When I was a little girl, I used to pretend I was a vampire like in the movies. I would stalk around, pretending to bite my brother with plastic vampire teeth and hissing dramatically when a shaft of sunlight fell across me. As I got a little older and was in school, I learned to hide my daydreams when I was around teachers and other children so I didn’t get picked on for being weird.
But I would still go home and read books about vampires. I would creep out of bed and watch horror movies when everyone was fast asleep. And as I got older, my idea of being a vampire started to evolve and mature. I realized that plastic teeth and the ragged black cape I had used since my kindergarten Halloween party weren’t going to somehow make me a vampire. I needed to look for real signs.
Allergies to silver and garlic. Real sensitivity to light. A taste for blood. A drive to kill.
And, of course, fangs.
I was eight when I killed my first animal. It was a bird that was already fluttering on the ground with a broken wing, so it didn’t take much effort. And I can’t say I really wanted to kill it, but I was curious if I would feel different after drinking fresh blood. But other than throwing up a couple of minutes after drinking from where I had torn the bird open, I didn’t seem to have a real reaction to it. I remember crying mournfully as I wiped blood off my lips.
As I got closer to being a teenager, I continued to be preoccupied with the idea. I would draw secret pictures of a midnight land filled with monsters and magic, imagining myself flying over it on ebony wings of taut, leathery skin stretched between ancient bones that I could shape to any form on command. I'd pass between the moon and the clouds as a giant bat or prowl the inky darkness of the woods as a marauding gray wolf. I could even turn into a swarm of large black flies if I needed to make a quick escape.
Over time, I found myself becoming more and more convinced that I had some great destiny—that I was a vampire, but I just hadn’t found the right time or action or some other trigger that would let me fully embrace my true nature. When I was twelve, I became convinced that the problem lay in my teeth.
Vampires are supposed to have fangs, right? And my canines, while slightly pointy, never seemed to get longer or sharper. I would spend hours secretly checking them in a mirror, feeling them when no one was looking. Finally, when I turned thirteen and nothing happened, I was despondent. I had decided that thirteen was a special number and was a “vampire birthday”, meaning I would come into at least some of my vampiric abilities on that day.
So that night, while my parents were downstairs cleaning up from my birthday party, I was up in my bathroom, tears streaming down my face. I checked in the mirror one last time, but I knew it was no use. If I was going to start changing, I was going to have to sacrifice for it. Clear the way for the change.
I had already brought the small pair of pliers with me in anticipation of what would come next, and to my credit, I didn’t scream as I pulled the two canines that I thought were blocking my fangs from coming in. But just as the second one pulled free from the root, I got woozy from the pain and stumbled, banging against the locked bathroom door. When my parents came to check on me, they were horrified. They couldn’t understand that I had my reasons for doing it, and at the time I thought it was my mistake for not telling them more about what I was going through earlier.
Because in the last few years I had taken to hiding my nature from them just like I did everyone else—partially out of habit and partially because of how my parents had changed themselves. When I was 6 or 7 talking about being a vampire, they would laugh and play along, talking about what a smart girl I was and how good an imagination I had. But at some point, they had stopped laughing. Their expressions had eroded from pride and happiness to embarrassment and worry.
So I kept it to myself.
When they first sent me to what I called “the problem school” (and was actually a home for children with mental disorders), I decided that I should just be honest with them. With the people at the problem school too. Because, I reasoned, if I did a good job explaining things to them, they would understand that I wasn’t crazy, just different than them. And they would be proud of me and the extraordinary creature I was becoming.
By the end of my first year at the problem school, I saw that honesty wasn’t the answer. I was never going to be accepted as I was, and my best hope was to lie better, to adapt more smoothly to the human world I was being forced to live in. So I started gradually acting like I had given up my strange ideas about vampires. I let them take me to the dentist to be fitted for a partial, making sure to act contrite and ask questions about when I would be old enough to get permanent artificial teeth to replace the two I had removed.
It took time, but I was back home and in regular school before my fifteenth birthday. I was much more skilled in maintaining my façade now, and there was no one I trusted with my secret. I made a point of blending in my freshman and sophomore years of high school. By my junior year, boys were noticing me and I had figured out the games of the girls’ social cliques, so it wasn’t hard for my false self, my outer self, to be popular.
To everyone else, I had become ideal. I was a smart girl (but not too smart), and I was pretty (but not too pretty), and most of all, I was compliant. I did what I was told at home and school, injecting just enough mistakes and disobedience into the mix that I wouldn’t seem artificially perfect or off-putting. When I went out with boys, I would let them take just enough advantage that they would feel satisfied without doing enough to get the reputation of being a slut.
And that might sound like a terrible existence—a life full of lies and feigned mediocrity and being used—but you need to understand, none of that mattered to me. That wasn’t the real me. That was just the girl the world got. And if I’m being honest, I thought she deserved every bit of it.
I had spent much of my time at the problem school, and the years since I had been back home, reading up on various systems of belief and all kinds of legends. Did you know that there are vampire legends in almost every culture? And that nearly every religion or philosophy has something that is similar in concept, even if it isn’t attributed to a monster? But by the same token, there are a lot of differences between the different kinds of vampires. The American movie vampire is very limited, based almost completely on one very specific hodgepodge of European folklore—Dracula.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I had come to understand that I had been misled, wasting my time by focusing in on that cliché idea of what a vampire could be. Because where some vampires might be weak to sunlight and afraid of crosses, others might have different or fewer ways they could be hurt. And while some may drink blood to survive, others lived off of other things.
Like pain. And fear. And death.
It wasn’t a hard thing to kill my parents. They weren’t really my parents, you see. They belonged to that other girl, that girl that everyone loved and no one really knew or cared about. That girl was a pleaser. That girl was a whore. That girl might have cried over the idea of starting a gas leak one night when she was supposed to staying at a friend’s house. She did cry the next morning when I let her out so the grief and surprise would seem genuine. When they told her gently that her mother had died in her sleep and her father was in critical condition at the hospital. Oh, how she screamed and wailed.
But of course, that was all an act. There’s not really another girl. I’m not crazy, you know. I’ve just become very good at compartmentalization.
Two months after my graduation, my father was back home with me looking after him. It worked out better than I ever could have hoped. Everyone would praise how brave and good and loyal I was to change his diapers and tend to his medicines. How I was earning a special place in Heaven and my mother (God rest her) would be so proud.
Meanwhile, I could do whatever I wanted to him and he was unable to tell a soul.
He lasted for nearly a year like that, and while he had come home unable to communicate more than the occasional grunt or scream, by the end he was totally insane. I can’t say for sure whether I was the cause of that—I’m not a psychologist, after all.
I’m a vampire.
And I had figured out how full and fat I would feel after spending some time extracting misery and fear from that disgusting cripple. How re-energized and powerful. Why, I felt like my true self.
That’s why I went into nursing, with my specialization in hospice care. I worked hard at it, making sure my grades were nearly perfect (but not too perfect) and that I had no black marks on my record to keep me from getting work just where I wanted. As luck (and some kerosene) would have it, the administrative building of the problem school burned down while I was in college, taking any record of me being there right along with it.
By the time I was twenty-five, I was working for one of the top hospitals in the southeastern U.S. as a nurse in hospice care. Primarily outpatient service, I would go out periodically to the homes of people that were already expected to die. The forgotten and expendable. It gave me a chance to get to know these people, get access to their homes, and learn their routines.
It helped me figure out when I could catch them alone and show them my true self in the dark.
But then you came on as the hospice administrator. From the start, I sensed you were going to be a problem. You watched everything so closely. You called it efficiency, but it seemed more like nosiness to me. Arrogance.
Then one day, I saw you looking at me. Studying me when you thought I wouldn't notice. It reminded me of how my mother looked when she saw my face on my thirteenth birthday, streaked with tears that went from clear to pink as they mingled with the blood streaming from my still-oozing mouth.
It was a look that said ‘there's something wrong with you. I don't know what, but something is very wrong.’
I can't abide that look.
That's why you're about to take all those pills. It's a clean way to go, and must faster than I'd prefer, but I can't have your death looking suspicious. A plain jane suicide will have to do. And before you think of fighting me, you need to understand that I kind of want you to. It would give me a chance to make this milquetoast suicide into a brutal simulated rape and murder.
That's what I thought. Eat them all.
The funny thing is, you could have avoided all of this. I was going to leave the hospital next month anyway. I got a great new job at the new pediatric hospital they just opened upstate, you see.
But maybe it's for the best. You're a loose end that is best tied up, and there is some consolation. At least you got to see the real me before you died.
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