Pages From a Vampire's Journal Page 2

  “Well I hear that a storm is coming. I saw it on the…”, she said.

  “Maybe not, they sometimes mess up. They have been wrong so many times now. Why just last month they were wrong four times. I counted. And don’t you hate how they say it “feels like” a certain temperature when it really isn’t? Anyway I’m really really cold. Sure you don’t want to come?”

  She looked back at her bedroom door, beyond which lie the dragon’s den, then back at Cedric, who resembled a dark-skinned James Dean. “What the heck. Coming.” she snapped.

  She thought she had seen Cedric at the science fair at school or at least someone like him. She remembered a weathered leather jacket, white sneakers, a necklace of sorts and a bulgy ring a size too big for his finger, with too many runes. She looked back at the birdcage and thought of Camilla slipping another kernel of kitty litter in their feed-box. She opened the cage and grabbed both and put them in her coat pockets, one on each side, then buttoned herself up. Father had told her not to do this, as they could not breathe, he claimed. Seven short trips to the store and one large trip to the zoo and they were fine, she thought. He was as efficient at overprotecting as she was.

  She didn’t want to brave the descent outside her window. She had tried that once and broken her ankle. There may as well have been metal spikes below for all the chance she had of playing circus acrobat.

  She opened her bedroom door a crack and heard faint arguing.

  Trixie started to walk softly down the long, winding staircase when she saw Boris belly up midway to the bottom floor. She crept along softly, thinking “Please don’t meow…please don’t meow”.

  He had the most stomach-churning meow too, which sounded like a cow dying of heat or a bull that charged a rodeo clown.

  She finally made it to the front door, but paused to hear what was being said in the kitchen.

  “I don’t care what the students say. Don’t give them any other options! Call up their friends and tell me you’re an interviewer for a high paying job. They will believe it and call you back, then you’ve got em by the balls.”

  Trixie realized Camilla was on the phone giving orders to one of her debt collector servants. She kept thinking of the nastiness of the Queen of Hearts in the land of Wonderland, who even in her kindest moment might as well belched flame at her underlings for all the subtlety she professed. She had lost all respect for Camilla and her tactics months ago when she had heard that she had gotten a student fired from a job for calling her employer and threatening to go to court over a wage garnishment for a defaulted student loan. She had called a movie set once and claimed to be a family member wanting to contact them about their father’s death, when in actuality they were lying and just wanting to track her down.

  Trixie darted out the door and didn’t look back. She didn’t care about tracks in the snow at this point.

  She walked over to where the stranger slumped about.

  “I really hate hard snow”, she said, walking up behind him.

  “Yeah me too, and look what it did to my new shoes!” Cedric exclaimed from behind her. My mother made these for me a few years ago when she was pregnant, and now their pretty much soggy garbage.” He stomped his foot in the muck.

  She glanced down at them, seeing the rims frayed and slushy mud seeping in.

  Trixie looked at him a little sideways, trying to remember him. Now that the snow wasn’t blowing in her face, she had a clear look at him. He had the eyes of Frankie Avalon, she thought…having a deep, dark Hawaiian like tan that no one in Montreal should have, and with James Dean’s hairstyle to boot. It was a bit disconcerting to look at him.

  “I think I saw you at the science fair. You had done some kind of weird physics experiment and…” she started.

  “Yeah and those old hens gave me a D! Unbelievable that I stayed up half the night on that project. What a waste of time! Nothing pleases them. Just nothing” he said rubbing his left eyebrow. “Did you see my project? What did you think? Tell me honestly.”

  Trixie bit the inside of her lip and said “I thought it was really, really complex. To be honest I didn’t understand half of it, but I found it interesting nonetheless. Little green and red wires wrapped around everything and that beaker of green juice. Yours was the one about quantum mechanics and time travel right? I didn’t even know that our school had a class on that”.

  “Well you’re right, they don’t, but my physics teacher Mr. Frick said our options were open, and we could do anything we wanted as long as it didn’t stray too far off-topic. They said my experiment was gunk! Less science and more like science-fiction. The gall!”

  Trixie chuckled at the way he said this, as if he were an old church lady who was displeased with some unscriptural element in a sermon from the preacher.

  Cedric looked down at her pockets, raising an eyebrow.

  “I see something moving in there. Are you giving your pet some fresh air out in the snow? I don’t think they can breathe well in there”

  “I have really deep pockets, and they like the warmness”

  In reality they liked her scent. The scent of Trixie’s hands were of potpourri and peaches she had for lunch.

  “I bet it smells like bird crap in there, haha!”

  Trixie flashed him a disapproving look.

  “For your info it smells like peaches. And they know how to respect my clothes. I trained em pretty well I think. ” she said half-sarcastically.

  Cedric twirled a lock of jet-black hair back behind his ears and scratched his sideburn.

  “so where do you want to eat? I don’t know about you but I am dying for something with some meat in it. There is a place where we can snag a burger up on Clover Street. How about we go there?”

  “I thought you wanted to get a smoothie?” she remarked

  “No, I just used that to get you out of the house, ha. Every girl I have met loved smoothies!”

  “You’re a brutally honest one aren’t you. Well anyway I wouldn’t say I love them necessarily. But I am not really that hungry come to think of it. How about you eat and I’ll just sit.

  “Ok, easy enough, though you should really eat something…anything. You look a little pale. Put some color in your cheeks so you don’t blend in with all the snow. And no I didn’t mean eat the birds.

  Trixie laughed.

  “I don’t think I want to look like Ms. Santa Claus” she said.

  “Too skinny. And I don’t think my finches would taste very good. You just might get sick from kitty litter too.”

  Cedric raised an eyebrow. “Kitty litter?”

  “I suspect my stepmom of putting some in their cage. She hates the very air they breathe. Almost as much as I hate her. Well, maybe not hate. That is a strong word. There’s a word for how I feel but I don’t know what it is. My dad always defends me when she attacks but he isn’t around at the moment”

  “Maybe you need a lucky charm…here have a look at one of mine”

  Cedric reached beneath his black leather jacket and into his shirt, pulling out a dyed green rabbit’s foot tethered to a silver necklace.

  “Like this one, see? Every time I have forgotten to wear this, something really nasty happened to me that very day, no joke.”

  “How nasty?”

  “Well nasty enough that I ended up in the hospital with stitches across my forehead! I was walking home and decided to take a shortcut through some suburb and a couple of kids…actually more than a couple, all younger than me, were hurling rocks at each other from huge piles of dirt. I tried to run under the zone of fire and caught one in the head. Bam! Kid ran off but my whole forehead was red, red and RED! Wasn’t wearing the rabbit’s foot that day”. He sighed and looked down, scratching the hair behind his neck.

  Trixie raised her eyebrows at him and asked, “…and the other days you forgot to wear it?”

  “Almost hit an orange Maine coon with my dad’s motorcycle when I took it out for a spin. I think I nicked its tail. Was taking a curve a wee
bit too fast and this enormously fat cat with one eye came out of nowhere. Then another time I…”

  “How do you know it had one eye?”

  “Because I stopped to see if it was alright. Was backed into a corner and looked scared to bits so I just left it be. I was pretty mad too but it just made this squinchy face like this, see?”

  He squished his face together trying to look as hammy as possible.

  “See, kinda like this…like real hammy. You know… a hamster”.

  Trixie shook her head and sighed.

  “I think if you were a hammy, you’d have been digested by him by now.” She laughed.

  Cedric reached into his back pocket, pulling out a card: seven of diamonds.

  “This also brings me luck too. I also have a lucky 1907 penny but I can’t seem get it out of my dad’s motorcycle gas tank. I dropped it in there by accident and now it rattles when the gas is low”

  “That’s probably a good thing” Trixie smiled.

  “ and I think they stack too! Isn’t that cool!”

  “Of course pennies stack”

  “I mean that the power of lady luck stacks. The more lucky charms you have, the luck quotient stacks on top of one another, like layers to an onion that build the strength of the smell, you know?”

  “Luck quotient?! That’s ridiculous! Seriously!”

  “No really! Hey I used to mock and laugh all the time at things like that. Not anymore I don’t. Some close calls but I have stayed out of trouble since bringin em along! You know what Trixie, sometimes you just gotta belieeeeve!” he said, tapping his sideburn.

  He sounded like an evangelist tapping his good book in some circus tent, fleecing his flock.

  Cedric glanced down at her coat pocket and scratched his sideburn again.

  “Hmm, do you think your finches are…lucky?”

  She tried to mimic the hum of his hmm.

  “Hmmmm, you know, I haven’t really given it a lot of thought. Maybe they are, and maybe that is why Camilla hates them so much. Maybe they have what she doesn’t”.

  “You know, lucky charms are really hard to destroy. They keep coming back to the one their fated to be with, even for a short time. That’s what I was told.”

  “Yeah maybe. I hadn’t heard that one before”. She gave a slight grin.

  She was starting to think this guy had more than one loose marble rolling around upstairs. However there was an aroma of innocence to his laugh, like a jester humoring royalty. He was incapable of actually hurting anyone or jabbing jokes too frivolously, like he set his own boundaries and obeyed them like a priest did his weekly confessors.

  They walked along towards the burger joint he claimed was up the street. As it turned out, this joint was stacked with a 1950s motif.

  CHAPTER 3: FLIPPER

  Journal Entry 46: “My goodness what I have been missing! My old teacher never told me the lifeblood of a child was so sweet! And practically free for the taking! I staked out this

  nice little conservative town named Smithville and watched the kids go from house to house collecting candy, and a good two thirds of them were alone. Unbelievable! I grabbed one and brought him home. Told him I was a messenger from the hospital and that his mom was injured in some accident. He lapped it up quicker than a cat does cream. No resistance at all! I loved the scent of his hair. Peach with a trace of vanilla. His blood was divine. Maybe I will pick a redhead next”

  They walked into the diner thinking the place would be packed to the gills with greasy teenagers, but it turned out everyone was at home (or other warm, moist places) from the cold weather marching into town. No one was here except the hairy short order cook and his blond seven year old in the corner. Checkering the wall were “signed” portraits of Sinatra, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis jr. and John Wayne, with cobwebbed corners spun in haste for any flies daring enough to seek shelter from the punishing cold. In the far corner the kid bounced the pinball flippers back and forth on the Elvis machine. No silver ball was present: the flippers only pushing pockets of air within the archaic machine, ricocheting dust between the bulbs. In one quarter slot, a lone nickel stuck within the red glow of the coin mechanism; a lame attempt at getting a free one by the perpetually bored kid. A decrepit jukebox sat in the opposite corner.

  Cedric sat down first, facing the exit which repelled a flurry of snowflakes.

  “I always like to see who is coming in so I can see if I need to say hi to someone right away” he grinned.

  “I am actually the opposite. I hate facing people when I eat, unless I know them personally. It’s awkward, especially if I am not doing anything else. I like to leave the “saying hi” part optional, as in leave it to the other party to do it first. I’m not really forward like that.”

  “I’ll bet you are just the life of any party you go to, ha! So what do you do if you see em first but don’t really want to say hi, like an ex-boyfriend? Do you pretend you didn’t see em or skedaddle out the back?” he asked.

  “Oh well in that case I am not sure…never had an ex-anything see me accidentally in a public place like this…at least not that I know of.”

  “Maybe they all pretended they didn’t see you?” he chuckled

  Trixie blinked twice at him.

  Cedric squinted at her, stroked his peach fuzzed chin and remarked “Two blinks mean yes, no?

  Trixie blinked once.

  “Uh, never mind…” he said, stretching his hands behind his head.

  “So where do you work?” he asked.

  “I was working at a call center. My stepmom had gotten me the job. I quit recently though. I just despised calling people up and demanding payments. I walked out one day at lunch and never went back. It’s my favorite way to quit a job that tries to hurt people. I call it “going Casper”.

  “Yeah I have heard those places are a little like meat factories, just taking in desperate souls and then grinding them back out in worse shape than when they came in”, he said.

  Trixie studied his face for a moment and asked, “Has anyone ever said to you that you look a little like…”

  “James Dean?” he smirked.

  “Yeah…a little” she said. She got the feeling he didn’t like that comparison, like a grandma at a family reunion pinching his cheek and telling him he looked just like his Uncle Leo. That is, before Uncle Leo removed himself from the gene pool with an amazing stupidity on the fourth of July…igniting a bottle rocket from his back side, with the rocket pointing the wrong way. Hilarity sometimes turned tragically unhip.

  Cedric pulled out a Chesterfield cig from his shirt pocket and lit it up. Taking a drag, he bellowed out in his best James Dean voice,

  “You do look pretty, Miss Leslie, near good enough to eat!”

  Trixie grinned at him and asked “What movie is that from?”

  “Giant, I think?” he remarked.

  Cedric coughed, and felt his body kick back the smoke he improperly inhaled.

  He coughed again.

  “Shit!” he said in between coughs.

  The lit cigarette then tumbled like a twirling baton down between his legs, falling into the crevice of his slightly unzipped jeans.

  Cedric grabbed the nearest thing he could and poured it between his legs: a hot pepper container that had not been screwed on completely, sending hot spices sprinkling into his crotch.

  Trixie laughed.

  “I’ll be back in a… *cough*… sec…” he said, coughing out more smoke.

  Cedric ran to the back restroom.

  The waitress walked over and saw the red peppers littering the booth.

  She shook her head, saying “Those stupid kids were in here again I guess playing their pranks on the pepper jars. Sorry I will get that cleaned up for you”.

  Trixie rubbed her eyes and thought, somewhere in the universe of video games and virtual landscapes, a character named Cedric roamed a coded countryside of sentient mushrooms and jump-able clouds. A perfect fit.

  A few minutes later, C
edric slid back into the booth anew.

  “Sorry about that” he said.

  “Not as sorry as your little man is”.

  He shot her a look of embarrassment.

  “My lil man is more resilient than you give him credit for”, he shot back.

  Cedric glanced at his watch and said, “Hey I’m gonna see if there is any decent music to be had in this joint. What kind of tunes are you into?”

  She sighed and thought hard.

  “Just pick something light” she said.

  Trixie watched him stroll over to the jukebox twenty feet away in that subtle strut he did, which was impossible to notice walking beside him but was quite clear from a few paces. He was clearly born in the wrong decade. Unfortunately it happened to the most unexpected people, Trixie thought. Males meant to be Marine snipers rejected for their color-blindness. Promising swimmers with asthma tossed out by Navy SEAL instructors. Near-sighted medical students propelled into pediatrics instead of neurosurgery. It happened to the best of ‘em, she thought, and through no fault of their own. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be so unexpected. Mother Nature and her gambling habit with gene pools was an unmerciful lark, but an all-seeing lark; perhaps saving them from a disabling fate that is better traversed by stronger souls. Cedric seemed something of a genetic anomaly: a soul meant for a time of coats laid-down-in-mud for umbrella-clad ladies and at the same time, a decade of 1950s motorcycles, switchblades, anti-commies and bobby socks. And yet here he was, lost in time.

  Cedric held his right hand to steady the jukebox which rocked a bit over the loss of one slightly misaligned wheel as if it would keel over without his assistance. He looked brazen and free standing there, like a knight against his horse. Strolling down the list of 50s artists with his ringed index finger, he mumbled along:

  “Letsss seeeee…Elvis, no. The Four Tops…hell no. Sinatra, meh, harrumph. Ah, this sounds interesting. He pushed a white button labeled “Beatles: Norwegian Wood”, clearly the wrong decade for this diner.