The Dorkiest Vampire

I adjusted more to high school over the next few weeks. Things weren’t as bad as middle school had been since all of my middle school bullies were now freshmen being targeted by upper classmen. My status as the principal's niece and as Ritchie’s little sister kept most people from bothering me. They tended to bother Mick less than I suppose they would have since he seemed to be my friend. He was still the weird new kid, but as the weeks progressed, his novelty slowly began to wear off.

Over those few weeks, Mick had actually begun speaking to me. First, it was in stuttered sentence fragments followed by stuttered sentences. By the third week of school, he could speak to me without any stutter. Still, he didn’t speak much and his overly shy nature had made him somewhat of a target at school. His dark wardrobe, loner tendencies and the rock music occasionally blasting from his headphones had instantly labeled him as a goth by our school, though he didn’t really fit in with the other kids who hung out together under that label.

People were pretty unsure what to make of his self-medicating every lunch with a virtual pharmacy of pills. Some of the tougher bullies picked on him but basically every else left him alone. Everyone at school treated Mick sort of like poison ivy. They knew he was dangerous but no one was really brave enough to pluck him up out of the ground. I decided to keep this analogy to myself, not sure what Mick would make of it. I turned a corner to meet him for lunch where I found his hair dripping with water.

“What happened?” I asked worriedly.

“Water b-balloons,” Mick replied. “Brent Humphries and his friends…”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. I began rummaging through my backpack, hoping I had something he could use to dry off in it.

“Don’t worry,” Mick chuckled. “I’ve had worse…”

“Worse?” I gaped.

“Yeah,” Mick nodded. “I’ve had grape juice, lemonade, gasoline, bricks, and fists thrown in my direction… Water balloons are a nice change…”

“Gasoline? Bricks?” I said in disbelief.

“Bullies in big cities are tough,” Mick shrugged.

“They threw gas on you?” I shrieked.

“The principal showed up before they lit the match,” Mick shrugged.

“They were going to set you on fire?” I said, gaping.

“We’d been learning about the medieval witch trials,” Mick replied. “Third graders can be pretty mean.”

“Third graders?” I said in disbelief.

“Told you big city bullies are tough,” he said. I found a wash cloth that I had once randomly put into my bag and handed it to him so he could dry off. He wiped down his hair. “I’ll let my mom wash this and give it back…”

“You don’t have to,” I replied. “Honestly, I don’t know why I had that in my bag in the first place.” Mick chuckled and we headed into lunch. Mick had swallowed his cocktail of pills and we had started eating with Ritchie ambled over to our table.

“Hey, sis,” Ritchie said. “Coach called for football practice immediately after school… I can’t take you home… I’m still trying to hook you up with a ride…”

“S-she c-can come h-home with m-me,” Mick said nervously. Even though he had seen Ritchie around and spoken to him, Mick was still incredibly nervous about my big hulk of a brother.

“Really? Thanks man,” Ritchie grinned. “Mom and Dad’d kill me if I made their precious Riley-Baby walk home all by her lonesome…”

“You’re a jerk,” I rolled my eyes.

“See you kids on the flipside!” Ritchie grinned dorkily before rushing back to his football player friends.

“Sorry that my brother’s a weirdo,” I told Mick with a soft smile.

“He’s probably the nicest football player I’ve ever met,” Mick admitted. “Hasn’t shoved me into my own locker once…”

“He’s a nice guy,” I had to admit.

We managed to make it through the rest of the day of classes easily enough. The real work hadn’t exactly started yet because the teachers were all still trying to gauge the type of kids they were dealing with in this new freshman class. After grabbing the books and things I would need for homework out of my locker, I followed Mick out of the school and toward the parking lot, where the black SUV he always disappeared into at the end of the day was waiting. He motioned for me to follow and we both slipped into the back seat of the car. It was completely done in black leather and was by far the priciest car I had ever been in.

“Mom?” Mick said uneasily. “I offered Riley a ride home… her brother had practice…”

“Wonderful,” Mrs. Vespasien beamed at me from behind her thick designer sunglasses. I didn’t understand why she needed them with the tinting of the car being so dark. It was a wonder she could see out of the front windshield.

“Thanks for driving me, Mrs. Vespasien,” I said to her politely. “They called an emergency practice and I wasn’t really up for waiting out on the bleachers.”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Vespasien nodded. “That hot sun…why it would ruin your beautiful complexion…” I blushed. “Any time you need a ride dear, feel free to come with us.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

The drive itself was pretty quite. Mrs. Vespasien had soothing classical music emanating through the high-end speakers installed in the car. Mick didn’t seem to know what to say to me with his mother sitting in the front seat of the car, probably listening to every word we said. He fidgeted with his hands in his lap, not really knowing where to put them. I figured the awkwardness was just part of Mick’s mystique.

When I arrived home, my grandmother was out in the front yard working on the flower gardens that surrounded the patio of the house. We had a large vegetable and herb garden on the side of the house she also tended but we had a gardener who came twice a week to tend the three massive French style gardens bordering the house. She looked up at me through her straw hat and smiled, then waved to Mrs. Vespasien through the open car door.

I thanked Mrs. Vespasien again and my grandmother came over to speak with her as I headed into the house to start in on the homework. I had just set everything up in the dinning room when I looked up to see Mick coming into the room behind me, his backpack slung slightly over his shoulder. I was curious as to why he had followed me in the house, especially since he always seemed to be eager to just head home.

“Your grandmother invited me to stay over…” Mick said. “My mom told me to…”

“You want something to eat?” I asked him. “I usually have a snack while I do my homework…”

“Um… okay,” Mick nodded. I went into the kitchen and came out with two glasses of milk and the package of cookies in the pantry. After sitting them down between the two of us, I flipped open my math book.

“I hate when they give us homework over the weekend,” I sighed. “How can teachers complain they have to grade our papers over the weekend and still give us homework over the weekend?”

“Dunno,” Mick shrugged.

“Where are you?” I asked him.

“Number thirteen,” Mick replied.

“I’m only on seven,” I grimaced.

“I can help you out…” Mick suggested.

“Cool,” I asked him. After I had caught up to where he was in our homework, we began working on the next few problems together. “You’re really good at math.”

“I wasn’t always,” he admitted. “My dad used to always help me with my homework and he explained math to me much better than my previous teachers did. It’s not that I’m good at it. It’s more like I have a better understanding of it.”

“So, are you liking it here in Merridick?” I asked him curiously.

“It’s been much easier to get along here than my old schools,” he admitted. “Seriously, the bullies here are like kittens compared to what I’ve dealt with. Sure, people whisper and stuff, but they seem generally polite.”

“How many schools did you go to before you came here?” I asked him.

“Sixteen,” he said.

“Sixteen? You’ve been to sixteen schools in ten years?” I gaped.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “We used to move a lot because of my dad… his job. Sometimes two, three times a year. And my parents moved me from school to school when bullies got bad. I was only expelled once.”

“Expelled?” I gaped.

“At my last school,” he admitted. “I got sick of this one guy always picking on me and… I guess I snapped. I don’t remember what happened. I hurt him pretty bad. His parents were threatening to sue… Dad was deciding to retire any way, so my parents pulled me out of school, home schooled me for the rest of the year, and then we moved here over the summer.”

“I can’t believe you got expelled for just sticking up for yourself,” I shook my head.

“The school didn’t see it that way,” Mick shrugged. “I beat up their best basketball player two weeks before the championships. I was the bad guy.”

“That sucks,” I shook my head.

“Yeah,” Mick said lightly.

“Well, hopefully things will be better for you here,” I told him. “I’m sure once people get over the whole you being new thing, you’ll fit right in.”

“That means a lot to me,” Mick admitted. “I’ve never really fit in anywhere.”

“I’m sure you’ll have tons of friends by the end of the semester,” I smiled.

“I hope so,” Mick said. “You’re really the first person I’ve ever gone to school with that’s said more than two words to me. Well, more than two nice words, anyway.”

“You know, we’ve never really hung out after school before,” I mentioned to him.

“Aren’t we doing that right now?” Mick frowned.

“Yeah, but we’re doing homework,” I shrugged. “I meant doing something fun.”

“I guess,” Mick said, seeming to scour his brain for an idea. “I know there’s a meteor shower this Saturday. If I could find my telescope, we could watch it. I’ve been sort of lazy, so a lot of my stuff hasn’t even been unpacked yet…”

“That sounds neat!” I smiled. Mick blushed, almost as if he had never had an idea complimented before in his entire life. “So, are you and your family coming to the game Friday? The first football game of the season is usually a pretty big deal around here, which is why I guess Ritchie had extra practice this afternoon.”

“I’m not big on sports,” Mick admitted.

“I’m not either,” I replied. “I go because my parents bribe me with nachos. If you want, we can probably just hang out in my parents car and watch a movie or something the entire time.”

“Okay,” Mick nodded. “That sounds cool.”

We finished up doing our homework together and then Mick’s mother returned to pick him up. She chatted with my mother again while Mick stood behind her awkwardly, like a small child trying to hide in his mother’s skirt. I figured he was sheltered because he was an only child and wasn’t always in the best of health. The Vespasien family was definitely weird, but I figured they couldn’t been stranger than anyone else in town.