Chapter 2: I’m never coming back
Of course I’m a vampire. A 17-year-old vampire girl. I’ve been 17 for 18 months now – I was a couple of weeks away from my 18th birthday when I was changed, and I’ve been an immortal for half a year now. My friends would say I’m living their dreams. They’re completely obsessed with becoming vampires, though they have no idea that it’s very possible.
Unlike my friends from college, I didn’t think vampires were cool or sexy. Grudgingly, I did agree that it’d be bloody brilliant to be super-strong, move at lightning speed, hear everything three miles down the road, smell every fragrance in a room and identify each of them individually.
But not at the cost of having to actually live on blood.
Now that I have all these incredible abilities, I still don’t get the appeal. Clearly, I haven’t embraced this new life yet.
I don’t know if I ever will.
I didn’t celebrate my 18th birthday. Who would I celebrate with? I don’t have any friends or family anymore. Don’t worry, I didn’t kill them – in fact, they’re all very much alive and healthy back in Reading – I just can’t see them now. Not because I’m still a newborn vampire, still in my first year when we’re thirstiest and strongest and most obsessed with blood. When we have virtually no control over ourselves and live only to kill and drink, drink and kill. No, because I’m not the typical newly created immortal. I can manage, or rather, suppress my thirst and not be ruled by it completely.
Most importantly, I can abstain. For months. Until breaking point. And I give up the fast only to avoid utter tragedy. The killing of a human (the person I feed off in my deranged, blood-starved state) and a vampire (me at the ruthless hands of The System).
The reason I have to stay away from my friends is because they’d notice something isn’t quite right with me. The changes they’d see in the teenager they once knew would be startling to say the least.
I wasn’t the prettiest girl in my local sixth-form college, but I wasn’t ugly. Now though, with my pale white, pearl-smooth skin, natural grace and stillness, alluring charisma, and always-glossy dark brown, wavy hair, I am simply beautiful. A perk of this new life that I fail to find any enthusiasm for. Perhaps because I was never all that vain, didn’t think beauty was skin deep, and looking great didn’t top my list of priorities.
My eyes being coal black wouldn’t be too much of an issue, I suppose – I can say they’re not the usual light brown because I’m wearing coloured contacts. And not because I haven’t had a meal in weeks and so the eyes which should be mortifyingly crimson have become beetle-black.
Maybe I can even explain away the new skin tone – plastic surgery, mismatched foundation, or even say that I secretly loved vampires after all and this is my new vampire look. A new, limited edition designer perfume would suffice as an explanation for my scent – floral, with a hint of vanilla and strawberries.
But the cold, hard skin. The voice that sounds like music and bells. How would I talk my way out of that? And if they were fooled by whatever excuse I made for every little difference they queried, wouldn’t they become a little suspicious as to why I only ever saw them in the night? Not that I’d burn in the sunlight. No, I would simply start sparkling like a diamond, my skin seemingly embedded with reflective surfaces whenever it’s exposed to sunshine.
So, as well as staying as far away from humans and sunlight as possible, I have to stay away from my old life. My family.
My mother. Oh, thinking about her makes me mad! Makes me think of the night, 6 months ago, when I ran away from home.
We’d always had a troubled relationship, me and mum, especially when I hit my teens. Nothing strange in that, of course. Few of my friends often said they hated their mums. I didn’t hate mine. I do now. I did that night I left home. That night, a fortnight from the biggest milestone of my life so far – my 18th birthday – she told me about my father.
My real father.
Birth father.
Not the one I grew up calling my dad. Not the one who I secretly thought didn’t love me as much as he loved my little sister Heather. Not the one who’d pretty much stopped talking to me after adolescence without any discernible reason other than the birth of little Heather. Not the one who sat watching TV while my mum told me I wasn’t his biological daughter.
No, the real one. The one I didn’t know existed.
“You’re going to be 18 soon,” she’d started sternly that night, after ordering me to sit on the sofa in the lounge. She sat on one of the armchairs. In the other chair, her husband – I can’t think of him as my dad now, I just can’t, not when I know he isn’t – turned the volume up on the TV.
Here she goes, I’d moaned internally. Always lecturing me. Come straight home from college. Stop spending so much money on clothes. Help out more around the house. Grow the hell up. I’d been particularly rebellious that week because she’d forbidden me from celebrating my birthday with a road trip to London with my friend Carrie and her 23-year-old cousin Angela who’d be driving.
“You have to start being more responsible,” she continued. Then suddenly her strict tone softened. “You’re almost 18 love, you can’t keep acting out like this every time something doesn’t go your way.”
“Every time you stand in the way of my happiness,” I retorted.
“That’s not what it is,” she insisted, tone still calm. “You used to be such a good girl. And you’re so smart. Your teachers always said the nicest things about you. If there were parent-teacher meetings at college, then I’m sure your lecturers would sing your praises too.”
Lecturers, yeah right, I’d thought, rolling my eyes, we still call them teachers at college. It’s only at University that you have lecturers and professors. I was going to be there after the summer holidays that were just around the corner. After my exams, which were a few weeks away. I was so excited about Uni, but each time I dreamed about it, I quickly came crashing down to earth. I wasn’t going to go away for Uni, living in halls, on campus. No, she wouldn’t allow it. It’s cheaper to study from home, she’d argued. But really, she just didn’t want me out of her sight.
“But you’re always fighting with me,” mum complained. “Why are you like this with me?”
“Why are you like this with me?” I asked in return. I suppose I sounded unreasonable to her.
“Oh this is pointless,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “You say I’m always shouting at you, lecturing you, well I can’t get through to you any other way can I?”
“Huh.” She didn’t get through to me with the shouting or lecturing.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, narrowing her brown eyes at me. The same eyes I have. The brown hair colour I inherited from her too, but she’s been dying it blonde since before I was born. So it looks like… like her husband’s mane of golden hair.
“It means huh,” I told her in a smart-aleck voice. “It means you have no idea what’s going on in my head and you have no idea that you don’t get through to me on any level, in any way. And the shouting and lecturing, well, I just tune most of it out. Because it’s always the same thing.
“You’re trying to explain that I have to grow up because I’m nearly 18, but how can I, if you don’t let me? If you keep treating me like a child. How will I grow up and find my own path, when you’re always trying to control me?” It all came out, everything I felt. Like it did every time we fought, but this time she seemed to be listening. She was quiet for a long moment anyway.
“I’m not trying to control you,” she said eventually. Her voice was shaky, her lips quivered.
“You are trying to control me,” I pressed while her guard was down. “You’re a control-freak and you want to turn me into one. You want to turn me into you.”
My mother’s eyes, wet and glistening with silent tears, looked up from her lap to my face instantly, as though I’d cussed her. I knew it the moment the words were out of my mouth that they
’d hit a nerve and that I’d never said this before and why hadn’t I, because it was so true. That was it. Why she was the way she was with me and not with Heather. Not yet anyway.
My mum wanted to turn me into her.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I said, jerking to my feet, furious. “That’s why you’re always in my face, my life. You say you want me to have the life you never got – thanks to getting pregnant with me and having to give up your hopes and dreams and marry and settle down. But what you really want is to live through me. Live vicariously.” No wonder, I’d thought. Every little thing she’d ever said to me, ever told me to do, or made me do, or wouldn’t let me do, every thing made sense in that moment.
“You’re wrong,” she argued, sniffling. I shook my head and she stood up, her face red. “The last thing I want is for you to turn into me. And frankly, I don’t care if we become polar opposites, sometimes it feels like we are anyway, as long as you don’t make the same mistake–”
I know why she paused at that moment. Her brown eyes began to apologise before her vocal chords could find the words. My mind had already been thinking along those lines. I just expected it to be me who made the accusation – accuse her of thinking I was a mistake.
I hadn’t anticipated a confession from her.
“Don’t worry, mum,” I reassured her sarcastically. “I’m not stupid enough to get pregnant by my best friend at 18. In fact, I don’t have a single male friend, thanks to you.” She lectured and interfered most when it came to boys, so much so that it was easier to not make friends with guys and not accept dates just to get her off my back. And yeah, there wasn’t anyone that I really liked, but that’s not the point, and I wasn’t going to admit it to her either.
I remembered then that the main reason she was so opposed to the trip to London was her fear that I’d be seduced by some sleazy guy in a club. “I’m not desperate enough to fall for the first stranger that shows an interest in me either,” I snapped.
“Well I wasn’t desperate either,” she snapped back. Then she paused. And then she looked guilty.
I was a little confused. “Of course you weren’t desperate,” I said slowly. “You and… dad were a couple…” They’d been friends and he’d been in love with her for ages. She eventually realised the feeling was mutual and then bang! They slept together. I was conceived. He offered to marry her and that was that.
“Yes we were good friends,” she murmured, averting my gaze.
It got pretty messed up after that and suddenly she was confessing to not being in a relationship with anyone when I was conceived. That I wasn’t a product of her and her husband Jake.
That it was someone else who’d fathered me.
“I’m not – he’s not – I’m not – he isn’t my – my real father?”
She was crying by then and just sniffled and shook her head.
I didn’t stutter when I spoke again. “Tell me who is. Tell me everything about him.”
There wasn’t much to tell but I soaked up the information like a sponge.
“You’re not leaving home!” she screamed at me 20 minutes later in my bedroom as I stuffed as much clothes and belongings as I could in the largest of my rucksacks.
“I can’t stay in this house anymore,” I screamed back. Not now that I knew I didn’t belong there. Now that I knew why the man who I thought was my father had never really treated me like his eldest daughter.
“Come back,” called my mother from the doorstep. Her husband had his arms around her, keeping her from running after me. I heard him say that she should let me calm down, stay with friends for a while, and that I’d come home when I was ready.
“Never,” I cried as I ran off into the night.
I’m never coming back.