Just months before I start medical school in Boston, I decide to let loose for one night. A dark club, a loud band, strong drinks--and the attention of a dangerous-looking man who says he's in the city for only a week.
I know exactly what he is: a...
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FEBRUARY 21, 1986/Boston, Massachusetts
This singer's voice is laced with a romantic huskiness that reverberates through my veins, tugging at some invisible, needy part of me. It makes me want to do wicked things, to chuck my carefully constructed life into the garbage.
Or maybe that's just the acute awareness of being inches away from a man with the most intense blue eyes I've ever seen. It's a feeling of desire, a sharp, visceral attraction. What I want is to turn and kiss him, to do something totally out of character for me. To follow my desire for once.
But I won't. I'm way too timid, especially with guys I'm interested in. Still, the way he defended me against those skinhead jerks was so freaking hot. And I did promise to buy the guy a beer. That was bold, at least for me.
I glance around at the crowd, hoping to see Kerri pushing through with our beers. My eyes alight on a tall woman with black, spiky hair who's standing next to the stage. Oh, there's Kerri. She's worshiping the lead singer, swaying without a care in the world, screaming her head off. Wait, is she blowing kisses at the singer? Yes, she is. I laugh out loud while watching her.
Since Kerri doesn't have our drinks in her hands—those are in the air, extended toward the singer—I figure she hasn't even gone to the bar yet. She's too enamored with that singer, and I know for a fact that she's been hoping to meet, and fuck, him.
There's that desire thing again.
It comes easy to Kerri. Everything does. As a hundred-and fiftysomething-year-old vampire, she's had plenty of practice. She's perfected everything on her own, from enrolling in college to getting a job at a blood bank so she always has a fresh supply of food, to seducing men to sate her sexual desires. She's independent to her core, and I worship her.
Me? I haven't mastered shit. Even though I've been a straight-A student ever since I started kindergarten, I still feel like I'm not living up to my full potential. Kerri chalks this up to my age and type-A behavior, but I know better.
It's because I've been surrounded by uniquely accomplished and incredibly brilliant people my entire life.
Take my parents, for example.
They were once vampires. Dad was born in Romania and was turned hundreds of years ago by Dracula himself. Mom is younger, only about a hundred years old, and from New York. She became a vampire when she was bitten by a jazz singer at the age of twenty-four.
She and dad met in the city at some poetry reading in the early sixties; back then, she was attending school to become a psychotherapist and dad was a celebrated English professor. Once they got together, they immediately knew they were soul mates—and promptly had my brother, and then me.
A stupid decision, in my opinion. In our particular vampire clan, once soul mates give birth to a child, they become mortal. They age like any other human, and they die.
