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?”