The Dorkiest Vampire

Mick’s POV

I was frightened at the prospect of Riley coming to hang over at my house. Normal people would be ecstatic at the prospect of having a friend coming to hang out with them, but I was terrified. I had no idea what would happen with Riley over and there were so many opportunities for things to go terribly wrong. I knew anything awful was bound to happen, from my parents just completely mortifying me in front of her to something going dreadfully wrong and our secret being revealed. I had worked so hard to make Riley my friend and I feared I was one evening away from ruining it all.

I heard the voices of Riley’s mother and my own talking as I made my way down the stairs. I had heard the car turn up the drive moments before and, though I had desperately wanted to rush out and say hello, I decided against it. I was proud of myself for playing cool and casually strolling down the stairs, as if I actually had a life or something. I smiled slightly when I saw Riley standing there and she gave me a comforting look back. When I arrived next to her, I looked at my mother, silently asking her to not embarrass me completely. However, I had a feeling that wouldn’t be the case as my mother put her arms around my shoulders.

I showed Riley the entire house and then my room. Unfortunately, I forgot to clean it up before she came and I was completely embarrassed that the place was a sty when I finally showed it to her. Riley didn’t seem to mind though and was very kind about the entire thing. She gave me a lot more credit than I deserved and was a lot more kind than anyone had been to me before. I didn’t know how I had lucked out enough to get a friend as good as Riley.

“So… I guess we should find the telescope. It’s up in the attic,” I explained to her.

“Alright,” Riley smiled.

I led her up to the attic, which was a room I rarely visited in myself. I knew I should have looked for the telescope and set it up before Riley came over, but I was a little afraid of heading up into the attic all by my lonesome. It was much easier to have her help me out than admit to my parents I was terrified of our new house and have them help me. My dad probably would have sent me up there alone so I could build character or whatever and my mother would have cooed and coddled me about it until I was so embarrassed I went up to the attic to hide to just to get away from her. Riley, however, put me at ease, and I didn’t mind searching through the attic with her. We each took different sides of the attic to begin searching.

“Who’s did these belong to? Did they come with the house?” Riley asked out of the blue.

I looked over and saw she was peering into the trunk that my parents had always said belonged to my sister. Lia, was what my parents had always referred to her as, when they were able to talk about her at all. They probably only mentioned her only three or four times during my entire life and I had learned not to really bring up the subject around them. I always hoped that one day my parents would be comfortable enough to tell me what exactly had happened to her, but as I got older, it seemed less and less likely they would ever broach the subject.

“No,” I said, looking away from riley. “Those things belonged to my sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister. She must like old things, huh?” Riley mentioned.

“Yeah, I guess,” I shrugged. “I never met her…” It was easier for me to talk about Lia because I had never met her and, since I didn’t know much about her, she was more like a distant relative than my long lost sister.

“How could you never meet your own sister?” Riley said, confused.

“She died before I was born…” I tried to explain.

“What happened…if you don’t mind me asking…” Riley said.

“I don’t really know,” I shrugged. “My parents never really want to talk about it. They had to when I found her stuff in the attic of one of our old houses and I started asking questions. They never kept any photos of her out or anything… I’ve only pieced it together from things I’ve overheard now and then… I guess it was hard on them…” Honestly, the never told me what really happened to Lia. I had managed to put things together from family gossip and the little bit my parents had told me when I began asking questions when I was around eleven.

“I guess it should be,” Riley agreed.

“Anyway, apparently, she fell in with a pretty bad crowd of people and got suckered into some stuff…” I said. It was all my parents had explained. They didn’t go into much detail.

“Drugs and alcohol?” Riley suggested. I shrugged. I didn’t really know exactly what or who Lia had been involved with. My parents just said they were “bad people.”

“Anyway, she did something… I don’t know what and someone was killed because of it…” I said, trying to remember. “And it gets really fuzzy after that… I hear different stories from both of them. My mom always said she couldn’t live after she caused an accident that killed someone she cared about. My dad said she died in the accident too… It’s almost like they don’t know what really happened to each other…”

“That’s horrible,” Riley said. I nodded. I was pretty confused about the whole thing myself. I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t want to tell me the truth about what had happened to Lia. All I knew was what I told Riley, that Lia had gotten into a bad crowd, something had happened, someone had died, and then Lia died somehow.

“Yeah,” I lied carefully. “My parents had a hard time having kids, so they thought she was the only kid they would ever have. Then, about five years later, I came along and basically shocked them.”
Sure, it was a lot longer than five years, but to explain the entire thing to Riley… well, that would expose too many of our secrets. I couldn’t afford to do that. Anyway, it was the story I was supposed to tell if anyone came around asking about Lia.

“That’s probably why they’re so overprotective of you,” Riley surmised.

“I guess,” I sighed, tossing away some boxes. Finally, I found the box with the telescope. “Oh, here’s the telescope…”

We set up the telescope and then headed downstairs for supper. I was a little embarrassed about the food as it was spread out. I hoped Riley wouldn’t notice the fact that we ate our steaks extremely raw or that we all drank strange red drinks. If she did notice, Riley was kind enough not to say anything and was very polite to my parents throughout the evening. Of course, it didn’t help me that both of my parents seemed to insist on embarrassing me.

“So, Aurelie, are you getting adjusted to high school well enough?” Mom smiled.

“Yes ma’am,” Riley smiled. “though I think it helps a little that I have my older brother there to look out for me. I’m glad he is nice instead of trying to avoid me or make things worse.”

“Michael is enjoying school as well,” Mom smiled. I glowered at her out of the corner of my eye. “aren’t you, mon petit écureuil?” I couldn’t believe she had just done that. It was enough my mother called me that around the house, but I was mortified that she had done it in front of someone else. I hoped Riley didn’t know enough French to realize my mother was calling me her “little squirrel.” I hated the nickname more than anything.

“Louise, we’ve been over this,” Dad said, coming to my defense. “Mick is not a little boy any more. You need start treating him as a grown up.”

“He will always be my little boy” Mom continued in French. I sighed, annoyed that my parents were about to get into this at the dinner table, in front of a guest.

“Don’t embarrass the boy, Louise. He had a friend over..” Dad grimaced. “Besides, he’s a little too old to be your ‘little squirrel’.”

“He will always be my little squirrel.” Mom huffed indignantly.

I seriously wanted to curl up in a ball and die. I was so thankful Riley seemed completely confused and didn’t understand a word that my parents were saying. If they kept going, I knew I would have to crawl under the table and hide until Riley left that evening. I wished my parents could just get through one evening without completely embarrassing me.

“Can we please talk about something else?” I begged them.

“I apologize, Aurelie,” Dad said. “We don’t usually hold conversations in other languages when we have guests present.”

“It’s alright,” Riley assured him, giving me a comforting smile. “Thank you for having me over, by the way. Your home is lovely.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Mom said.

“How are your studies?” Dad asked. “Mick has said you are studying short stories?” At first, I was glad for the subject change.

“Yes,” I nodded. “Things like ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ ‘The Interlopers,’ “Harrison Bergeron’ and ‘the Scarlet Ibis.’ We’re supposed to be doing some O. Henry this week as well as some other passages in our literature book.”

“I remember reading ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’” Dad mused. “The one about the hunter that hunts human beings?” I frowned, hoping that Dad wasn’t going to continue the way he seemed to be going.

“That is a disgusting story,” Mom said, shooting him a warning glare.

“I think it has a valid psychological point,” Dad argued. “About brain over brawn and that sort of thing.” I breathed a slight sigh of relief, that Dad hadn’t been going where I thought he was going.

“I like ‘the Necklace,” I said quietly.

“Guy de Maupassant,” Mom swooned slightly. “Now he was a writer.” Dad looked at her with a smirk. I knew there was a story there I would have to find out about later.

“I’m partial to Edgar Allan Poe,” Riley said. “I’m looking forward to doing the Twain and the Aesop fables. We’re supposed to be starting our mythology unit soon.”

“Well, I am very happy to know that the school is affording the both of you a decent education. A challenging one, even,” Dad said. “You cannot place a price on a good education.”

The meal was over without little incident and I was thankful my parents didn’t bring up any other uncomfortable subjects. Riley was very understanding when it came to my parents and their ability to embarrass me so easily. I thought things were going fine until Riley brought something up from the conversation earlier.

“What was your mother calling you?” she asked.

“What?” I said, hoping she wasn’t mentioning what I thought she was.

“She kept saying… what was it? Oh, ehnikyulary?” Riley said, knowing she wasn’t saying it right.

“Éécureuil,” I corrected. My parents sometimes took to only speaking French around the house when the mood suited them. “Mon petit écureuil.”

“Yeah. What does that mean?” Riley asked.

“She’s calling me her little squirrel,” I said quietly. I looked away, feeling the blush cross my face.

“That’s cute,” Riley smiled sympathetically.

“Not when she does it in front of the entire eighth grade. And again at a PTA meeting,” I said, remembering how she had called it out across the gym the previous year.

“Hey, my mom didn’t stop calling me Riley-Poo in public until two years ago,” she assured me. “I can sympathize.”

When Riley left for the evening, I headed back to the kitchen to help my parents clean the dishes from the night before and eat a bit of a snack before I went to bed for the evening. My mother was singing an old French song and my father was smiling as he put the dishes away, nodding his head back and forth as my mother sang. I loved it when my mother sang, reminding me of the gentle lullabies when I was a child, but I was still overly annoyed at what had transpired over dinner.

“Mom, why’d you have to do that?” I asked her with a sigh.

“Do what?” Mom asked.

“Call me that. In front of Riley,” I grimaced.

“You’ve always been petit écureuil,” Mom frowned.

“Yes, and I always will be,” I sighed, “but do I have to be your petit écureuil in front of my friends?”

“He has a point, Louise,” Dad nodded.

“I know,” Mom sighed, squeezing me tightly, “but it’s hard to let you go as you get older.”

“I know,” I nodded.

“Anything else?” Dad asked.

“Um… yeah…” I said, trying to approach the subject as delicately as I possibly could. “While we were looking for the telescope in the attic… We stumbled across Lia’s trunk and Riley asked me about it and… well, I didn’t really know what to tell her about it. And she seemed pretty confused that I didn’t seem to know anything about my own sister…”

My parents were silent for the longest time, looking at each other, as if they were mentally debating what to tell me about the entire situation with Lia. I waited patiently, noticing my mother had been scrubbing the same dish for several minutes. After a moment of silence, my father finally sighed and looked at me, as if he had been dreading this moment his entire life.

“It’s complicated, son,” Dad said finally. “Lia… she was… she was engaged at the time of her death… Engaged to one man, but involved with another. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we believe… we believe she lost control and killed the other man. And after she came to her senses and realized what her bloodlust had led her to do, she killed herself, unable to deal with the grief of killing one of the men she loved.”

“Why was she hanging around a guy she wasn’t engaged to?” I asked.

“It was a different time, dear,” Mom sighed. “She engaged fell out of love with the man she was engaged to and couldn’t break it off… not without scandal… and then she found someone else… someone… human… But it was before… before we had ways to stop ourselves… and she lost control…We tried to stop her. We knew she was too young and wouldn’t be able to stop… but she wouldn’t listen… and then it was too late…”

“You must understand why it is so hard for us to talk about your sister,” my father said. “We thought for the longest time she was all we would ever have.”

“And then you came along and we were eternally grateful,” Mom smiled, ruffling my hair a bit.

“You have to understand how hard it was for us,” Dad nodded.

“Now,” Mom smiled, “what do you want for your snack?”

I ate quickly and gave my parents hugs before going to bed. I knew they would need the extra comfort since I had brought up such an uncomfortable topic of conversation. Tired, I changed for bed and crawled underneath the covers. Ever since moving to Merridick, I no longer dreaded the coming of each morning. In fact, I usually had very restful nights and was eager when I woke up in the morning, knowing I would be going to a school I liked and spending time with my new friend Riley. I got to sleep easy enough that night, but then the dreams started.

I awoke to the sounds of Ophélie’s dying screams and the images of Jacques floating down the creek, his body drained of blood. I gasped and choked, sputtering for air as I rapidly left the world of dreams and returned to reality. I shook my head, brushing my hands through my hair and feeling the sweat forming on the back of my neck. I wanted to save her somehow, but there was no way I could think of to protect Ophélie. I sighed, attempting to return back to bed and to a dreamless sleep.