Page 20 of The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood & Boyfriends
VAMPIRE LASER TAG LEAGUE
brENNAN’S PHONE
Brennan
Did you know about Evelyn? Did you help cover it up?
Nellie
Yes. It’s our job.—N
Brennan
You and Sunny.
Nellie
And Travis, in this case.—N
Brennan
Why?
Nellie
Accidents, missing people. We have to cover them up, or they’ll lead right to us.—N
Brennan
How often do accidents like these happen?
Nellie
We minimize it.—N
Brennan
What does that mean?
Nellie
We have population control, restrictions on turning people, restrictions on killing, and penalties in place for this very reason. To protect both humans and vampires.—N
Brennan
Well maybe that’s not good enough!
Nellie
I’m sensing frustration that might be misdirected? Do you want to schedule a therapy appointment?—N
Brennan
You know what? Yes.
The address for his one-on-one with Nellie led him to a side entrance down an alley that led to a retro arcade. The carpet was a bright swirl of colors to distract from the stains and smudges, and there were rows of old game machines spread out in a wide-open, tall-ceilinged warehouse.
Next to the entrance, there was a silvery cafeteria with an Instagram-ready wall of neon signs. Sunny was perched at one of the tables with her MacBook, long hair loose around her face, typing furiously, but she spared Brennan an arched eyebrow in greeting before returning to her task.
Brennan scanned the arcade—a kid and her parent, two college students on what might have been a date, and a lone figure staring down a Skee-Ball alley with the ball clutched to her chest.
Brennan approached Nellie and watched as she prepared to pitch, reeling back and mimicking the motion of throwing the ball underhand a few times without releasing it. She wore big hoop earrings, a fanny pack, and a colorful shirt that had a similar pattern to the arcade’s carpets.
“Hold that thought, Brennan,” she said without looking over her shoulder. “I need to get this shot.”
He didn’t know how the game worked, but the numbers at the top of the machine were high, and she only had one ball left. Nellie wound her arm back, and this time released the ball to skid across the alley and hop straight into the smallest hole marked with 1000.
The machine trilled with electronic music and started spitting out tickets. Nellie jumped and squealed.
“A perfect game of Skee-Ball!” she announced, clutching her tickets and beaming at Brennan.
“Impressive,” Brennan said, and offered a smile in return, nowhere near matching her enthusiasm.
“Do you wanna play Street Fighter ? I find it’s great to talk about things that are stressing you out while playing Street Fighter. ”
“I can’t say I’ve played before,” Brennan said, with the sinking feeling that he didn’t have a choice in the matter.
“You’ll pick it up,” Nellie said, tucking her tickets into her fanny pack around her hips and beelining toward the machine in question. Brennan followed.
The machine pretty much explained it: a joystick for moving, an array of buttons for attacking, two sets of controls for two players.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to annihilate me?”
“I’ll go easy on you,” Nellie said, but there was a glint in her eyes that agreed with me. “So, tell me: how are you doing? How are you adjusting? How are things?”
She inserted coins to start the game without taking her attention off Brennan.
“That’s a complicated question,” Brennan said.
The game started, and Nellie turned to assume position with hands on the controls. Brennan mirrored her. They chose characters, and they immediately started beating each other up on the screen.
“I’ve got nothing but time,” Nellie said, and finished Brennan’s character with a roundhouse kick to the face.
Another round began, and with Brennan’s hands busy button-mashing, the words flowed out easily.
Brennan usually needed a few sessions to get comfortable with a new therapist, but something about them both being vampires, or Nellie looking his age, or the fact that he had been stewing in his own angst without therapy for about a month, made Brennan let loose.
He started with the Dom stuff. How she admitted to killing her own sister. Then it spiraled.
He told Nellie he was terrified of being immortal.
He told Nellie he was afraid of fucking up irreparably.
He told Nellie he still hated himself most of the time.
He told Nellie about Cole. About the library. How Cole was the only person who knew about him.
Nellie, for her part, was a good therapist, all while destroying at Street Fighter. She asked questions at the appropriate times, called him out on negative language and biases.
When he finally stopped rambling, Nellie spoke.
“As a side note, I’m gonna have to get you to fill out some forms about the people who know about you. Just housekeeping, Sunny will keep an eye on them.”
Brennan frowned, still smashing the buttons of the game.
“That sounds sketchy. Keep an eye on them how?”
“Nothing worse than what Facebook or the US government does already.”
“Oh, great, so full-on surveillance then?”
“Nothing invasive, don’t worry. She makes sure nobody makes any information public, or does anything to endanger any of us. You’re not putting your friends at risk.”
“What about you? Are your friends and family on the vampire FBI watch list?”
“I never told my family about me, and all my human friends who once knew have died.”
There was a lot to process there, and Brennan stumbled in his button-mashing.
It was easy to think Nellie was the same as him—she looked like any other college student, if a bit more retro, and that could easily pass as hipster.
But she was decades older than him. She had stayed the same while the people she knew grew old and died.
“You never told your family?” Brennan asked. He couldn’t imagine telling his mom, but he also couldn’t imagine her never knowing.
Nellie curb-stomped him a final time in Street Fighter and the game ended. Brennan faced Nellie, but Nellie remained with her head bowed toward the controls.
“My sister had such a bright future, and I knew if I ever told her, she would have given it all up to try to help me. And my mother already gave so much for me and my sister. I couldn’t give them the burden of the truth.
” She inhaled sharply, blinking rapidly and forcing a smile onto her face.
“I stayed in their lives for as long as I could. But then my little sister started maturing, and my mom’s hair started graying, and I stayed the same. ”
“What did you do?”
“I left.”
“You left.”
“I estranged myself, over time. Answered calls less, visited less, then stopped until I was just writing them letters. Even that was hard, because they wanted to hear that I was having children and settling down and doing the kinds of things I’d never be able to do. I stopped writing, too, eventually.”
“And that was it? You cut off contact?”
“I went to see my mother in the hospital when she was dying. She thought I was an angel. I wished I hadn’t gone. I have a niece who’s still alive, my little sister’s kid, and I have Sunny keep an eye on her for me, from a distance.”
“Those are the only two options? Keep it a secret and lose your family, or tell them the truth and keep them?”
“Not quite… Vampires with beginner levels of power can make minor adjustments to their appearance—like Sunny, she changes her hair color all the time, and she makes her eyelashes longer without extensions. So it’d be possible to, I guess, synthetically age to keep up the facade of normalcy.”
“Why didn’t you? Don’t you have powers, or something?” It felt so science fiction to ask, but that was the world he lived in now: full of strange and impossible things.
“No, I’ve never had powers. I don’t know if I ever will.”
Brennan didn’t know how to ask the question. Powers weren’t covered in the pamphlets, as far as he could tell.
“Why not? I mean, how do you… get them?”
“Vampires gain power for each human kill, Brennan. That’s why I don’t have any, and why I don’t think you ever will, either.”
“So. The more people you kill, the more powerful you are.”
“Yes. Or people you turn. ”
He guessed going from human to vampire counted as death, too. “That’s a pretty messed-up rewards system.”
“Exactly. Urban clans don’t allow kills, and we don’t train vampiric powers. If you ever have an inclination, I can happily provide you pamphlets about transferring to a nearby colony, but—”
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Good.” Nellie produced more quarters from her pockets. “You want to play another round? Tell me more about that cute librarian.”
“I don’t think I said he was cute.”
“You actually said it twice.”
“I resent that,” Brennan said, but he waved for Nellie to start up another game.
He told Nellie how Cole had helped him steal blood from the school, how he was a university-renowned heartthrob, about the Bachelorette viewing group, about Cole’s infuriatingly gravity-defying curly hair.
He told Nellie how Cole knew all his vampiric secrets and how, except for that first day, Cole was never afraid of him. Which was refreshing, when Brennan spent most of his time being afraid of himself.
After Brennan realized he’d been rambling about Cole for ten minutes and finally shut his mouth with a click, Nellie said, “It sounds like Cole has been a major source of comfort in all this.”
Brennan’s cheeks warmed and he focused on beating up Nellie’s game character. “I guess.”
“Do you think you’ll pursue that relationship?”
Brennan sputtered. Nellie’s character finished him in the moment’s distraction.
“I don’t—I didn’t say that. And no. Of course not. He and I are, like, the textbook definition of ‘bad timing.’ Of ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ I can’t. He deserves better.”
“Have you considered that maybe he should be part of this conversation? Doesn’t Cole get to decide what he deserves?”
“You don’t get it. He’s literally the kindest person on the planet. He sees the vampire thing as a quirk. He doesn’t see the whole picture.”