Cannibal Red

I guess if I expected Tyler to somehow find my number and call me I would have been more prepared and not let my mother answer the phone.
I was just about to walk into the kitchen wrapped in a towel with soaking wet hair when the phone rang, my mum, deciding to embarrass me totally, picks up the phone with her cigarette still in her mouth causing her greeting to sound like;
“Gerio?”

I’m about to go back into my room after mum’s “uhuh’s” had gone over the count of five (which is usually the time that I know it’s one of her friends) when I see her motion to the phone with a grin on her face.

“Yeah, she’s just here in her towel, alright, bye.” She then hands me the phone and I disappear in my room, totally embarrassed. Gee, thanks mum.

“Hello?” I mumble, expecting it to be Tiffany or someone.

“Umm…Lee?” Says a shy voice, I nod, as if the person was before me until I realize I was being rude by not acknowledging them.

“Uh, yeah that’s me.”

“Hi,” I hear soft coughing in the background “it’s Tyler Morgan, you umm…tried to eat my face yesterday.”

I giggle nervously into the phone “Yeah, sorry about that. I don’t normally go around eating people’s faces.”

“Sure you don’t.” his confidence seems to pick up once he knows I’m relaxed with him.

Stop it, you’re being stupid. Don’t talk to him, it’s not worth it, you can’t touch him.

I sometimes try to stop the voice in my head, because sometimes it’s just plain creepy, but the more I try to get rid of it with loud music or speaking over the top of it it’s still there.
Earsplitting.
Spine-chilling.
Exasperating.
It’s what Adrienne likes to call the voice, ESE. I swear she must have looked up words just to get a cool three letter name for it; it’s something she’d do.

“Ha, ha. Listen, I was wondering what you were doing today,” his voice goes back to its usual shy, scared tone “because I was well, a bit worried about you yesterday and I wanted to apologize for being, well, for hurting you.”

I smile, inspecting my toes from my seat on my bed “Thanks for worrying I guess, but I’m fine.”

“And about doing something today?”

“I’m not busy.”

“Good.”

After hanging up and agreeing to meet Tyler at some bar in the main street I stand in front of the mirror and glare at my boring, boring look.
Flat straight hair, white shirt, blue jeans. I was boring, just flat, full stop.
I was sort of hopeful that maybe Tyler might like me, but there was no way he could. I was plain Jane, he was...he was that guy that nobody liked and feared. He was so different to everyone else.
Somehow, I found myself changing my clothes. I put on a new pair of black jeans that mum got me, but I didn’t think I’d look good in, I changed my shirt and tied up my hair for the first time in ages. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t look too bad. I wasn’t so plain anymore, I was, semi plain.
I wished I looked like Adrienne at that moment, with her full always red lips, her perfect weight, her beautiful face. If she was a few years younger Tyler would be chasing after her, she’s his type.
Not me, never me.

When I entered the bar I instantly recognized it, Adrienne had taken me there once to see her band one night. Hopefully she’d be there so if I decided to freak out while I was near Tyler I could be saved by her.
Would she even save me? Or would she laugh and egg me on?

I found Tyler sitting in the corner table, in the darkness with hardly any light. I liked his choice of seating, I couldn’t stand the light lately; it was as if I was forming too quickly.
He was sitting with his legs propped up against another chair, probably pulled from another table. There was a drink in his left hand, and his right elbow was resting upon the table, his hand twirling around in circles as he watched the band play.

I avert my eyes from him to look at the band myself; sure enough Adrienne was standing at the microphone, a guitar swung over her shoulders and her eyeliner rimmed eyes closed. She was wearing a pair of leopard skin and denim jeans, and an awfully tight shirt as always. This one looked as if she’d taken it out of her little sisters’ wardrobe.
I watched for a little while as she roared out lyrics and played her guitar. I wasn’t really ever into the music Adrienne played, she screamed out stuff like “Take your top off girl, you ain’t gettin’ nowhere.”
The music they played was pretty fast too, I couldn’t keep up with it if I tried, most of the time I don’t understand what she’s saying anyway because she’s singing so damn fast.

I cringe when Adrienne screams particularly loudly and head over to where Tyler was, still watching the band in the same position my eyes last left him.

“Hey.” He says when I sit down at the table, crossing my legs on the seat lotus style.

“Hey,” He says, nodding his head over to the band “They’re pretty good eh?”

I nod, just to keep him satisfied “Yeah, they’re good, I know the singer.”

Tyler takes a sip of his drink and smirks into the glass “So do I.”

I glance over at him, his head is tilted a little and he’s looking at me, frowning. “You look nice.”

“Thanks.”

“Just nice.” He smiles and takes another sip of his drink, then looks over as the band finishes playing. Adrienne, hot, sweating, and probably rotten smelling waves over at us, putting her guitar down, talking to someone and walks over.

I was quite confused to tell you the truth. It’s not all the time that I meet someone else who just happens to be a vampire too, and just happens to know Adrienne.

“Hey munchkins!” She says enthusiastically, pulling up a chair and sitting down, the chair the opposite way. It kind of made me uneasy; the way she was just filled with so much energy after all that playing. Her skin was a sort of grey-ish colour tonight, but I chose to blame it on the lights.

“You did well.” Tyler says, moving closer and kissing her cheek. What the hell? Tyler’s seventeen and Adrienne is what…twenty six? That’s about a nine year age difference.
Sensing my slight panic, Tyler smiles and me and drains the last of his drink. Surprisingly enough, this bar let us drink because we looked eighteen, not by our ID’s. I remember asking the bartender why one night, he just replied;

“You kids are just gonna drink anyway, might as well show you what you’re getting yourself into.” And he did. A group of kids came in, got smashed, and told each other they’d never drink again.

I haven’t seen them since.

“Adrienne’s my sister.” Tyler says, as if he knew there was a little voice in my head, not the ESE, but something different. A voice that sounded exactly like me. A voice that said; you like him.

I pushed the thought right out of my mind, knowing full well not to get involved with him, no, not a good idea; he was Adrienne’s brother.
Adrienne grins and ruffles his jet black hair. I watch as he scowls, his nose looking bigger than it normally did when he scrunches his face up, looking particularly annoyed. I thought I heard him mumble something but ignored it, turning my attention to Adrienne who was retelling her night of being a musician.

“Okay,” she says after about twenty minutes of her gabbling on about how great all her shows are “main reason for you guys to be here is because the big guy knows you both know.”

I raise my eyebrows “the big guy?”

Adrienne nods, setting her drink down and leaning forward. I couldn’t help but notice when she did this her black laced bra stuck out of her shirt, causing a look of disgust to run across Tyler’s face.

“The big guy, the guy that hired me,” she lowers her voice significantly so Tyler and I had to lean in to hear her “he found out that you guys know about each other.”

I glance up at Tyler, who looks confusedly at his older sister “Were we not supposed to know…?”

Adrienne shakes her head, her long black nails digging into the table.
“No, you’re not, and the company,” she turns to me to explain “these are the guys that control all of the Super-Cannibals in Australia,” I nod to show my understanding “aren’t very happy about it, you see every town in this country has at least one or two Cannibals, and they’re usually of the same sex, so it’s pretty much impossible to breed. But you guys weren’t supposed to know about each other and you,” Adrienne says, pointing a careless finger at me “weren’t even supposed to know about yourself until you got uncontrollable but um…you were a, uh special case I guess.”

This confused me, why was I the special case and not Tyler or Adrienne? I chose to wave it away just as Adrienne did. I didn’t take anything like that into long hard consideration unless I actually needed to worry about it, and it wasn’t doing me any damage right now was it?

“Why are you telling us this then?” I ask Adrienne briskly “I mean, we’re not supposed to know.”

Adrienne shakes her black and blue head “No, you’re supposed to know about this, I’ve set up a meeting with both of you tomorrow because one of the head dudes wants to speak with you privately, stuff I shouldn’t be telling you apparently.”

This was all getting too strange for me, so confusing, so much to take in. I glance over at Tyler who was sitting back, staring at the table surface almost guiltily. I wondered what he was thinking, but there was so much we just learnt that someone couldn’t just guess what he was thinking, you’d have to crawl into his mind just to find that out.

Right now that seemed quite appealing.