Steven Hunley
10-30-2010, 02:55 PM
Hot Teenage Vampire Love --A Cautionary Tale of Love
By
Steven Hunley
Johnny Alucard saw her on the first day of school at Hollywood High.
She was all blond and perfect. Perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect all-the-rest. She noticed him too. Pale skin,dark glasses, coal-black hair. This was his introduction to that school, having just transferred there from Transylvania Tech. So he was the New Kid. And it was worse than that. He was falling in love with a girl who wasn’t a vampire. She wasn’t even Gothic. She was a cheerleader, the head cheerleader.
She was one of those sort that were always voted “Miss Popular”. These kinds of girls are fringies as much as boy vampires. Their fringe is just on the opposite side of the cloth. They made an unlikely pair; he with his pale skin and coal-black hair, she all dark tan and blond, both of them fringies in their own private way.
He sat behind her in history. She sat only a row from him in math. They lived only a block away from each other so it was inevitable they’d hook up, no matter what anybody else said, which was alot.
At lunch her friends would group around her and say,
“Why is he so pale? Why doesn’t he get some sun?”
“Why is he so serious all the time?”
“Is that a Gothic look? Or does he think he’s a vampire or something?”
“You know how all vampires are,” they’d all say together, “they suck!” then laugh their heads off.
None of them believed in vampires including her. A vampire’s strength lies in the fact people don’t believe in them.
His parents were completely against his serious involvement with her. They studied together once a week. She’d tutor him. One day his mom said,
“Don’t get too close Johnny, she’s not one of us.”
She counseled, “one bite and it’s over, then who you gonna do your homework with?”
She was concerned about his grades as every mother should be. But to her the girl was just another piece of meat or another blood donor. She regarded her as you or I would regard a piece of sirloin. But she cared about her son immensely.
“Just be careful son,” she counseled, “If you slip up with her you’ll never pass history. You’ve got to think of your G.P.A.”
“Mom, how can you say that? Draining her of her life-blood is the last thing on my mind. How can you be so horrid? I’d never do it. Never.”
Right! He’ll never do it.
His Mom always make sure he had his special anti-sun cream which allowed him to expose his flesh safely where his clothes didn’t cover. They bought it at Vampires-R-Us. And she always packed him a lunch. Every morning when he left for school she’d say,
“Got your blood-plasma smoothie and chips Johnny?”
“Yeah Ma.”
“I packed your favorite, O positive. Got your sunglasses son?”
“Yeah Ma, right here on my face like usual.”
She was a good mom.
The couple hadn’t been going together too long. Just since her brake up with Biff Strong, the well built captain of the football team.
Johnny questioned the reason for their break-up.
”I’d never let him go too far with me,” she answered, “So we had to break up. I’m saving myself for marriage,” she said deluding herself.
“I understand completely,” he said, deluding himself even further. Even vampires can talk like mortal men.
In the meantime he would hold back. He would control himself. They’d hold hands, share an embrace, and occasionally there was the short goodnight kiss. At first. But then they got a little more involved. Vampirism is an animal thing so you couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t in control.
It all started with the hickies.
At first she didn’t mind so much. Then she started to like them. After a while she started wearing them on her slim neck like a badge, like they were a sign of membership in some exclusive club, The Break-up with Biff Club.
Funny, because even though well-built Biff was captain of the football team she had never let him get a first down. All her friends knew it. So she didn’t hide Johnny’s marks. She displayed them. He was a different customer. And besides, he was so good giving hickies, as if he’d been practicing or something.
“So it is true,” she thought to her smiling self, “vampires do suck!”
She loved doing it. It made her feel so damn close, like she was wanted real bad.
It felt like, when he did it, that he wanted to consume her. She liked that. So she let him. Then she did it to him just to give him a charge. I mean, if you want me to point it out I will. That’s the spot they were in. But after a while he wanted more. You know how men are. Enough is never enough.
They decided to go to a dance near Santa Monica Pier. It was Halloween night so they dressed up. They dressed as a vampire couple. He had on a tuxedo and cape; his hair slicked back straight just like Bella Lougosi.
He couldn’t believe what he saw. Makeup had turned her skin from dark tan to white. Sparkles in her powder made her skin twinkle like stars. She had a long black wig. She wore a red cape over a revealing gown. It turned him on. With her blood-red lipstick she was quite the tart. They stopped at a carnival nearby that had a funhouse.
The room of mirrors was where she fell apart. She saw herself too tall or too short, her face distorted. She didn’t like what she saw.
“I can’t stand it,” she sobbed, “seeing my face all wiggly.”
He suggested eating cotton candy and decided they go out on the pier. They walked until they found a place where a light had burnt out. They stopped in the shadow. The moon was full but half-hidden by passing clouds. He slipped his arm around her waist. The moon, the water, the stillness were assaulting her senses like a romantic rocket attack. It affected her reason.
Then she made the mistake of her life. She said something to him he’d been dying to hear.
“O.K.” she said raising her chin up a bit, “just a nibble.”
He was going to do just that. Just a nibble. But the first drop was just too good. His canine teeth swelled. Their points grew sharp. He pressed a little harder. His eyes grew bloodshot.
“Just a little longer,” he said, still talking like a man.
At the next drop his teeth grew longer and harder and sharper. His eyes began to glow like flaming embers. He continued to suck.
“Just a little longer,” he said, “and I’ll pull out.”
Somehow that phrase seemed familiar.
But he couldn’t control himself. He wouldn’t stop. In the end he sucked her dry. As dry as your last bag of tea pressed hard against the cup. As thin as a bag of Capri Sun juice when you’ve sucked the bag flat with the straw.
Two drops of her blood fell on his new shoes. It didn’t bother him a bit. They were red Converse.
She weighed practically nothing now. So he picked her up and threw her over the rail. Just like that.
The bacteria started to work.
A week went by. He tried to forget her. He couldn’t. In all his thousands of years it had been exactly the same. Lust, then regret, lust, then regret. But it wasn’t the pain in his heart he went to the doctor for. It was the pain in his side.
“I got a pain in my side Doc.”
“Uh huh,” the Doc said.
He raised his eyelid and looked in his eyes. Doctors always do.
“And my stomach’s all messed up.”
“Uh huh,” nodded Doc and then said taking out a needle, “We need some blood work.”
He tied off his arm, rubbed it with alcohol and took some blood. Then he told him,
“Come back in a week.”
He did.
They entered the exam room together.
“Sit here,” Doc said, patting the exam table, “I’ve got bad news for you.”
He sat.
“It’s your liver that hurts. Hepatitis “C” is doing it. Explains your yellow eyeballs too. But that’s not the half of it. You’ve got Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Chlamydia too. Maybe a touch of Herpes. I gotta know your sexual contacts. Gotta report them. Who are the girls?”
He’d had no sex. But he had had her bodily fluids, her blood.
He gave her name and at once the Doc said,
“Oh her, the cheerleader right? She’s done the deed with the entire baseball team. Football too. The word around is she’s thinking of doing the track team. Gymnastic is probably next. I’ve treated most of ‘em myself. Real lively girl.”
Johnny cringed a bit at that one.
“‘Course we can cure Gonorrhea and Syphilis today with antibiotics. Not the rest though. They’re incurable.”
“But Doc, didn’t you read my chart? I’m a vampire. I’m going to live for eternity if I play my cards right.”
“Looks like you’re going to be hurting for a long time Sonny. ‘Course, there’s always a chance they’ll find a cure in the future. In the meantime take these, two a day of each.”
He pushed toward him nine bottles of pills. Johnny stuffed them in his pockets and left.
The bacteria were working hard.
He drove about in a haze. Near the pier he stopped at a bar to drown his sorrows. Two thousand years of lust followed by regret. To be truthful, he missed her. So now the pain. It would get worse. His non-ending future would be filled with lust, regret, and pain. He stayed there until they threw him out at two. Then he wandered around in a stupor until it was after four. By five he was back by the pier again where it all happened. He walked out to the spot.
The bacteria were working.
He looked over the edge and contemplated his fate. He didn’t like the sum of what he was coming up with. There under the cover of darkness he began to sob.
Down on the sea bottom the bacteria finally finished their work.
Now the skin was free of her skull. Being only dead skin and fat it peeled loose and floated upward to the surface. The sea distorted the maskface, moving it back and forth with the current. When it floated to the surface you could see the sparkles from her makeup shining in the moonlight.
“Two-thousand more years of lust and regret and pain?” he asked himself.
The sun would be up in a minute. He should go and seek shadows. But he loosened his collar instead. He took off his coat. He was going nowhere.
A wave coming to shore rolled under her mask and parted the lips like a kiss.
He unbuttoned his sleeves then unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt then clasped his hands together and put them on the rail. He began to cry. Two blood-stained tears rolled down his cheeks, then fell through the air.
The wave rolled back from the shore, opening the mouth of the shiny mask. Just then the two tears dropped into the water just at the corners. The current distorted it again, turning them up in a smile.
It was now six ten. The sun was up. He should have run for the dark. Now it was too late.
He was in the last shadow, the shadow of the burned out light pole. It was getting thinner and thinner. He looked down when the wave pushed the shiny mask into sight. There was no place to hide. It was six thirteen when he stepped onto the rail right above the neat pile of his clothes. He balanced for a second. Looking down he saw three bands of sunlight between himself and the sea.
“I’ve never touched the sun,” he thought, “Maybe it’s time that I did.”
Then he jumped.
I bet you think that the sunlight turned him to black or brown dust like in the movies. It didn’t. That’s not what happened. The dust of him wasn’t black or brown at all. He turned into fine gold and silver sparkles and drifted over the floating mask. When they finally hit the surface, the sparkles landed on the mask dusting it gently, like a girl at a high-school dance re-powdering her face.
And though the sea was dead calm, the face smiled again, completely on its own somehow, no longer distorted you understand, then turned away from the sun and surface to disappear into the shadows inky-black.
By
Steven Hunley
Johnny Alucard saw her on the first day of school at Hollywood High.
She was all blond and perfect. Perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect all-the-rest. She noticed him too. Pale skin,dark glasses, coal-black hair. This was his introduction to that school, having just transferred there from Transylvania Tech. So he was the New Kid. And it was worse than that. He was falling in love with a girl who wasn’t a vampire. She wasn’t even Gothic. She was a cheerleader, the head cheerleader.
She was one of those sort that were always voted “Miss Popular”. These kinds of girls are fringies as much as boy vampires. Their fringe is just on the opposite side of the cloth. They made an unlikely pair; he with his pale skin and coal-black hair, she all dark tan and blond, both of them fringies in their own private way.
He sat behind her in history. She sat only a row from him in math. They lived only a block away from each other so it was inevitable they’d hook up, no matter what anybody else said, which was alot.
At lunch her friends would group around her and say,
“Why is he so pale? Why doesn’t he get some sun?”
“Why is he so serious all the time?”
“Is that a Gothic look? Or does he think he’s a vampire or something?”
“You know how all vampires are,” they’d all say together, “they suck!” then laugh their heads off.
None of them believed in vampires including her. A vampire’s strength lies in the fact people don’t believe in them.
His parents were completely against his serious involvement with her. They studied together once a week. She’d tutor him. One day his mom said,
“Don’t get too close Johnny, she’s not one of us.”
She counseled, “one bite and it’s over, then who you gonna do your homework with?”
She was concerned about his grades as every mother should be. But to her the girl was just another piece of meat or another blood donor. She regarded her as you or I would regard a piece of sirloin. But she cared about her son immensely.
“Just be careful son,” she counseled, “If you slip up with her you’ll never pass history. You’ve got to think of your G.P.A.”
“Mom, how can you say that? Draining her of her life-blood is the last thing on my mind. How can you be so horrid? I’d never do it. Never.”
Right! He’ll never do it.
His Mom always make sure he had his special anti-sun cream which allowed him to expose his flesh safely where his clothes didn’t cover. They bought it at Vampires-R-Us. And she always packed him a lunch. Every morning when he left for school she’d say,
“Got your blood-plasma smoothie and chips Johnny?”
“Yeah Ma.”
“I packed your favorite, O positive. Got your sunglasses son?”
“Yeah Ma, right here on my face like usual.”
She was a good mom.
The couple hadn’t been going together too long. Just since her brake up with Biff Strong, the well built captain of the football team.
Johnny questioned the reason for their break-up.
”I’d never let him go too far with me,” she answered, “So we had to break up. I’m saving myself for marriage,” she said deluding herself.
“I understand completely,” he said, deluding himself even further. Even vampires can talk like mortal men.
In the meantime he would hold back. He would control himself. They’d hold hands, share an embrace, and occasionally there was the short goodnight kiss. At first. But then they got a little more involved. Vampirism is an animal thing so you couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t in control.
It all started with the hickies.
At first she didn’t mind so much. Then she started to like them. After a while she started wearing them on her slim neck like a badge, like they were a sign of membership in some exclusive club, The Break-up with Biff Club.
Funny, because even though well-built Biff was captain of the football team she had never let him get a first down. All her friends knew it. So she didn’t hide Johnny’s marks. She displayed them. He was a different customer. And besides, he was so good giving hickies, as if he’d been practicing or something.
“So it is true,” she thought to her smiling self, “vampires do suck!”
She loved doing it. It made her feel so damn close, like she was wanted real bad.
It felt like, when he did it, that he wanted to consume her. She liked that. So she let him. Then she did it to him just to give him a charge. I mean, if you want me to point it out I will. That’s the spot they were in. But after a while he wanted more. You know how men are. Enough is never enough.
They decided to go to a dance near Santa Monica Pier. It was Halloween night so they dressed up. They dressed as a vampire couple. He had on a tuxedo and cape; his hair slicked back straight just like Bella Lougosi.
He couldn’t believe what he saw. Makeup had turned her skin from dark tan to white. Sparkles in her powder made her skin twinkle like stars. She had a long black wig. She wore a red cape over a revealing gown. It turned him on. With her blood-red lipstick she was quite the tart. They stopped at a carnival nearby that had a funhouse.
The room of mirrors was where she fell apart. She saw herself too tall or too short, her face distorted. She didn’t like what she saw.
“I can’t stand it,” she sobbed, “seeing my face all wiggly.”
He suggested eating cotton candy and decided they go out on the pier. They walked until they found a place where a light had burnt out. They stopped in the shadow. The moon was full but half-hidden by passing clouds. He slipped his arm around her waist. The moon, the water, the stillness were assaulting her senses like a romantic rocket attack. It affected her reason.
Then she made the mistake of her life. She said something to him he’d been dying to hear.
“O.K.” she said raising her chin up a bit, “just a nibble.”
He was going to do just that. Just a nibble. But the first drop was just too good. His canine teeth swelled. Their points grew sharp. He pressed a little harder. His eyes grew bloodshot.
“Just a little longer,” he said, still talking like a man.
At the next drop his teeth grew longer and harder and sharper. His eyes began to glow like flaming embers. He continued to suck.
“Just a little longer,” he said, “and I’ll pull out.”
Somehow that phrase seemed familiar.
But he couldn’t control himself. He wouldn’t stop. In the end he sucked her dry. As dry as your last bag of tea pressed hard against the cup. As thin as a bag of Capri Sun juice when you’ve sucked the bag flat with the straw.
Two drops of her blood fell on his new shoes. It didn’t bother him a bit. They were red Converse.
She weighed practically nothing now. So he picked her up and threw her over the rail. Just like that.
The bacteria started to work.
A week went by. He tried to forget her. He couldn’t. In all his thousands of years it had been exactly the same. Lust, then regret, lust, then regret. But it wasn’t the pain in his heart he went to the doctor for. It was the pain in his side.
“I got a pain in my side Doc.”
“Uh huh,” the Doc said.
He raised his eyelid and looked in his eyes. Doctors always do.
“And my stomach’s all messed up.”
“Uh huh,” nodded Doc and then said taking out a needle, “We need some blood work.”
He tied off his arm, rubbed it with alcohol and took some blood. Then he told him,
“Come back in a week.”
He did.
They entered the exam room together.
“Sit here,” Doc said, patting the exam table, “I’ve got bad news for you.”
He sat.
“It’s your liver that hurts. Hepatitis “C” is doing it. Explains your yellow eyeballs too. But that’s not the half of it. You’ve got Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Chlamydia too. Maybe a touch of Herpes. I gotta know your sexual contacts. Gotta report them. Who are the girls?”
He’d had no sex. But he had had her bodily fluids, her blood.
He gave her name and at once the Doc said,
“Oh her, the cheerleader right? She’s done the deed with the entire baseball team. Football too. The word around is she’s thinking of doing the track team. Gymnastic is probably next. I’ve treated most of ‘em myself. Real lively girl.”
Johnny cringed a bit at that one.
“‘Course we can cure Gonorrhea and Syphilis today with antibiotics. Not the rest though. They’re incurable.”
“But Doc, didn’t you read my chart? I’m a vampire. I’m going to live for eternity if I play my cards right.”
“Looks like you’re going to be hurting for a long time Sonny. ‘Course, there’s always a chance they’ll find a cure in the future. In the meantime take these, two a day of each.”
He pushed toward him nine bottles of pills. Johnny stuffed them in his pockets and left.
The bacteria were working hard.
He drove about in a haze. Near the pier he stopped at a bar to drown his sorrows. Two thousand years of lust followed by regret. To be truthful, he missed her. So now the pain. It would get worse. His non-ending future would be filled with lust, regret, and pain. He stayed there until they threw him out at two. Then he wandered around in a stupor until it was after four. By five he was back by the pier again where it all happened. He walked out to the spot.
The bacteria were working.
He looked over the edge and contemplated his fate. He didn’t like the sum of what he was coming up with. There under the cover of darkness he began to sob.
Down on the sea bottom the bacteria finally finished their work.
Now the skin was free of her skull. Being only dead skin and fat it peeled loose and floated upward to the surface. The sea distorted the maskface, moving it back and forth with the current. When it floated to the surface you could see the sparkles from her makeup shining in the moonlight.
“Two-thousand more years of lust and regret and pain?” he asked himself.
The sun would be up in a minute. He should go and seek shadows. But he loosened his collar instead. He took off his coat. He was going nowhere.
A wave coming to shore rolled under her mask and parted the lips like a kiss.
He unbuttoned his sleeves then unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt then clasped his hands together and put them on the rail. He began to cry. Two blood-stained tears rolled down his cheeks, then fell through the air.
The wave rolled back from the shore, opening the mouth of the shiny mask. Just then the two tears dropped into the water just at the corners. The current distorted it again, turning them up in a smile.
It was now six ten. The sun was up. He should have run for the dark. Now it was too late.
He was in the last shadow, the shadow of the burned out light pole. It was getting thinner and thinner. He looked down when the wave pushed the shiny mask into sight. There was no place to hide. It was six thirteen when he stepped onto the rail right above the neat pile of his clothes. He balanced for a second. Looking down he saw three bands of sunlight between himself and the sea.
“I’ve never touched the sun,” he thought, “Maybe it’s time that I did.”
Then he jumped.
I bet you think that the sunlight turned him to black or brown dust like in the movies. It didn’t. That’s not what happened. The dust of him wasn’t black or brown at all. He turned into fine gold and silver sparkles and drifted over the floating mask. When they finally hit the surface, the sparkles landed on the mask dusting it gently, like a girl at a high-school dance re-powdering her face.
And though the sea was dead calm, the face smiled again, completely on its own somehow, no longer distorted you understand, then turned away from the sun and surface to disappear into the shadows inky-black.