This Is Not About Vampires

After barely surviving lunch Ballah and I went up to her room to work on our project. Her room had four walls, which was the normal number of walls for a room. Although of these four walls, only three were normal. The first wall contained the door, a normal component of any room, as well as a bookshelf. The wall across from this wall had a window. The headboard of a bed with a blue bedspread was against this wall also. The final normal wall contained a desk complete with a computer and a swivel chair. The fourth wall, the outlier, contained a gun rack, knife holder, and various bottles of anti-undead chemicals. I avoided this wall.

Ballah plopped herself down at the computer, beckoning for me to join her. I pulled a beanbag chair over and allowed the cushy softness to absorb my undead bottom.

“Let’s get this shitter done!” Ballah said, raising a fist into the air. She pulled the painting we were writing a poem about up on the screen. The poem wasn’t started yet. The day we were supposed to start was the day Ballah and I were busy helping the school gain some extra insurance money. We’re caring like that.

“So…” Ballah said, spinning back and forth in the swivel chair, “How do we want this poem to go?”

“Well,” I pondered, “I want it to be something that infuriates Mrs. Webster.”

“I thought that was a given?” She laughed, “I don’t usually do projects how teachers want. So, how can we piss that windbag off?”

“I think the thing that would piss her off the most would be if we wrote a poem that was actually good.”

It was true. There’s nothing a bitter teacher hates more than giving a good grade to a student they hate. It would mean they would have to acknowledge that the annoying, indifferent student was actually intelligent.

“That’s brilliant!” Ballah exclaimed, “We’ll make a poem that is so good, she’ll have to like us, which will make her hate us!”

We began brainstorming words and images we wanted to include in our epic. It was still going to be gruesome, graphic, and generally upsetting. But then again, I don’t think there are any good pieces of literature that do not include some kind of socially unacceptable content. Even the Bible had its fair share of murder, incest, penis cutting, and buttsex. I’d like to think that my and Ballah’s poem would actually be more tasteful than that. We were some pretty classy people.

“So,” Ballah brainstormed, “I think we should make an allusion to another piece of literature, maybe Dante’s Inferno, you know, to show we’re well read. Piss Mrs. Webster off some more. Do you have a favorite circle of Hell? Mines the seventh circle… violence.”

This girl was amazing. I mean, most girls go on about which boy band or Hawaiian island is their favorite. Ballah isn’t’ like that, she has a favorite circle of Hell, she may be more dangerous than I am, and she was beautiful. Not directly beautiful, but in a vague sense. Like, I could try to describe her, but the thing that makes her so attractive is that she looks like everyone, but no one, like as if her appearance is contradictory. She’s average and beautiful. Sorry, this makes no sense, I know, but I’m going to keep explaining. She looks like that author of that vampire book! Yes! That’s who she looks like. But not enough to discourage other girls from being able to cut and paste their own features onto the vaguely described face of Ballah. What really set Ballah apart though is her independence. Although her face may be the face of every-girl-out-there-but-not, her sense of identity was astounding, something other female heroines lack. And if there was a vampire war (theoretically of course) Ballah would be out there killing her enemies, not making stupid mind shields. I mean really, how helpful is that? Say a gunman comes up to you all “Hey, I’m gonna blow your brains out!” and faceless, personality-less heroine who represents the entire female population says “Ha! I’d like to see your bullet pierce my MIND SHIELD!” Gunman pulls the trigger. Bullet burrows deep with the girls skull. Embeds itself within her frontal lobe. Kills her. Her mind was fine though, really. Well, until the bullet hit her brain, then she died.

Ballah was still waiting for me to answer her question. I just kept internally monologue-ing.

So yeah, the feminist movement is not about making mind shields, it’s about being able to run into battle with the ability to gun down a couple mo fo’s. And that’s why I think, I might, possibly, kind of, hypothetically, in the right context… have feelings for… B-

I was interrupted by the sound of splintering wood. Mrs. Swank had smashed open the door with a battering ram.

“Hello children!” she sang happily, tossing the long cylinder of ramming power down the hallway, “I made some garlic cookies!”

She produced a plate of acrid smelling cookies and shuffled into the room.

“Mom, since when do you make garlic cookies?” Ballah asked.

“Since always! They’re your favorite Ballah, and like a good mother I make them all the time. There’s nothing odd about me making garlic cookies. Really. It’s completely not suspicious.”

The woman then turned to me.

“Here!” She exclaimed, thrusting the plate of cookies at me, “Won’t you try one? You won’t like it!”

“No sane creature would!” Ballah argued, “I know what you’re up to! You either made shitty cookies for Tyler as a test to see if he is polite and will lie to compliment your cooking, or you’re trying to poison him!”

“Um…” the first one!” Mrs. Swank smiled bashfully. “I’m sorry… I’ll go make some non-garlic-y cookies.”

She left the room, placing the unhinged door against the door frame.

“I apologize,” Ballah sighed, “But you were internally monologue-ing about something, I could tell because your eyebrows were wiggling. What were you monologue-ing about?”

“Um… well… I…” I’m not usually one to be at a loss of words. I almost always have a derogatory comment or a poem about a guy from Nantucket ready. But right now, I was nervous. If I had a functioning heart, it would be pounding right now.

But I think Ballah pierced my mind shield, because she suddenly leaped into my arms. I sort of felt the warmth of her body as she shifted her weight on top of me. The combination of both of our weights caused us to sink down deeper into the beanbag chair. Then, catching me totally off guard, she pressed her lips against mine. What little functioning neurons I had left sent little blips of passion from my lips to my brain. I guess what my half-dead body was trying to say was… well, I was enjoying this.

As Ballah’s hands swung around to get a better hold on me (ooh la la) her hand smacked clumsily against the keyboard. A document popped up on the monitor, and between snogs I glanced at it, became appalled, and then snapped Ballah’s neck.

What? Why are you surprised? I think I specifically remembered telling you there would be no romantic moments in this story. Ever. Did you forget? Did my momentarily lapse of indifference make you think maybe, just maybe, I was wrong before? Well I wasn’t.
The thing on the monitor was a story. No, not a story, a fanfiction! And the cover of this fanfiction depicted a girl who looked a lot like Ballah (except I couldn’t tell because she looks like everyone and no one) and me! She was just like the rest of them. The girls in the mismatched clothes, the obsessive self proclaimed vampire hunters… she was trying to perceive me as something abnormal. I was stupid for thinking anyone could ever be different, but I needed Ballah to finish my project and now that she was dead I had to do all the work. She couldn’t have suppressed her hormones until the project was over? Oh well… I better get to typing.