So I Might Be a Vampire - Book 1 (Original Version)

43: To Be Human

I went to see Jaime.

Or at least I intended to, but I wussed out at the last minute. There is something magical to a restraining order that inspires that kind of wussing out. So I didn't walk into her store and tell her the news that our mutual friend Louise, the one who had brought us together, was dead

Instead, I stood in the alley across from her store and tried to cry for Louise and all that we had lost. As easy as the tears had come earlier, they were decidedly less forthcoming at that moment, so I stood there, stalking my ex-girlfriend and was completely unable to cry for my friend. The alley had the perfect combination of shadows and the occasional homeless person that allowed me to stand there long enough to catch a glimpse of her through the window without ever being seen.

After a while, feeling like a complete fraud because I couldn't cry for my friend, I stumbled off to work.

***

I was still in a state of depression, especially after I realized that I didn't have any pictures of me and Louise. Sure she had a bunch of her pictures up on her social media accounts, so I had those to remember her by, but I didn't have any of the two of us together. In fact, I couldn't remember taking any pictures of the two of us. I was always the one behind the camera, and now nothing was all I had to show for it.

By the time, Sammy showed up I had gotten to thinking about how I was going to tell my friends that Louise was dead, in fact, what I was going to tell them about her death. This had quickly led to the fact that I couldn't actually tell anyone that Louise was, in fact, dead, without telling them how I knew for sure, oh and by the way, she was a vampire and now I am one too. That would go down very well.

Maybe they would figure it out after a while when she failed to update her Facebook page. The last time had been the night she had met me in the bar and then nothing after that. Just the picture of her and her eternally sunny smile on her timeline banner. The picture had been taken at night in a bar somewhere.

In fact, all of her pictures had been taken at night.

There are some points when you ask yourself exactly how well you know your friends. How much do you really, really know about them, and how much of it is truth? How much do they actually want you to know, and how much can you know before you begin to judge someone? In all of my memories of Louise, I now realized that I had never once met her during the day. All of our encounters had been after dark, but that was just the nature of the friendship, and I hadn't thought twice about it. She was just one of those friends that always seemed to show up in dark places. Even when I had crashed on her couch for a couple of weeks when I was trying to find a new place, we had never gone outside during the day and the curtains had always kept the place dark, which was fine by me.

Now I wondered exactly how long she had been a vampire.

So that was what was on my mind when Sammy showed up, steam practically coming off of her.

"I hate men!"

"I'm a man."

"Well, I hate you too, but that's different. That's a personal hatred. This is more general and a lot more vindictive."

"Lucky me."

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Somebody died or something?"

"Actually yes."

"So remind me to care in about twenty minutes."

Anger. Genuine anger and hurt. How well do you know your friends, and if you knew them well enough, would you actually care?