Teeth: Vampire Tales

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, I throw out all my Body Shop.

6. Refuse blood all you want. The hunger drives you insane after the third day.

That morning I couldn’t go to school because I was shaking and sweating and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t even speak to tell my mom I’d be fine.

“Grandmother will take care of you until I get home,” Mom said, unconvinced. But I nodded. Grandmother knew the score.

My parents went, and I listened to the quiet house for a while, sucking in air I didn’t even need, trying not to let my brain boil. I heard, Hang on, hang on, but I didn’t know who could be talking; I was alone. I thrashed out — I wasn’t going to let Death get me twice.

Grandmother brought with her a little bowl in each hand. She was wearing a yellow housedress, and her skin smelled like tea and lotion and fish scales and the vitamin pills Mom made her take.

I turned away, gripping my knees with my fingernails until the blood ran, so I wouldn’t grab for her arm and bite down. My head was going to burst.

Then I felt something cool on my shoulder, something thick and earthy. Mud.

I tried to speak, but my throat was too dry; I lay quietly as she smoothed her fingers over my shoulders, my neck, the backs of my arms.

At last, somehow, I was calm enough to look at her without being afraid of myself.

She smiled. “Come here. I have something for you.”

I didn’t want to get closer, but somehow I was sitting up anyway, moving to rest my back against the headboard. The mud was soothing — it smelled nice, like sleep — and Grandmother’s yellow dress filled the room.

“Here,” Grandmother said, upturning the second bowl.

It was dry rice — the little white grains stood out sharply against my purple bedspread — and my mind went blank, suddenly. I started to count.

Dimly I was aware that she left and came back, but I wasn’t finished, and the counting was all that mattered.

“How many?” my grandmother asked at some point, and handed me a warm mug. I counted through to the end.

“Four hundred thirty-six,” I said. My throat wasn’t dry anymore; I was surprised, until I looked down in the mug and realized I’d already drunk from it. There was some blood left, forming a pudding skin on top. When I looked up, I saw myself in the desk mirror, my mouth ringed with red.

“I’m disgusting,” I said, on the verge of tears.

She held my hand. “Don’t worry. You’re mine.”

After a moment, she sat back, folded her hands over her stomach.

“If you’re ready for the rest, I can tell you,” she said, and I scratched at the mud on my arm and listened.

7. Jiang-shi must drink blood to keep their bodies from turning into tombs; otherwise they go from strong to granite, and you’re trapped inside. (“You should learn to hunt deer,” she says. I ignore that.)

8. The yellow dress keeps me at bay. (“Tell your friends to wear yellow,” she says, like I have any friends I’d want to save.)

9. She can get blood from the butcher, “for sausage,” she says, winking broadly, so long as I give her a ride. She’s not allowed to have the car anymore.

10. Blood tastes disgusting.

11. At first.

At school, I went in the back way and made it through the morning trying not to fall asleep. (Good news about the new compulsions: I took monster notes.)

The cafeteria was an orgy of social anxiety, and my useless heart still pounded in my chest as I walked in. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Amber, Madison, Jason, and the rest were sitting at the lunch table with their McDonald’s bags, evidence that they were cool enough to leave campus. Jason was feeding Amber fries, one at a time.

I heard, Ignore them.

It was a boy’s voice. I looked around; I was alone.

You can’t see me, it said. You can stop looking.

“You can shut up,” I muttered, but I headed through the cafeteria, trying to shake it.

We should talk, now that you can hear me, it said.

“Now, as in you were around before?”

Outside, I found an empty bench and sank onto it, checking that I hadn’t been followed.

Still here.

I got nervous before I remembered I was dead, too. I probably had more in common with this thing than with any of the people in the cafeteria.

“How long have you been around when I couldn’t hear you?” I asked, folding my arms like I was too cool to care if some ghost had been watching me brush my teeth.

You brought me back, it said.

I thought about my sense that there was someone in the room with me that first long night.

“Wow, I hope you’re not a pervert,” I said.

12. If you’re frightened enough, or desperate enough, when you come back to your body, you can drag a soul with you by accident.

13. His name is Jake. He committed suicide. (He doesn’t say more than that, and I don’t press him. People get to strange places.)

14. He thinks he still has it better than me.

“We should send you home,” I say that night.

The idea of an imaginary friend was fun in class (I wrote snarky notes and he laughed), and it was great in study hall, when Amber and Company murmured and cast dark glances at all the nerds sitting around trying not to be seen. An imaginary friend who could secretly complain about how much they sucked was pretty ideal.

But now I was getting ready to shower, and, well.

I don’t know how to go back, Jake said. I don’t think I have a home anymore.

“Well, my room is not the place for invisible boys.”

I don’t look.

“Like I can tell,” I said.

He said, It’s not really my thing.

I wondered if it meant what I thought it meant; it would explain a lot about why he had committed suicide, but I didn’t push it.

“All right,” I said. “Hope you know chemistry.”

C plus last year, he said.

I opened my textbook. “Start reading up, then.”

I didn’t mention sending him back again. Even if I’d known how to, he didn’t seem eager to go. I guess any friend is a good friend if you’re lonely enough.

I knew the feeling.

Early on, the worst part of being jiang-shi is watching my body dying, a little at a time.

It’s not as bad as it could be; apparently if you don’t come back right away, you have to deal with the half-decomposed body you left behind. Disgusting.

But you can tell yourself a hundred times that what you look like doesn’t really matter; there’s still horror in waking up every morning to see your hair going white, that you’re getting paler and harder, that your eyes are bloodshot no matter what you do.

I deal. I dye my hair black even though it chokes me with the stink, and I wear those tinted sunglasses that make you look like a John Lennon impersonator.

Once, in the hallway, Madison calls me a poser, but no one else even notices I’m any different. Death hasn’t changed a thing about that.

It should make me happier than it does.

How long before someone figures you out, you think?

I shrugged and jogged across the crosswalk. “I don’t go to lunch. If anyone even notices, it’ll be Madison. She’ll just think I’m starving down to bikini weight.”

You could always eat her.

“Don’t tempt me,” I said, a reflex.

Then I thought about it — Madison screaming as I sliced into her neck with a plastic fork and started drinking. It would be like drinking Victoria’s Secret perfume, but I’d never had blood fresh. It might be worth it, just to find out what it tasted like when it was still hot and pulsing and —

I made a note to stay out of school when I was hungry.

“It’s just until college,” I said.

Jake said, So you’ll go to college?

Sometimes a normal question can stop you right in the street.

15. It will knock you sideways that everyone around you will grow older and go to college and major in art history, and they’ll get jobs and date and complain and marry and have normal lives and die, and you’ll be stuck at seventeen, sucking blood out of mugs and counting the stripes on your wallpaper forever.

16. You make a note to ask Grandmother if jiang-shi can die; what happens then?

Grandmother was home making tea, shuffling quietly back and forth in her house slippers. (Over the past couple of months she had become the most comforting thing in the world; anything she did was home to me.)

“What happens when I’m supposed to be older?”

She thought about that, shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said, in that tone she used when she had been thinking about something with no good outcome. (She used it a lot.)

Grandmother set a mug of warm blood next to me. “You’ll think of something. I know it.”

That was more faith than I had in myself.

I rested my head on her shoulder, just for a second, like a little kid would. Then I cleared my throat, said, “I have homework, gotta go,” and scooped my backpack over my shoulder on my way up the stairs.

Grandmother watched me go, looking lonelier than I’d ever seen her. My stomach twisted just to see it.

I dreamed that the school was empty and covered over with vines, the walkways broken with tree roots, the shelves of the library stuffed with birds’ nests. There was a little river sloshing through the main hallway, and as I walked, I made no sound.

The sunlight streamed through the broken windows and through the holes in the ceiling where the beams had given in at last.

They are all dead, I thought, and I knew it was true. I was the only one there; I was the only one left.

I didn’t think it was a nightmare until I woke up and heard myself panting.

Sorry, Jake said. I was trying to wake you, but —

My hand shot out across the bed, looking for him. He took in a breath, held it.

Then I remembered he was only a spirit, some remnant I had brought back with me because I was too angry to come back alone. I felt the lingering horror of the dream, seeping quietly through me like rising water.

“Why do you think it was you I brought back?” I asked, just to say something.

He let out the breath slowly. I wondered if I still breathed, too; how deep my habits went.

I was looking for a way out, he said finally, like the words were being forced out of him. I couldn’t — I couldn’t be there anymore.

Jesus. I asked quietly, “Why not?”

But there was no answer. He was gone.

The room was so quiet that I heard the first raindrops falling before it started to storm.

The next day in chem, Madison was sitting so close to Jason that their legs were touching, so close that when she turned to look at him they were practically kissing.

I wondered how long it would take for that to get around to the injured party. I scribbled in the margin of my notebook, “T-minus Amber?”

There was no answer from Jake. Not like I had expected one, anyway. Whatever.

I erased the note.

(Third period, Madison’s car got towed. High school is more efficient than the Mob.)

Jake was silent all day. I hadn’t realized how much I liked having him around. I mean, I managed — you take the notes and ask questions and draw stick-figure monarchs in your history notebook just like usual — but it was. strange. You get used to some people.

(You miss someone.)

17. You stop sleeping at night.

18. You get in more and more trouble for nodding off in class.

I had been drinking blood for months, but I still ended up in bed later that week, broiling and thrashing.

It was Grandmother’s day at the doctor, so she couldn’t help me for hours, and I could hardly move; I was going to burn, I was going to burn.

There was a cool breath on my neck. Suyin? Suyin.

It was Jake. Jake was back. I could hardly hear him through the grinding ache of my blood as it slowed.

Suyin, open your eyes.

I struggled to find the will, but at last I hauled my eyelids open, gasping with the effort.

There was a boy in my room. He had dark hair and slightly crooked glasses. He wasn’t quite real — I could see my desk through him, and he had eye sockets instead of true eyes — but I could see the silhouette of his hands, which he was holding up, palms out.

Count my fingers, he said.

I couldn’t even focus my eyes for more than a moment, but I counted, one through ten. After that I counted the threads in my comforter, and just as I was running out (and panic was coming), Grandmother knocked on my door.

Jake stepped behind my drapes.

“What’s wrong?” Grandmother asked, kneeling and looking me over. My skin was clammy; my hands were shaking.

“I’m so hungry,” I said. “I drank yesterday, but. ” I couldn’t finish, my throat too dry; I shook my head.

Grandmother frowned at me. Then she said, “Let me see what I can do.” She handed me a book, said, “Count the words,” and closed the door behind her.

By the time I was on chapter three, I had a mug in my hands. The blood was hot and rich, and when I was finished, I licked down into the mug as far as I could.

Grandmother looked tired, but she smiled at me. “We’ll find a way,” she said. “We’ll find something.”

I nodded and kissed her cheek. (She smelled like salt and lotion and talc.)

After she had gone, Jake stepped out from behind my curtains.

“Thanks,” I said. “For before.”

He shrugged. No problem, he said, not quite looking at me. I’ll let you get some sleep. He started to fizzle around the edges, like film burning out.

“Don’t go,” I said.

He stopped. Now I could see him when he held his breath; I could see him nodding, his dark hair falling into his face.

Even if he’d never told me, I could tell he had died unhappy. His eye sockets were two black pits, as if sadness had swallowed him up while he was still alive. I wondered if he would ever have real eyes, or if this was how his sorrow had marked him.

(I wondered if he was sorry for anyone else; if he had seen anyone else’s last moments, when he happened to be looking. Madison and the rest of them were worthless, but it hurt, it hurt, to think of them all being gone, and just me left behind. There were kinds of loneliness that I still couldn’t name.)

He spent all night beside me. I could feel him breathing, and if I reached out my hand, there was a chill when my fingers passed through his fingers.

One morning as I was walking to school, the sun came out. It was the summer sun, hot and bright.

My blood started to boil.

I screamed, pulled my hoodie up over my head, and ran. The sun was beating down, I was aching and trembling, I didn’t know where I could go that would be safe. Finally I ran past the wooded acre — FOR SALE for the last five years. It was studded with trees and brambles; it was dark and wild.

It was a beacon.

I ran until I couldn’t see the street, and then I fell to my knees and pressed my face to the ground. It had rained overnight, and the smell of the damp earth was as comforting as an embrace.

I dug. My arms were like marble, like iron; mud and roots flew up under my hands.

I slid into the shallow trench, pulling mud over me until the last of the knife-sharp pain was gone; still my body trembled, and I gasped into the sopping mud, openmouthed, until I choked.

The grave got mercifully cool, as if snow had suddenly fallen on it. Jake whispered, Suyin?

I cried.

When it was dark, I clawed my way out and walked home, sluicing mud off my clothes with my hands. Jake was quiet, but I could feel him to my right, a patch of blessed cold in a world that was getting warmer.

(My body was room temperature these days.)

I got home just in time to catch Mom, Dad, and Grandmother cooking dinner. They stopped and stared.

“I slipped,” I said into the silence.

My mom sighed. “Suyin, what’s wrong with you?”

“I’ll wash them,” I said. “I need to shower. Sorry.”

I dropped the boots in the hall and squelched up the stairs as carefully as I could.

If I turned on just cold water, it was almost nice.

When I came down, Grandmother was making tea.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better. You?”

She was looking a little drawn, a little pale, but she waved one hand and said, “Better,” and we smiled.

She was wearing a yellow shirt.

My stomach dropped.

“Grandmother, are you scared of me?”

She looked up and blinked. “Oh, no. You always wear yellow when you’re near jiang-shi. The priests used to ring bells to let us know they were carrying souls with them.” She smiled. “You remind me of home, now. Of those days.”

I thought about her home in some little town in Anhui province I had never seen; how Dad had brought her here. And her dead granddaughter was the best thing that had happened to her, somehow.

“Tell me,” I said.

She beamed. Then she told me about going to the opera there; she told me how to steam stone frog.

Then she kicked my ass at rummy. Twice.

After she had gone to bed, I went upstairs, worrying with every step.

You all right? Jake was sitting on the edge of my bed, not quite looking at me.

“No,” I said.

After a long time, I covered his translucent fingers with mine. He looked down, smiled.

You really suck at rummy, he said.

I pulled a face. “Quit spying!”

I was in the kitchen, he said. You could have seen me. You just didn’t look.

“I was concentrating on not sucking at rummy,” I said.

Yeah, he said, that worked out great.

19. Jiang-shi must seek the earth when the sun is bright. (“It’s just the pain,” said Grandmother. “You won’t burn.” Like that was comforting.)

I went back to school; it was cloudy enough that I could bear the pain, if I tried. No one mentioned that I had the shakes.

My acceptance letter came from Seattle. I sat on the empty benches at lunch and read it twice. Then I stuffed it into my backpack, grinding it into the bottom.

You should go, Jake said from beside me. He sounded more excited than I’d ever heard him. I’ve always wanted to see the West Coast.

“Sure,” I said. “Crawl out of the mud in time for night class and learn things that don’t matter for a life I’m never going to lead. Brilliant plan.”

You just need a couple of fake IDs and some shade, he said. He was the freaking pep squad, suddenly. He grinned at me. You’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. It’ll be an adventure. You can totally handle it.

I turned to face him. “You think I can get through college hoping they don’t notice I only take night classes and wildlife goes missing? What sort of life is that? How can I do that?” I shook my head. “I can’t even live at home for long. But where else can I go? I’m trapped.”

His glasses gleamed in front of the blank sockets. He snorted, his mouth twisting. Wow. I didn’t realize you were such a coward, Suyin. You’re just going to run?

Blood filled my vision.

“Coward?” I turned to face him. “And you knew so much more about how to handle life than I do, before you killed yourself?”

Shut up, he said, so raspy I could hardly hear him.

I couldn’t shut up, though, couldn’t stop. “You couldn’t even take being dead! You caught a ride with the first person who could come back on her own because you couldn’t hack it in the afterlife, and you’re telling me when I’m being a coward?”

There was a horrible silence. The words settled in between us, and still nothing happened. I was frozen. Behind his almost-there glasses, his eye sockets filled with tears, like a crack in a rock weeps.

Then he was gone, plumes of smoke that disappeared into the afternoon sky.

And that’s how you take care of a lingering spirit, I thought. Annoy it until it goes back to the afterlife just to avoid you. Then you get to be alone, just like you wanted.

Go, me.

20. The school has no outside broadcast system. If you’re not in the building, you don’t know that you’re being paged to the main office, and you’re an hour late getting the news that your grandmother has died.

My parents had left a note with the address of the funeral home.

I went into Grandmother’s room like I didn’t believe it; like she would be there if I just opened the door fast enough.

The room was thick with smells: the bamboo in a vase on the windowsill, the detergent smell of her dresser. The bed smelled like her skin, as much as if she were still in it, sleeping, and I could reach out and wake her up.

The little nightstand next to her bed was a pile of vitamin bottles and eye drops and insulin. It seemed wrong in the room, like weapons, and I opened the top drawer to sweep them in, to leave the room the way she’d meant it.

Inside the top drawer was a needle and a plastic tube and a small glass jar with a narrow neck, like an ink bottle. Everything was clean, but the smell of blood was so powerful, I sank onto the bed.

After the animal blood stopped working, she had found something that would save me. She hadn’t told me I needed human blood; I would have found some other way if I had known. Why hadn’t she told me?

(“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “You’re mine.”)

I wondered, if I tried, if I could bring her back. I could reach into the afterlife, I was sure — if I just brought her out, she could keep me company, she wouldn’t mind, we could get out of here and go anywhere she wanted —

I bent over, sobbed into my hands.

21. You cry blood.

When I had cried myself out, I licked my hands clean and then drank what was left of the blood in the fridge. Now that I knew it was hers, it tasted strange, but it was a gift of love, and I would need strength for what I planned to do.

The glass bottle and stopper went into my backpack, along with necessities and cash from my dad’s desk drawer.

I put on a yellow shirt, left a note for my parents, and hit the road.

22. You can carry a person’s soul in an object of great meaning to them. No matter how far away they died, you can bring them home again, so they aren’t angry or lonely; so they can sleep quietly in the ground.

I shake all the way down the highway, my hands trembling on the wheel, but I don’t turn around. I owe my grandmother a favor. I know how she missed home.

Jake appears just as I’m walking into the airport.

You gonna do that to me, too?

He’s solid now; if people weren’t walking right through him, I’d think he was real.

His eyes are green.

I tilt my head. “You want me to?”

He shrugs. I’d go back if you sent me, but I thought maybe you want a friend.

“I can do it alone,” I say. It’s important, now, to be able to be lonely and still survive.

He slides his hand through mine.

I know, he says. But I’m with you, if you want.

I wait him out for three seconds before I smile.

23. It’s just as weird as being alive. You figure it out as you go.