That Friday afternoon I waited for Gabe in the church coffee shop, Holy Grounds. We were going to practice our duet and my blood was buzzing with the possibility of being alone with him. Caroline plopped down across from me, cradling a giant cup with the Big Box logo on it.
She took a sip. “I’m trying to downgrade from Goliath-sized drinks, but I love them. This one is a triple cappuccino. We call it ‘The Lord is My Strength.’” I sipped from my own Zaccheus-sized “Land Flowing With Milk and Honey” or, as regular people called it, a small latte with extra sugar.
“How are you doing, Caroline?”
“Thrilled,” she said. “Just thrilled that you’re jumping in with both feet, that you’re already involved in the choir. Pastor Nate was so impressed that you saved the Halloween Cantata that he wants to set up a meeting with you. What do you think?”
I shrugged. “Sure.” Caroline hadn’t mentioned Wednesday night or the teeth incident, and I wondered if she had actually seen anything.
Caroline leaned back in her chair, a goofy grin on her face. “Pastor Nate is the best. Before I came to Big Box I didn’t know what to do with my life.”
I tapped my fingers on the table. I wondered about this. I understood some people came to Big Box for the music, or the theatrical style, or for the hypnotic sermons. But I couldn’t figure out why so many people would come. A thousand, sure. Ten thousand? I didn’t get it. “Why exactly do you come here, Caroline?”
“Before I came to Big Box I was alone. I didn’t have many friends. I spent a lot of time on the Internet. What Pastor Nate calls a ‘pasty blogger’ ha ha. I had a lot of issues in life where I didn’t know what to do. But Pastor Nate helped with all that. I came here and found a community of people willing to take me in, to be my friends. Just like you’re finding!”
I considered this. She wasn’t completely wrong. I had a few friends, but a lot of them were married and had kids and being the “aunt” all the time wore on me after a while. On a Friday night I could be watching television with my married friends or sitting at home alone. Honestly, even drinking coffee with Caroline was a nice change of pace.
Caroline held her coffee between two hands, warming them on the paper cup.
“You know before I came to Big Box, my understanding of money was wrong. But Pastor Nate did a series on financial accountability and now I know exactly where to put every dollar. And his series on politics was great. It’s not like he said which political party to vote for, but I got the picture.” She blushed. “And if I ever get married, Pastor Nate did a whole series on which sexual acts are acceptable between married couples.”
“Doesn’t he seem a tad… controlling?”
She leapt up from the table, knocking over her chair and spilling coffee everywhere. “No way!” she yelled. “Pastor Nate is a Renaissance Man and he knows what’s best for all of us and he’s not afraid to share it.” She stood there, chest heaving, while I sat silently, watching her. When she caught her breath she said, “That might have been an overreaction.”
I tried for a little joke to break the tension. “You could text Pastor Nate and ask him if you overreacted.”
Caroline nodded. “Great idea.” She wiped the table with napkins. I didn’t help, I thought it might embarrass her. She excused herself to go into the bathroom, and just then Gabe walked up, white clothes gleaming along with his smile. I sipped some coffee just to have an excuse to open my lips a little.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“No problem.” I gathered my things and waved to Caroline as she came out of the bathroom. Gabe and I walked over to the choir room, and he warmed us up on the piano. I liked watching his hands move across the keys, and the way his skin creased between his eyebrows when he concentrated on singing. We worked on our duet for a while. Gabe started with his clear voice. He looked me in the eye and sang, “So it’s come to this/There are monsters in our midst/On this year’s Halloween/How will we be seen?” The way he looked me in the eyes while he sang made my knees weak.
I sang my part next, really struggling to hit the higher notes. My voice cracked. I sounded awful. Half the notes were flat, but Gabe just kept playing the piano as I croaked out, “Monsters mean me harm/Monsters cause alarm/I don’t want to buy the farm/I’m protected by God’s strong arm.”
He winked at me and my teeth sharpened and grew, making me sing the next bit with a lisp, “So what are we to do/humans like me and you?”
Gabe got up and came around the piano. The air seemed still and empty without the piano, until Gabe filled it with his golden voice “Let’s take our stakes and pound them into the vampire’s chests.”
I gulped and sang, my voice stretching for the notes like a yoga instructor reaching for a shelf ten feet too high for her, “Let’s get our silver bullets and do what we do best.”
Then together, our hands linked, our eyes locked onto one another, our faces much too close, “Because we are the church/let’s not leave society in the lurch/let’s kill the monsters in our midst/We do it all for Jesus.”
Gabe closed his eyes, pleased by our performance and tilted his head back, a full inch of his neck coming free of the turtleneck. I hissed and bent my mouth toward him, felt my lips closing around his turtleneck, my teeth pricking through the fabric. His eyes snapped open and he said, “Let’s try it again.” He moved back around the piano and started pounding out the song. “You’re quite a bit out of your range. Let’s see how it sounds if we bring it down an octave.”
We sang for two hours. Caroline poked her head in once. Gabe never came around the piano again, bur he hadn’t left, either. I didn’t know what to say, so I kept singing.
Gabe stopped playing. “Do you think we should kill monsters, like the song says?”
I rubbed my throat. My voice was getting tired. “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “What do you think?”
He ran his fingers lightly over the keys. “It seems to me that we’re supposed to love people, even the people who are hard to love. I’m not sure why people we disagree with, or monsters, or politics or sexual orientation should get in the way of that.”
“Murder is wrong,” I said. “There’s that to consider.”
Gabe smiled lightly. “Maybe. Monsters aren’t human though. Are they?”
“Sure they are,” I said. “They’re ordinary people and they don’t want to be what they are, most of them. They’re struggling to find an answer that doesn’t involve a stake in the heart.”
“That’s not a popular opinion around here, Lara.”
I tossed my folder onto the piano. “I’m ready to go home.”
Gabe pulled the neck of his shirt higher. “Is that what you’re going to tell Pastor Nate when you meet with him? That you disagree with him?”
“Someone has to say that.”
“People have, you know.” He shook his head. “They don’t last for long. They get fired from staff, or removed from the elder board, or referred to subtly in sermons until they get sick of it and leave.”
“So why do you stay? Why don’t you all kick him out?”
“I stay because I think that leaving a church when things get hard is like leaving your family in rough times. And I can do some good here, try to balance things out.”
I slapped my hands on the music. “But you’re going to sing this song?”
Gabe gave me a sly look. “Oh yes. Absolutely.” He chuckled. “Nate’s my pastor and I’m going to give him what he asks for.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I still have work to do here,” Gabe said. “I’m not a consumer. I’m not here to take and take and get what I can out of this community without giving anything back. I’m here to make a difference, to make it better.”
“You know, vampires don’t always take and take. They are capable of kind things, too.”
Gabe cocked his head. “I didn’t say anything about vampires.”
Heat crept into my face and I mumbled something about mishearing him. He put his hand on mine,
his skin hot. I didn’t want to talk anymore, I wanted to take what I wanted and be on my way. I snatched up my purse.
He called after me, “Is there something you want to tell me, Lara?”
I didn’t answer. I hurried to my car, drove home, and sat alone in the dark.