Excerpt: So You Think You're a Vampire

“Hello, my name is Cassandra, and I am a vampire.”

I heard my roommate across the apartment talking into her mirror. All I could see of her through her open bedroom door was her butt and one foot as she leaned toward her mirror, applying makeup. So far I’d been asked to give my input on eyelashes, eyeshadow, earrings, necklace and hair. Not that Cassandra usually asked for my help; far from it. She usually did her own thing, regardless of what I or anyone else thought of her. Usually I admired this about her. I don’t exactly ask for her opinion on fashion (being that her ideas and mine go together about like hounds tooth and paisley), but then again, she was the one being a vampire for Hallowe’en.

Oh, vampires. They seemed to be everywhere. I couldn’t escape the little toothy buggers no matter where I turned. Even kids were getting into vampires, which was weird since as far as I remembered from high school English, Dracula was a big social statement about crazy sexual ideas. I mean, that made sense to me in terms of the teenagers and their raging hormones as they swooned over the latest vampire book or movie, but kids? How much do kids really understand about allegory? Most of them don’t even get sarcasm.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. The point is that my roommate, Cassandra, was another vampire lover. She has read her favorite book, which sounds to me like the Chinese takeout place down the street at least seven times and she had pictures of the main characters all over her bedroom walls. While that didn’t especially bother me, since the pictures mostly stayed in her bedroom and out of our living room, I was definitely getting tired of talking teeth. Of course, she never wanted to talk about the whole bat thing, or about her serious lack of a social life, but she wanted to talk about vampires and their clothes and their hair and their everything else any time I sat near her.

Oh, and you could forget about watching a movie with her. If the movie had an actor from a vampire movie in it, she would sit and watch it to tell me all about their role in the other movie. That made me mad. I liked watching movies for their own stories, not for whoever was in something else. Come on now. Needless to say we didn’t watch many movies together.

You’re probably wondering now why I’m going on about my roommate’s obsession. Well, that’s because there wasn’t much else to do that night except reflect on the fact that Hallowe’en was the one night of the year that she got to act on her fantasy without people thinking she was weird. Well, weirder than normal. We had been invited to a costume party. I did the standard thing I always did and put on a cowboy hat and some boots and a flannel shirt. After all, cowgirls are cute, right? With a pair of shorts and bright red lipstick, I was ready to go.

Not Cassandra. She spent an hour getting dressed in the costume she’d been assembling for weeks, then started badgering me about the accessories. Like I care. I mean, I didn’t mind some of the vampire action flicks, any more than I mind watching zombie action flicks or ghost action flicks. That was just it—I didn’t mind certain things to an extent, but I did mind having to hear about it all the time. Was I a little bitter? Maybe. But Cassandra and I had been friends a very long time and I felt a certain sense of loyalty to her.

Cassandra and I met in ninth grade. At the start of high school, everyone feels awkward and out of place and we happened to find each other in first period biology. We shared a black topped lab table near the back and took notes together and both snickered when the teacher started explaining gaseous exchanges a couple of weeks later. From that terrible teenage sense of humor, our friendship began.

Cass and I spent almost every weekend on the phone that year. We met at the football games and kind of watched the players run around the field. Mostly we were looking at the guys in the stands to see if any of them were looking back at us. Once in a while one did and we’d collapse into a fit of giggles. We got her mom to drive us to the mall as often as the poor woman had the patience to take us, and we spent hours trying on outfits that we either couldn’t afford or weren’t allowed to wear to school. We were best friends.

By our sophomore year, Cass and I knew how school “worked.” We knew that we weren’t Freshmen anymore and that we were therefore way cooler than them. We walked with more confidence and we took as many classes together as we could. Tenth grade English would’ve been a bear if Cassandra hadn’t been sitting beside me, making faces at the teacher while his back was turned.

Then we started Shakespeare and Cassandra and I had our first true fight. The teacher assigned us two Shakespeare plays that fall, a comedy and a tragedy. The tragedy was our first big reading. Of course he assigned Romeo and Juliet. What high school English teacher doesn’t? Anyway, we read most of it over the course of a couple of weeks and were assigned Act V over a long weekend. I went home and read the final scenes on Sunday evening. Apparently Cass did the same, because she called me an hour or so after I’d finished.

“Wasn’t that just the most romantic thing you’ve ever read?” she gushed.

“What?” I said. I wasn’t sure I understood what she meant.

“Romeo and Juliet giving their lives to be together! It’s so romantic!” Cassandra sighed happily on the other end.

“Didn’t you read the introduction?”

“Of course! Star crossed lovers in Verona fair!” Cassandra sighed again. “I wonder how you get to be star crossed. It sounds amazing!”

“Mr. Hooper explained that, Cass. It means that fate conspired against them.”

“Exactly! They had an amazing, passionate love that other people just didn’t understand so they found a way to be together forever.”

“They died.”

“But for their love!”

“But they’re still dead,” I said, matter of factly.

“Honestly, Erica, where’s your sense of romance?”

“Not in a crypt, that’s for sure! I mean, can you imagine stabbing yourself in the heart over a guy?” I sure couldn’t, and I hoped she might see reason if I pointed that out to her.

“What’s wrong with that? If you love someone that much, I mean, I’d do anything to be with the guy I love. My parents and my friends couldn’t stop me.”

“You’d kill yourself over your boyfriend that you don’t even have?” I asked.

“Erica, don’t be such a know it all!”

“I’m not being a know it all, I’m just pointing out—”

“What do you know about it, anyway? You’ve never even had a boyfriend, much less been in love! Well, I’ve had a boyfriend and I know what it’s like and if my parents ever told me I couldn’t see someone I love, well I’d try to run away. And if I couldn’t run away, then I’d have to take drastic measures!” She finished the sentence with a rush of dramatic flair.

“Um, Cass? Do you hear yourself?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I can hear myself. And I don’t see why you can’t let me enjoy the story!”

“I never said you couldn’t enjoy it, it’s just that in the introduction they said—”

“I know! You already said that!” she snapped at me.

“You didn’t let me finish!” I snapped back. “In the introduction before the play, you know, in the text book, it says that Shakespeare based the story on a couple of twelve year olds. And besides that, the whole family had been fighting for something like five hundred years. It’s ridiculous.”

“It was two families fighting, Erica.”

“Okay, my bad, two families then. But who in their right mind would marry a pair of kids hoping to fix a five hundred year old feud?”

“You’ve got no sense of romance, Erica.” With that, Cassandra hung up the phone. We didn’t speak for a solid week.