Angie sighed. “You just wish some guy, any guy would bother making your tits scabby.”
Deadweight glared. “That was uncalled for.” Her eyes flinched in their sockets the way they had when Angie would pull a pigtail when they were little.
“Ummm...wait, before we get into this...You’re the one who’s been ragging on me. I just say one thing and...”
“I was kidding; that wasn’t kidding.”
“Relax, kidding is in the eye of the beholder. Okay?”
Her glare relaxed, but her mouth still tensed. “Just because I don’t have a different guy each week doesn’t mean I’m ugly.”
Angie looked up at Deadweight. Her cousin, underling, and sometimes-confidante oozed a broken-spiritedness that hadn’t been in since the days of grunge and heroin chic. Only, she couldn’t possibly pull off the waif look until she dropped a hundred pounds. Beyond her size and her despondence, there were other things. Those thick glasses caked with smudges. The acne which, even at eighteen, clustered in colonies on her forehead and chin. Deadweight’s attempts to match Angie’s fashion sense slammed against the reality of the girls’ disproportionate family incomes.
To see the two of them together served as a compelling testament to the power of nurture over nature. The defining features of their matrilineal clan lingered over both. Each had wide hips, ample breasts, and most defining of all, the Roman nose and pouty mouth. Yet, as if subjected to an experiment, each had been raised in homes as different as two sisters can be.
“I didn’t say you were ugly. Look, I’m really, really tired. We shouldn’t fight like this our last summer together. No more fights, okay?”
“Oh, I see, the commoner did your nails, served her purpose, so now you need to crash. Who’s going to do mine?”
Angie remembered Deadweight’s brittle, chipped nails. She got up and pulled the bed sheets down. “Tomorrow. Right now I have to crash, and this headache’s killing me.”
Deadweight looked on.
“Good Byyyyyyeee.”
It stabbed and released, over and over again with the rhythm of rutting. Each pain in her skull reminding her of J.D. clawing into her, slurping and sucking on her nipples, then biting and thrusting into her. He gave no pause before crashing into her like high tide in winter, and she had succumbed gratefully.
She woke up damp. Wet between her thighs, wet atop her skin, and frozen to the marrow. Someone kept on knocking on the door, and calling to her. She found her panties and nightshirt tossed to the floor. She scrambled to put them on, stumbled and fell onto the hardwood floor. The knocking at the door continued, and the knocking in her head resumed, now like a hammer driving a nail deeper and deeper into her brain. She crawled to the door. Bracing herself with the handle, she pulled herself up from the ground. She turned the knob.
Deadweight stood just outside, frowning. “Aren’t you going? You’ve been hiding out in there all day.”
She glanced out the window. Nighttime. “Going...where?”
“To the outlets. We were supposed to find me some new shorts, remember?”
“Oh, I...” Her teeth chattered and pricked her gums. “Ouch.”
“Something isn’t right. You’re sick.”
“My mouth...fuck!”
“Here, let me see.” Deadweight flicked on the light switch.
The only hint of color in the girl’s body was the thin scribbles of blue veins around her wrists, the undersides of her elbows, and her legs. Something had bleached her skin an impossible white. Her dirty blonde hair, brown eyes and candy apple nail polish now stood out as awkward anachronisms from days of life and color.
Deadweight screamed her throat raw. “Oh God, what the fuck’s happened to you?”
Muffled voices from downstairs. “What’s wrong up there?” She heard the clanking lever of her father’s Lay-Z-Boy. His steel-toed footsteps bounded up the stairs, creaking the hardwood. Squeak, pound. Squeak, pound. Deadweight continued to shriek.
New instincts asserted themselves. The pounding inside Angie’s head grew less severe, less foreign. It now served as a new pulse, a psychic one picking up where the physical one ended. She tried to tell Deadweight to shut up, but it came out as a hiss and a snarl. Frustrated by her inability to tell Deadweight exactly what she thought of her, she summed it up by flipping her the vampiric bird.
Yellow and red flew past her, followed by a ghostly rush of air. The window flinched twice in two seconds. Then the door flew open, and Deadweight turned to face Uncle Ray. “She’s left.”
She told the police, Uncle Ray, and Aunt Charlotte everything that she thought they’d believe. Angie had gone out with an older man known only as J.D. He had been rough with her. By the next evening she disappeared without a trace.
The result netted Deadweight notoriety, the closest she’d come to popularity since she’d boarded the bus for first grade. For a while, her classmates even stopped calling her Deadweight and actually used “Becky.” In the vacuum of information left by a true vanishing like this one, the gossip mill needed answers, and had no one better to turn to. Had Angie been there to navigate her through the gauntlet of stares and eavesdropping, she could have perhaps turned it to the advantage of her social status. Yet instead she floundered, a moon with no planet around which to revolve.
Rain rattled the roof and crisp static thunder ripped open the sky the Friday night in February that Angie came back. She pawed at the window like a stray until Deadweight woke up. Deadweight tensed in her bed as if bound and felt her gastrointestinal reflux worsen. Bile and vomit tickled the back of her throat. Sleepdust crusted her eyes half-open. A raspy muffled voice barely made it past the rain and the window.
“Hey Deadweight, it’s me, Scabby Nipples.”
She slinked to her nightstand and fetched a Bible. She thrust it forward. “That only works with crosses. I really don’t have time for this.”
Deadweight answered aloud. “Don’t have time? You have eternity.”
“Deadweight...”
“Yeah?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Deadweight let her dry off with the comforter. There, drenching her bed, sat an honest-to-god, five-month pregnant, naked vampire. She’d lost some of her wildness and much of her confidence since she disappeared. Her shapely hips and still-scabby tits had retreated onto her emaciated frame. Out of modesty or repulsion, Deadweight shoved a terrycloth robe toward her. “You look awful.”
“Let me guess, all hagged out?”
“Seriously...”
“I haven’t fed...almost at all...rats mostly...I have no fucking thirst. I can’t fucking feed on people. What sort of loser vampire am I?”
Deadweight glanced at her belly. “How the fuck...”
“I don’t know...I guess his vampire jizz had a date with my vampire egg.”
“But, you’re both...”
“I know...”
A smile crept onto Deadweight’s face. “Just another preggers teen with bad teeth. In this town, it’s the perfect cover.”
Angie glared and growled. “This situation isn’t permanent, you know.”
“Angie, abortion isn’t always...”
“Shoosh your youth group talk.”
“You’ll be emotionally scarred for life!”
Angie cackled. “Now...at this point...you’re worried about that? I think that’s going to be par for the course, babe. Besides, the fetus, my baby...it can’t be alive anyway, right?”
“I have no clue. Could it be alive?”
“Not if I’m dead.”
“How are you going to do it?”
“Find me a phone book.”