#vampires and bi awakenings a match made in heaven

[aplanetaryghost]

Sucker

I'm pretty sure my best friend's a vampire. I'm aware that opening with that makes me sound delusional, but I promise I'm not.

Maya's been my best friend since middle school. I told her when we were ten that I thought she was the most interesting person I'd ever met, and she gave me a glow-in-the-dark Silly Band and, giggling, invited me to her secret society. And thusly, we were inseparable, as most childhood best friendships go. Through the trials of middle school dances and AP classes. She was the first person I told when I stopped believing in God; I was the first person she told when she got a girlfriend last spring. We keep each other's secrets safe. So Maya's never been scary, never been weird before— I mean, we've both been weird, but in the way little girls are. Inventing elaborate backstories for our fairy characters on the playground, making potions out of sticks and grass. 

The weird-weird stuff only started this past summer. Or at least, that's when I first noticed it. I don't remember the date, but it was early August, those dreamy midsummer days when school's not an imminent threat, but a distant memory. 

Maya had had a dance recital. She's been doing ballet since she was tiny, way before I knew her. You'd think she'd resent it by now, but she doesn't, isn't the kind of person to lose her love for something because of what other people want her to be. Her dance company was doing The Firebird, and I certainly can't remember the plot, but I remember Maya. A riot of red, a ribbon of flame. You know how there are some people who just— sort of— glow? Maya's one of those people. Like, of course she got the lead, because there's something electric about her, something impossibly magnetic and expressive. I'm the quiet kind of storyteller; I keep it to self-indulgent fanfiction and the homebrew DnD campaign that'll blow everyone's socks off if I manage to finish it before I die. But Maya— Maya's a center stage sort of girl. She's the only one I'd believe playing a creature of legend. She's such a good dancer. 

After the show I gave her some flowers; I don't really believe in traditional forms of manners like thank you notes and flowers, but my mom told me to bring them, so. And then Maya beamed as she took them from me, her brown eyes warm, honey-gold. Molten. Like there was fire in her then, too. 

Anyway, her mom had work stuff (her mom always had work stuff) so she came home with us. We sat on my bed with the stripy sheets, and she didn't make fun of me for having way too many stuffed animals for a junior in high school, and after we talked for a while she spotted my ukulele leaning against the side of the desk. And she asked me to teach her something. 

I mean, everyone and their mom learns "I'm Yours" on ukulele. It's super popular and it's in C, so it's sort of baby's first uke song. I said something mildly mocking about this to Maya and she laughed and said "Well, you don't have to teach me if it's too basic," and I blushed and said no I actually hate pretentiousness, and what kind of ridiculous person would try to gatekeep ukulele anyway, and she just laughed at me again, all airy and unsulliable. Sometimes I think Maya's made of different stuff from the rest of us. Sometimes I wonder why she bothers hanging out with me. 

I explained a little bit about how chord diagrams work, but Maya's not really a visual learner, so I handed the ukulele over so she could try it out herself. But she still hadn't quite gotten the hang of how to press the strings down so they don't buzz when you strum them, so I reached over to help. It's sort of instinct to do that— I did it when I was teaching my little sister, Lou, too— because it's hard to explain it any other way. I feel kind of bad for invading people's space, but Maya's a pretty touchy person anyway, so I shifted closer to her on the bed and leaned over her shoulder. I reached to place my fingers over hers on the fretboard. 

Her hand was freezing. It was ninety degrees outside, and our AC is super finicky, so it wasn't much cooler indoors. But Maya's hand was icy, and there were goosebumps up her arm. On some sudden fervent instinct, I grabbed her hand in both of mine and rubbed at the skin. "Why are you so cold?" I asked with a little laugh.  

She looked down sheepishly and gave a forced chuckle, gently tugging her hand from mine. "Maybe it'll warm up if I actually get this chord right."

She sounded uncomfortable. Nervous, almost. Like I'd caught her out on— what? Having cold hands? Maybe she just hadn't expected me to touch her. Logically, I should have been able to brush it off, but I just couldn't. Everything about that afternoon stood out to me, but especially the feeling of her frigid hand in mine. I just kept thinking about it. In bed that night, long after she'd gone home. In the car the next day, on the way to pick up Lou from summer camp. Practicing ukulele by myself a couple weeks later. The warm line of my shoulder against her back and the slightly-too-closeness of her face and the chill that seemed to pass from her to me when I touched her hand. It was just so fucking vivid, and not in a bad way, exactly, but it was weird. 

School started up again. I found Maya in homework and she beamed upon seeing me, and something sort of bubbled in my stomach, some weird nerves-excitement that I guess happens when you don't see your best friend for several weeks. And things were normal. I can't point at anything that was actually, tangibly off in those first few weeks. It's just that every interaction with Maya felt so charged, like now that she'd passed that strange electricity to me once, every time we touched each other that current flowed between us again. And it was unfamiliar and unsettling and also it meant nothing because nothing had actually changed, except for the fact that I was sort of addicted to it now: kept catching her eye in class, kept switching seats to sit next to her at lunch. 

But I didn't really have anything to ascribe the feeling to until Mrs. Richmond introduced the first unit of Honors English. Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, like Dracula but before Dracula, and with more women. I'm not really a spooky-scaries person (as evidenced that I say shit like "spooky-scaries"), but it's short and has fantastical elements, both of which are very rare in books you have to read for school. So, fine by me. I know it came out before all those tropes existed— is maybe the reason we have these tropes— but it's funny reading a story that feels kind of like the ultimate vampire archetype. Spooky castle in vague eastern Europe. Beautiful mysterious stranger who hates crucifixes. Sorry Laura, but I think she vants to suck your blood. 

I've never read vampire stuff before, though, and there's something compelling about it. There's this intensity to the way Laura and Carmilla talk to each other, a sort of self-destructive desperation that feels like maybe there's a universe where Laura just says screw it and runs off with Carmilla on a whirlwind vampire quest. I always make this joke that if some kind of portal-fantasy door opened up in my life I wouldn't think twice before diving through it— fantastical dangers or no, I want to see a dragon! And there's something sort of like that in Laura. Like she's looking for something she can't find, except maybe Carmilla is it. Just something about the way Laura thinks, feels, talks, there's a flicker of— something— in my mind, in my heart, in my stomach. A sort of recognition, but of what? 

It tips over the edge when Maya bites me. That sounds weird, but— well, it's a little weird. Maybe I'm just making it weird. 

We're sleeping over Jess's for her birthday and we're marathoning the entire High School Musical trilogy. But we started late so it's 2 a.m., maybe, and we're about halfway through the third one. While Kelsi tries to convince everyone to do one last show to celebrate their senior year, we giggle deliriously and flick popcorn at each other. Maya keeps trying to steal my sour patch kids, but she hasn't got a subtle bone in her body, especially when she's on a sugar high and loopy from how late it is. I hold the cardboard box of candy over my head, my arm flinging wildly enough that it'll probably spill all over the floor anyways. She clambers over me, grasping at my arms, a tangle of limbs and warm laughter, and I stagger to my feet, using my height to my advantage and dangling it out of her reach. 

She huffs at my "unfair" use of "tall person privilege" and flops to the floor, declaring "I give up!" I follow suit, giggling softly, but I'm barely settled when she dives toward me again, eyes sparking. I fling the sour patch kids away but she just plasters herself to my side and announces, nonsensically, "I bet you taste better than sour patch kids!" and gives an exaggerated chomp to my shoulder, bare in my pajama tank top. We're all past laughing by now, more of a breathless wheeze, the kind you only get when it's way too late at night and you know each other better than anyone. 

Then Jess cackles and says "Why are you two children? I'm trying to watch Troy Bolton's existential crisis over here!" And something about the awareness of another person in the room— what, did I think it was just me and Maya? this is Jess's house— snaps me back to the present, and a cold feeling comes over me. My stomach drops, and there's heat flooding my face, and I don't know why. But Maya just blinks a little and then goes back to chuckling at the movie, and Jess and Margo don't seem put off at all, so I settle back into our nest of blankets on the floor and try to focus on Sharpay singing about her big Broadway dreams. 

The Monday after, October begins, and we're still talking about Carmilla, now with a sort of goofy spooky edge. We do a close read of the bit where Laura describes her dreams, but I can't focus on the strategic use of sensory imagery and foreshadowing because something about Laura's words is ringing, is resonating like a tuning fork set to the same note as some strange hidden part of my psyche. A magnetic pull, the rushing of a river. A strange, tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear…

Mrs. Richmond says the river is the literal sensation of blood leaving her body, but I think it's something else. I think it doesn't matter what's physically happening when you're so wrapped up in a feeling; that Carmilla's consuming more of Laura's mind, or spirit, or something, than she is her blood. I know that intensity of feeling, have felt it before; it echoes the giddiness of that past Saturday, the sense that I was losing my mind in a good way. Maya's mouth on my bare skin. 

Well— okay, hang on. That's. That's not normal. Most people don't think about their friends the way they think about vampires.

I'm a pretty rational person, okay, and a skeptic to boot. But something's felt off for a while, and my brain latches onto this idea. Conjures a corkboard in my mind, draws strands of yarn between cold hands and strange attraction and teeth against my skin. Scrawls MAYA IS A VAMPIRE in messy red marker over the top. 

There's no fucking way. Right? Except now that the idea is named in my head I can't stop seeing it. Maya shading her eyes in the sun. Maya leaning into me for warmth. Maya not eating any of Margo's mom's garlic bread even though it's fucking delicious. Maya's eyes meeting mine and my brain plunging into some pool of Maya Maya Maya as if there's nothing else. Don't vampires have hypnotism or something? 

This is so stupid. I feel like a crazy person. I can't stop thinking about it, though. I go through the rest of the day in a weird haze, passing through class and homework and dinner with my mom and sister like a zombie. I try to distract myself but can't focus on anything because as ridiculous as this idea seems it also feels like an answer, like one I didn't know I was waiting for. I go to bed and toss and turn for a few hours and eventually give in, grabbing my laptop off my desk. The faint glow of the screen casts a ghostly glow on my face in the dark of my room. 

I don't really know what kind of search terms would get me where I need to go, and my brain's not really firing on all cylinders right now, so my first search attempt is the astonishingly intelligent carmilla vampire feelings real??? Which, shocker, does not bring up a helpful step-by-step checklist of signs of vampirism in your childhood best friend. 

It does bring up an article called "Queer Desire in Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla," which takes me aback. I click on the article and read through it, then go back and click on another. The rabbit hole swallows me and suddenly it's 4 a.m. and I'm deep in the YouTube comments of some vlogger-themed adaptation of the book, all of which say things like Carmilla could murder me and I would thank her and me, not knowing I was a lesbian: wow I wonder what it's like to kiss a pretty vampire girl.

At this point the blue light is hurting my eyes a little and, exhausted from my strange fugue state, I shut my computer and stare into the dark of my room. For a couple seconds there's just white noise in my head, my brain overfull with words and snatches of dialogue and flashes of photos. I let it sieve through my brain, the fluttering thoughts settling until suddenly they coalesce into a question I somehow hadn't even thought to ask. 

It's four a.m. I sit in my bed. I ask myself do I want Maya to kiss me? And—

Well, shit. 

The static fills my brain again, but not— not in a bad way, this time, I don't think. Just that flood of Maya Maya Maya, terrifying and reassuring all at once. Uncertain what to do, I'm left still staring at the ceiling until I fall asleep. 

The next day, Maya sits next to me in math, and the world implodes. I mean, it doesn't, not really, there are no external indications that such a thing might be happening. But I feel like someone pumped me full of helium and if I don't cling to reality white-knuckled I'll float away and maybe accidentally burn up in the sun. That sounds like my luck. I just keep looking at her. That Maya Maya Maya chorus has gotten louder, incessant, like my brain has decided it's key to my survival that I be distinctly aware of her presence at all times. We're partners for solving a problem on the board. She grins at me and jokingly names our team after the two of our names smashed together, like we're a popular ship from a sitcom. My insides are fizzing like that time when I was nine and ate five packets of Pop Rocks on a dare. 

But the world goes on even after it ends, apparently, because I don't spontaneously combust that day. Or the next. Or the next. I stammer my way through a couple of interactions with Maya, I shift uncomfortably in my seat when we talk about our opinions of Carmilla, but there's no catastrophe. I think this is what they were talking about when we learned about adaptation in bio. Sometimes shit just happens and you just…continue to exist. Reshape yourself around it. The feelings for Maya, unexpected and unrequited as they are, become comfortable. Like a worn-in sweater.

Maya talks about her girlfriend— not the one from last spring, someone new from the grade below us who she's in dance with, her name's Lily— more and more. It seems like she's getting more comfortable, too, and I'm happy for her. At first I think I can never tell her about me, like the fact of loving girls is permanently entangled with the fact of loving Maya, and admitting my sexuality to her would be showing my hand and ruining her relationship and a whole other host of anxious spirals. But weeks go by, and my heart settles a little. When Jess asks if there's a guy I want to take to the winter formal in November, I seize the moment and awkwardly reply "Or girl." And Maya grins and echoes, "Or girl." And then it's done. 

And then I tell my friend Parker from band, who's been out to me since freshman year anyway, and who thankfully is not embroiled in this whole mess and therefore is perfectly willing to listen to me lament my unrequited love as much as I need to. And slowly, the crush on Maya starts to feel less like an earth-shattering event or a collapsing star and more like something I can melodramatically gossip about in the band room after school. Then we finish Carmilla a week before Halloween and I get possibly the best idea I've ever had, even though it's literally an inside joke with myself.

There's a party at Jess's on the thirty-first. Maya will be there. So will everyone else. An hour before, I press fangs onto my teeth with cosmetic glue and smudge fake blood across my lips. When I'm done, I grin wickedly in the mirror. 

Maybe being a creature of the night isn't so bad. 

#original story #writers of tumblr #short story #i don't know how to tag these yet i'll figure it out #i wrote this for a project earlier this semester and absolutely should have edited it again before posting it here but #oh well #creative writing #fiction #vampires and bi awakenings a match made in heaven