the acid anymore. She suspected that she was in danger.

“I’m going to turn you,” he said. “I have to ask you if you want to be turned.”

“Yes, turn me, I want a better view of the sky,” Amy said. She thought if she was going to die, she wanted to do it while seeing colors light the sky.

He propped her up, bit his wrist, and dripped his blood into her mouth. She was reborn as she watched fireworks burst red, white, and blue.

Gina was a cold baby. Very cold to the touch. Her tiny hands and feet were always icy. She was always in the smallest percentile of normal. Just on the edge of being too short or too underweight.

“She just has poor circulation” was what the doctors said to reassure her worried parents. “Nothing to be done about it. Just exercise. Sunlight. Milk. She’ll grow out of it. Probably have a growth spurt in late childhood. Everything will be fine.”

Her parents likely realized that something was wrong early on, although they didn’t want to admit it.

Gina would come inside from playing with burns that blistered and cracked her skin. At first it was just on occasion, as though it were an accumulation of too much sunshine whose toxin would finally rise and explode angrily out of her. But then, by the time she was in first grade, it was confirmed that she was full-blown allergic to the sun.

Precautions had to be taken. Thick curtains everywhere in the house. The once warm, happy family was plunged into an eternal darkness. It suffocated them. Strained their feelings to the limit. Distanced them from one another.

To help ensure that no light seeped into Gina’s skin, clothing had to be UV-proof. Sunblock was worn like skin cream. Hats, dark glasses, long pants, long sleeves, long gloves became everyday parts of Gina’s wardrobe.

As a child, she looked eccentric and weird from the get-go. Knowing that she’d never fit in, by the time middle school rolled around, Gina had fully embraced being a freak. She wore vintage clothing, old vintage hats, dresses, and gloves. Although she longed for them, Gina had no real friends.

When they got to class that first night, Amy discovered that the book they were reading was The Crucible. Amy had read it right before she’d been turned, and she was surprised to discover that she remembered the book so well. She found herself raising her hand and making comments. Perhaps it was because she hadn’t been to school for thirty years and being in such a familiar environment made her kind of miss it. Back then, in 1976, she was more interested in smoking up and giving blow jobs. She was in the loser group. Part of the tough crowd. The ones that cut class, wore halter tops, feathered their hair, listened to heavy rock, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about school.

Perhaps it was the fact that over thirty years of feeding on humans had matured her, and so after all that time, she was finally ready for school. No matter how many years went by, she still felt sixteen inside. Which was not as fun as she thought it would be. She still had all the angst. She still had all the ups and downs. She still felt interested by things that other teenagers were interested in, even though she also now knew more about the dark side of life. More than she’d ever wanted to know.

The next class was math class, and Amy found herself slightly excited about seeing whether or not she could remember any of her trigonometry. She didn’t. Not one single thing. But it was exciting to learn it all over again.

After class, she made a decision. She would officially enroll in night school. She went to the front office, used a fake name and a fake social security number. She was given a schedule and a list of textbooks she’d need.

Amy was giddy.

She didn’t tell the clan about it. Every vampire in their group had their secrets. It was understood that you did what you needed to do to make the eternal life bearable.

For some it was going to prostitutes.

For some it was eating only animals.

For some it was keeping a night job.

For Amy it was finishing high school.

There was something that Gina liked immediately about Amy. It could have been her quietness. It could have been the way she wore vintage 1970s clothes. It could have been that Amy always had such an interesting perspective and point of view on things when she talked in class. Like she knew things about the world, and people. Like she’d seen things. Like she was sophisticated.

Amy liked Gina, too. Amy liked hanging out with Gina at the breaks between classes. Amy could tell that even though Gina was eccentric and didn’t have the best social skills, she had a kindness about her. Amy was certain that if she had met Gina when she was alive, she would never have talked to her; she would only have made fun of her. But at night school, with all the others who had had something happen to them to derail them from a regular teenage life, everyone had at last found the one place where they could all be the cool girl.

Gina was a benevolent cool, welcoming everyone, including all.

It was a sharp contrast from the cool girls Amy remembered from her day. She remembered that those girls were mean. Their hair flipped perfectly, their eye shadow always the perfect shade of blue, their boyfriends always the coolest boy in school. Amy suspected that if she looked long and hard at herself, she would discover that she had been one of those mean girls. She didn’t want to be that kind of girl anymore.

Here at night school, she remained quiet. Just happy to be included in the chitchat. Cheerfully chiming in when called upon. And sharing her homework with anyone who needed help.

It wasn’t too long before Gina asked Amy if she wanted to hang out. They went to the movies. They had sleepovers. They went to shows. Gina and Amy were fast becoming best friends.

They told each other everything.

Well, almost everything.

Gina told her that she was allergic to the sun. But she didn’t know how to explain that she was dying.

Amy told her that she was a little bit older than she looked. But didn’t know how to explain that she was a vampire.

Amy had moved into the twenty-first century. Cell phone, laptop, social network profiles.

Her relationship to killing altered because now she had a friend and socialized with humans. The other vampires in her clan had told her that would happen if she mixed. It happened to all of them after a while. It was inevitable. She hadn’t believed them. But in the end she had to admit that it was true.

She didn’t turn to only eating animals, or working in a hospital or blood bank to get her fix, like the others. She didn’t stop eating humans; they tasted too good to her. But now she ate less often, and only when people were already bleeding out, from a gunshot wound or a car accident or a stabbing or a suicide. She rationalized that those people were already dead, with no hope for life, the blood, just flowing out of them, going to waste. Feeding on them eased her conscience.

There was an older vampire in her clan who taught her how to find them, those on the brink. He taught her how to smell them from miles away. Showed her the special way to run so that it was almost flying on the wind. He had always been like that, ever since he’d turned. He called it a mercy to the dying. He said he felt like an angel.

He informed her that there was a property in vampire’s mucus that acted like a sedative. Amy had never known how to use it. Her victims had always been horrified and in pain. But he taught her how to hawk up a loogie in such a way that she could swish it around in her mouth with her saliva and spit it into the victim’s mouth so that they felt a pleasant warmth as they were being drained.

This kindness that she offered made her feel better about having to kill. It made her able to look Gina and the other girls they hung out with at night school in the eyes with no guilt.

It was Gina’s birthday. Gina knew that her time was coming to an end. And one thing that she had always wanted to do was go to the beach. But of course she never would be able to, because of the sun.

“Why don’t you go to Abe’s Tropical Paradise Tanning Spa?” one of the girls said during one of their five-minute breaks.

“You’ll come, too, Amy,” Gina said. “We’re both so pale, we could probably use two treatments of spray-on tan.”

Everyone laughed. Including Amy. But it made her miss the sun.

Abe’s promised a total paradise experience in the very comfort of your own hometown. No travel needed! Bring a beach towel! Swim in our marine-animal-free lagoon! Real imported Jamaican sand! Hawaiian-style tiki bar! Private parties available! Spray tan included!

“It might be a fun idea,” Gina said.

Everyone promised they would come. Especially Amy. She wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Gina’s parents knew that there wasn’t likely to be much longer, so when Gina asked for such an extravagant sixteenth birthday party, they gladly paid the $1,500 for Gina and her friends to have a private tropical experience.

All the girls packed beach bags and flip-flops and went downtown at night.

The lagoon area with tiki bar that served virgin margaritas had sand everywhere and a soundtrack of water lapping and bird calls. There were heat lamps that had no harmful UV lights in them. They just flooded the room with warmth. The only way you could tan up at Abe’s was to get spray-on tan. He still had some tanning beds, but they were in a storage room and he didn’t have a license for that anymore. People didn’t want the skin cancer. They just wanted the tropical experience.

Amy was the first to arrive. Abe let her wander around by herself, and she opened up doors and closets as she explored.

In one room, she found the old tanning beds. They looked like futuristic coffins.

Amy could not resist. She had never slept in a coffin. She had vampire friends who swore that it was the best sleep you could ever get. You were so sealed in, with such darkness, that they were sad that it wasn’t in fashion, or that having a coffin delivered to your home would call too much attention. It wasn’t like the old days, when death was a part of day-to-day life and coffins were common.

Amy wanted to try it out. She opened one of the beds. Lay down. And pulled the cover over herself. It was dark. She’d checked that the machine was unplugged, to make sure that it wouldn’t be accidentally turned on. Deprived of her sight, she found her hearing heightened. She could hear the heartbeat of everyone as they entered the spa. Two people. Now five. Now eleven. She could smell their sweat. She could pinpoint the person with the sweetest blood. She drooled for a second at the thought of the taste of the girl. But she would have to feed later, on a stranger. Rules were rules.

She relaxed. She breathed easy for the first time in years.

She drifted off, content.

She woke when she could hear the girls moving into the room. She didn’t want them to think she was weird, so she lay there, waiting for them to leave the room so that she could arrive like a normal girl, from the front door, and not emerge from the tanning bed.

“We can put all the bags and stuff in here, so they’re out of the way. We don’t want to see winter coats and boots in our tropical paradise,” Gina said.

And that was when it happened.

The tightness in her chest. The unbearable feeling of being strapped down.

“Oh, Mom! You bought me roses!” Gina said.

“Yes, but they won’t go with the tropics. Just leave them in the bag and we’ll put them in a vase at home.”

The bouquet of red roses with thorns that her mother had picked up on impulse just to give to her girl on her birthday lay inside the bag. Gina innocently put the shopping bag on top of the tanning bed, trapping Amy inside.

Amy had never believed that the warning the other vampires had given her about roses was true. It seemed more like a fairy tale. Roses were too pretty a thing to net a vampire.

But here she was, stuck. Trapped in the bed.

Amy listened from her jail as Gina and the other girls pretended to swim and bask in the fake sunlight. They splashed and wiggled around in their bikinis.

The whole time that the party raged on, Amy lay ensnared in the coffinlike bed in the next room. Unable to scream. Unable to move. Unable to call for help. Hearing all the fun that she was missing.

It was death. But she was conscious.

For herself, Gina tried to have as much fun as she could. But truthfully, she was mad at Amy for not showing up to her birthday party. She swore that she would never talk to her again.

It wasn’t until hours after the room had been cleaned up and the bag holding the bouquet of roses had been removed that Amy had the strength to lift off the cover and free herself from her temporary hell.

It had never really struck her that she was a vampire before. That although she was immortal and undead, she could be vulnerable. That she really was a monstrous thing who fed on humans, who needed to be trapped. That she was an actual danger to the world. Maybe it was a kind of awakening, because that was when she knew for sure that really being dead and not just undead would be a better end than a living hell.

Amy skipped school for a week after the tanning bed incident. She was afraid that mixing with humans was dangerous to her survival. The hours in the tanning bed had traumatized her. But one night she saw Gina sitting inside a coffee shop. Gina was eating some soup.

Amy missed Gina. She hadn’t called Gina to apologize, and Gina hadn’t called Amy to find out where she had been. Not that she could have told her the truth. But Amy was hurt. She wasn’t used to feeling hurt anymore.

Amy knocked on the window to wave Gina out to her. Instead Gina looked up and waved her in. Amy entered the coffee shop for the first time ever; after all, she’d been invited. It was a hip place, with Christmas lights strung up everywhere and overstuffed chairs and couches and impossibly hip-looking kids with colored hair, tattoos, and piercings, who sipped espressos and chai green teas with attitude.

Amy slid into a comfy chair across from Gina.

Gina didn’t speak. She fiddled with her oversized soup spoon. She looked very tiny in her black dress, dwarfed by the large mustard colored cushions of the chair.

“I really wanted to be there,” Amy said.

“I thought we were friends,” Gina said.

Amy froze. She remembered her old life. The one with the parties and the days spent with friends at Rye Playland and the Coney Island boardwalk. She remembered the slumber parties and the doing of each other’s hair and makeup. The endless flipping through fashion magazines and listening to LP records. The movie outings and the cheering on of boys at pickup basketball games in the park. She remembered her friend Stephanie, and how they couldn’t wait to see each other every day, shared every intimate personal detail, wrote to each other every day over summer vacations apart, and held hands at each other’s sweet sixteens.

Amy realized that she wanted to be that kind of friend with Gina. A human friend.

“We are friends,” Amy said. “Best friends.”

“Best friends?” Gina said. “A best friend would come to a friend’s birthday party.”

“I really tried,” Amy said. How could she explain that she was there? Listening to the fun. Scared out of her mind. Trapped in a tanning bed by a bouquet of roses.

Instead she said nothing. She just stared at Gina.

“I don’t have a lot of time to waste on people who are lame,” Gina said.

“I know,” Amy said.

That was the moment. They both looked at each other, a look that went right down to the very core. There was a moment when maybe they weren’t going to share their darkest secrets. But then they both did.

“I’m dying,” Gina said.

“I’m dead,” Amy said.

It was a relief to them both, having the worst parts of them out in the open.

After that, they never lied to each other. They never held anything back.

“An injection every morning and an injection every evening. One helps me release the toxins, one makes my blood stronger.”

“Young people taste best, children, babies. I try to stick to people who’ve lived a little. On occasion, though, I must admit, I have not been able to resist the tenderness of youth.”

“I’ve kissed a boy, but I’ve never touched it.”

“At school they used to call me the blow-job queen. I was a real slut.”

“I feel worse for my parents that I’m dying than I do for me.”

“My parents think that I ran away. They grew old thinking that I hated them that much.”

“You know what I wish?” Gina said.

“What?”

“No, forget it. It’s silly.”

“I bet it’s not silly. What is it?” Amy asked.

“To live.”

“Isn’t it funny that my deepest wish is to die?”

But they both didn’t laugh.

It wasn’t that funny.

Halfway through their last year at night school, it became obvious that Gina was going quickly. She became even thinner than she already was. Her skin translucent. And no amount of sweaters kept her warm anymore. She missed classes, so many the teacher informed Amy that Gina would have to take the semester over.

Amy never told Gina that. She just kept bringing Gina her assignments on the nights she missed school as though it was all going to be all right. As though Gina could catch up with a little bit of effort and extra care. Amy would patiently teach Gina everything that they had learned in class. She tutored her in all that she knew.

Gina would try to pay attention to the lessons for a while, and then fade from the effort after fifteen minutes.

Sometimes Gina would awaken and look at Amy like she wanted to ask her a question but didn’t know how to properly phrase it. Gina would move her lips, practicing saying the words aloud, but whatever she was thinking, she would stop herself, crinkle her nose, then shake her head and laugh as though she thought she was about to say something stupid.

Amy could not bear to see her friend suffer.

“I could give you a new kind of life, if you wanted,” Amy said slowly.

“Where I could live forever?”

“Yes,” Amy said. “And you wouldn’t know pain anymore. You’d be made whole, only in a different way.”

“You’d give me my deepest wish?”

“Of course,” Amy said. “You’re my friend. But you have to ask me to turn you. I can’t do it otherwise.”

“Does it hurt when you turn?”

Amy tried to remember turning. She remembered a stiffening. Her muscles cracking. Her body, her organs losing control. They had all failed and then restarted. A distinct feeling that her skin had been ripped off and burned and then numbness. And after the agony, it felt like she was floating on the warmest cloud of beauty, which slowly turned to ice.

“A little bit,” Amy lied. “But then you feel like you are supposed to.”

“We could be vampires together,” Gina said.

“Best friends forever,” Amy said.

Amy placed her hands on her lap and looked down. If she had tears left in her, she might start to cry. If it was the only way that Gina could have a life free from the half life she had now, and if it was what she wanted, Amy would help her friend. Her only friend.

“Would you do it if I asked you?” Gina asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Amy said. Although she didn’t have one of those.

Gina smiled. Relieved that she didn’t have to die if she didn’t want to.

“You know, I would kill you if you asked me, too,” Gina said.

“You would?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not easy. You’d have to cut off my head or burn me.”

“I know,” Gina said. “I looked it up on the internet.”

They didn’t mention the conversation again. Gina got sicker. Amy got busier with final exams. They saw each other less and less. Each one of them wrapped up in the difficulty of day-to-day survival.

Gina preferred to wear the long silk nightgown that had belonged to her great-grandmother, even though it was so thin that it offered no heat. That was why the hospital room was so hot. She wore a shawl, but it wasn’t enough.

Amy brought Gina the fleece robe from the closet. But Gina would have none of that.

“Ugh,” she said, pushing it back into Amy’s hands. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.”

They watched a movie on the television. Laughed at the funny parts. Caught up on the gossip of friends. The nurse came in to turn down the blankets and adjust the IV. She took one look at Gina and told Amy that she could stay the night if she wanted.

The nurse padded out of the room.

Gina looked at Amy. Her eyes were glassy.

“Do you remember what we talked about?” Gina asked.

“Remind me,” Amy said, even though she hadn’t forgotten. She had to make sure that Gina was serious.

“About turning me,” Gina said.

Amy nodded.

“I was thinking. You could turn me and then, once it’s done, I could kill you.”

Amy had never thought of that. She had assumed that if Gina turned, that would be that. She would never get her wish and she would be condemned to roam the streets of New York City for a hundred lifetimes. Only now she would have a true friend.

They looked at each other. Ready.

“Would you?”

“Would you?”

Amy let her face change. She bared her teeth.

Gina slipped her hand under her pillow and pulled out a can of hair spray and a Zippo. Amy could see the glint of a very large kitchen knife that lay there, available at a moment’s notice.

They eyed each other, waiting for what seemed an eternity for the other one to say the words, to give permission, to make the move.

One of them was going to live and one of them was going to die. But not exactly in that order.

And then, as if by magic, or by complete mutual understanding and love for each other, the absolute knowledge that they would never condemn their truest friend to their lot in life, they both moved at the same time as they put their weapons away.

Amy settled back into her chair and read a magazine and lived, as undead a life as it was.

Gina settled back into her pillows, closed her eyes, and died peacefully, in her sleep.