Teeth Page 6

  As a senior in Riverside High School, she at least knew of most of the students in her class and the juniors directly below her. The sophomores and freshmen were less of a concern, and even less of a threat. Sitting around her was a sea of faces she didn’t recognize, making most of them underclassmen. The only exceptions were a football player who was too dumb to be bothered with, and Dillon Hubbard. She’d gone to school with him for as long as she could remember, but they’d never talked or become friends. Brenna had been mean to him in kindergarten, and Madison vaguely recalled Amber having a crush on him back in seventh grade—otherwise, he didn’t register on her list of worries.

  She turned back to the computer and typed her first search into the open space at the top of Google: VAMPIRE CURE.

  The website options on the list, or at least the first three pages worth of the 1.3 million results, were no help. They all either said there was no such thing, or referenced some video game she’d never heard of, making her wonder if it was on the list of discontinued items due to the anti-lamian-hate laws.

  Trying a different tactic she typed TURNING BACK INTO A HUMAN, took a deep breath and hit enter. A nanosecond later, the search engine returned enough results all saying the same basic thing. It was enough to make her feel like an idiot for even questioning it, and she didn’t click any of them.

  I’m not human.

  The phrase ran through her head again and this time her conscious mind grabbed it and held it down. It was time to accept it and figure out what it meant.

  WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU FIND OUT YOU’RE A VAMPIRE

  The first result—not surprisingly and she scolded herself for knowing better—was an oversized box defining VAMPIRE as a contemptuous term for those of lamian decent. She changed the word to LAMIAN and hit enter. The results were much better.

  Apparently there was a huge library of information and help right in town. Right here. Screw Brenna and her circle of snitches and would-be friends. The group was part of the Lamian Council and had been around for centuries. They’d know everything she could possibly want to ask. And they provided a weekly meeting.

  I can visit under the guise of a school project, so Brenna wouldn’t know the truth.

  And they had a website.

  Perfect, Madison thought as she clicked the link to take her there.

  She scanned the homepage, skimmed through the FAQ, and then went digging with the internal search engine for reports, articles and what looked like blogs written by lamians over the years. First up: appetite suppressants. Madison smiled as she realized she wouldn’t have to kill people to feed. She could just eat rare and raw meat, and take pills if necessary. There was a list of local Planned Parenthood clinics and it took a moment for Madison to realize why.

  Oh, of course.

  The news was constantly covering the big enzyme companies and their continued fight against the FDA to prevent a nonprescription, over-the-counter version of the necessary lamian supplements. As such, a number of income-based clinics picked up the slack by offering health checks and enzyme pills to the uninsured, malnourished, or hiding the truth from their parents.

  I’m not alone.

  Relief washed over Madison and she felt her eyes warm and threaten to tear up. She glanced up and saw Dillon turned backward in his chair, watching her. His arms were crossed and he rested his chin on them, quite comfortable-looking, and made Madison wonder how long he’d been watching her. And why.

  He tilted his head ever so slightly in what could have been a gesture of empathy and smiled a thin, almost pained grin. She immediately looked down, blocked Dillon out, and continued digging.

  Further into the website’s archives, Madison found the true science behind her condition. The actual medical information they didn’t seem to share or offer or teach in school. In school they taught some basic history and rough biology, but mostly it was about tolerance. The Department of Education hadn’t gotten around to teaching nonhuman realities any more than it concentrated on the truthful histories of African Americans. It took a website from an organization older than the government to tell her the truth. She was not a monster. This was not a disease. Of course, that also meant it was not curable. It was a condition though, much like diabetes, and could be treated. Monitored. Controlled.

  There were drugs she could take if she qualified at the clinic. But there were also lamian treats, meats and liquids she could eat while still appearing to eat the foods her mother made. And no one would know.

  She jotted the name and address of the lamian group into the Notes app on her phone, Lamplight Foundation, and switched the search to job hunting. She was going to need to find a part-time job to pay for the things she was going to require to pull this off.

  She glanced up and saw Dillon roll his eyes and turned back around in his chair, before raising his hand and asking to be excused to the bathroom.

  — NINE —

  Henry worked quietly as he cleaned the last stall in the second-floor bathroom of the Riverside High School. Several boys came and went—one obviously sneaking a quick drag from a cigarette in the stall next to him, only half of them bothering to wash their hands, and most of them didn’t notice him. He preferred it that way. Preferred to be invisible.

  Now I do, he thought.

  He had hated it back when he was in school. When he was part of the boys flowing in and out of the bathroom and down the halls. He had hated the way they treated him, or rather, mistreated him in general. He’d hated how the cool kids, the jocks, the nerds, any cliché you could label—girls and boys alike—either ignored him with gleeful cruelty, or picked on him mercilessly and treated him as their own personal punching bag. There was no happy medium.

  He only had a couple friends back then. They were a tight group and often referred to as The Losers by those outside the circle, but he didn’t care. As long as they had each other they could make it through high school. They could survive their formative years.

  But then he watched, as one after another sprouted new teeth. They were full of excitement and anxiety, changing, becoming something he wasn’t. And leaving him behind. He watched them grow distant, choosing the perils and prejudices of the lamian label, rather than fighting to keep their friendships with him. He willed his own teeth to come loose. To let him be one of them. To let him follow his friends into a new future. To let him belong.

  He’d always been awkward, but now he wasn’t even on the same level as his equally awkward friends. He tried to pretend his teeth were loose. He wiggled them until he accidentally pulled one free—only to have his mother rush him to the dentist and fix it. She’d unknowingly returned him to the state of nothingness he’d been abandoned in. And his friends, The Losers, had joined the rest of the school in picking on him.

  They singled him out.

  They pushed him away.

  And he’d had no recourse but to drop out halfway through his junior year.

  He stopped going, as simple as that, and his mother never knew. For over a year he lied to her. He made sure to check the mail in case of truancy notices and called the school to give them a new phone number so they wouldn’t call the house. The moment he turned seventeen and could do so without her signature, he signed the papers to officially drop out of school. But he continued to pretend, for her benefit. He faked going to school every single day, only to wander down to the seedier side of town and watch the lamian lowlifes, still wishing he could be one of them. He even pretended to have the stomach flu on graduation day so his mother wouldn’t go and know anything was wrong.

  Of course, with no GED and no diploma, he was doomed to a menial job. What better place to watch what you want to be than to work where they blossom as their gene awakens? After working fast food for a year, he applied for an entry-level position and became janitor at the very school he ran away from. Over the course of five years, he’d co
me to discount most humans as subpar, and thrilled as he watched new lamians come into their teeth, their knowledge, and their heritage. He imagined if they’d have stayed hidden, they were born into families who accepted it, expected it, and there was no angst at the possibility. Humans made it dirty and wrong. Humans turned nature into a social status.

  Henry felt like he was part of the forgotten, hidden culture. He was so frequently the one in the background as they found out. When they either cried or rejoiced in the privacy of the school bathrooms. Alone in pain and worry, or with friends in excitement. He’d often stand and continually wipe the same sink during the break between classes when they all came and went with a rushed fervor. He was unimportant to their lives and he could watch them as a group or individually, peripherally or even straight on, without them noticing.

  But today was different. Today he preferred the quiet time during class when only a couple would come to interrupt his privacy, his thoughts. He was too excited to care about them today.

  Commotion in the hall alerted him a moment before the door slammed opened and two boys came tumbling into the bathroom.

  “Clean yourself up, Loser, before someone sees you and I get in trouble.” The bigger kid in the football jersey snarled at the shorter boy who was busy bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Neither seemed to notice Henry in the stall, even with the door open and the cleaning cart against the back wall.

  “If I get in trouble, you get in trouble. You’ll get it again. Worse this time. So don’t bother tattling like a little bitch.” The bully yanked the door open without waiting for a response and disappeared into the hallway.

  The bleeding boy lurched toward the sink and inspected his split lip in the mirror.

  Henry was sure he was in the reflection, but the boy only seemed to care about the damage he’d taken.

  The boy sniffled but held back the tears. He spit blood into the sink and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He yanked a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped both his face and hand before crumpling it up and tossing it at the can. He missed and ignored it, still not noticing Henry standing there. He exhaled in frustration through his nose and left the bathroom.

  Henry ran his tongue over his eyetooth and sighed as the door closed and the room was quiet again. His again.

  He returned to the mirror and curled his lip up, exposing his perfectly healthy human teeth. He’d given up wiggling them years ago. He touched the bottom of the tooth. Useless, he thought. They’re not even sharp.

  Yet.

  He huffed, as he grabbed a rag to wipe the bloodied spittle from the freshly cleaned sink, annoyed the boy had ruined his work. But he smiled when he looked down. Several perfect blood drops sat against the otherwise clean porcelain in the sink. Not spit, but drops. Pure, perfect drops of blood.

  He wiped his fingertips through them and raised his hand to inspect the blood.

  Tomorrow was the big day. The day he’d finally get his teeth. The day he’d finally be one of them.

  He licked the blood from his fingers and smiled at himself in the mirror.

  — TEN —

  Dillon rubbed his fingers across the picture for what was easily the hundredth time since he’d found it Sunday afternoon. His mom—nothing if not a woman of habit—had gone to church and then to Ruby’s with the girls, giving him several hours alone in the house. He took the opportunity to go through everything.

  His mom had been acting strange lately. Stranger than normal. Almost mean, but then not. She’d scold him for something, then turn around and point out how much she loved him and all the things she did for him. Dillon couldn’t figure out her problem and was worried she was losing her mind like she often claimed her mother did. Until it dawned on him.

  His teeth.

  He figured she might make it through the rest of his senior year, but once he was out of high school and moved out of the house, he guessed she likely wouldn’t speak to him again. Ever. Her hatred for any and all fangs was not subtle or silent, and now he was sporting his own set.

  A part of him was hurt on such a deep level. His mother? The one person who had always been in his life was now trying to withdraw from it. But she’d hated the lamians long before he’d come along, so on a strange level, he almost understood her shunning him—as if he’d offended her or let her down by not taking after her.

  As if he could control it.

  For the first time since second grade—when he’d given up asking because she had slapped him hard enough to bruise his cheek—he started to wonder about his father. Who was he? Where was he?

  His mom had forbidden even the use of his name. No name, no images, no phone calls or visits. Over the years, everything about him faded, leaving Dillon no idea where to even begin.

  Until he rummaged his way through every last drawer, box, and forgotten envelope in the house on Sunday.

  At the bottom of a long, narrow box, tucked under her bed and filled with memorabilia of his childhood—grade school report cards, awards for attendance, old baby shoes, a tiny outfit that looked too small even for a newborn—he found the Polaroid. It had been stuck to the backside of the warped cardboard placard from his hospital nursery crib. Written in blue ink across the white strip at the bottom: Shawn and Dillon.

  Shawn.

  My dad’s name is Shawn.

  Shawn Hubbard, Dillon presumed, since he knew his parents had been married when he was born. Though in all his searching he never found his birth certificate and wondered where his mother hid it, in her attempt to protect him from the name typed across it.

  Shawn Hubbard. Dillon rolled the name across his tongue under his breath. It wasn’t an unusual name, but it also wasn’t overly common. Dillon had run into other Hubbards in the area, but had never been related to any of them.

  Or at least I don’t think so.

  And Shawn as a name feels, hmmm out of date, Dillon thought, unable to come up with anyone he knew who shared the name. Must be a Gen-X name, he reasoned, deciding his father should be easy enough to find among the right age group.

  Dillon ignored the late-day lesson of English class and covertly searched Google on the iPhone in his lap. Held below desk level, out of sight of the teacher’s rules and snooping classmates, he searched for his father on the Internet.

  It had taken him two days to decide if he really wanted to find him. But his mom continued to get weirder, always watching hate-filled rants on television. He needed to find his father. He needed an ally. He didn’t know where else to look, so he went online.

  He tried the White Pages first, but he didn’t find a single public listing for the name in the state. Cellphones were usually unlisted and almost no one had landlines anymore. The White Pages were as out of date as dial-up. He couldn’t even begin to fathom finding him if he’d left the state, so he presumed he was still nearby and moved on to social media.

  Finally remembering his old password, he logged onto Facebook, believing it would be the most logical and easiest—since the older generations still used the site. But of the three he found, none were local. And none had the crazy jet-black hair he and both his parents shared. He tried Twitter, Instagram, and on a whim, hoping maybe his father was in touch with his generation, he searched Tumblr and Snapchat. Nothing. About to give up, he did a general search for the name and Riverside, and he was rewarded with a couple hits.

  The first was for a website called MySpace. The page was definitely his—the profile picture showed his father only a couple years older than he’d been in the picture Dillon found in his mom’s room. But the site was hard to navigate and didn’t look like it had been updated for several years. The photos consisted of food and books and nothing about the images or backgrounds were helpful to find where they’d been taken. He tried to dig around further, but he quickly grew frustrated with the archaic website navigation, a
nd he returned to the Google results.

  The next few were not his father—a blonde senator’s official page and a girl whose parents thought it clever to name their daughter a name Dillon only knew for boys. But as he scanned the preview text of the last search results on the page, his chest tightened and he hoped it wasn’t referring to his father either.

  He clicked the link for the obituary and his heart sank.

  What looked like a professional photo, but was more likely an ID picture for work, showed the same face as the Polaroid. The same jet-black hair. And Dillon’s nose.

  He’d found his father.

  The punch in the gut was selfish for several heartbeats. Then it turned to confusion.

  Dillon looked up at the whiteboard in front of the class but didn’t comprehend what the teacher was talking about. His mind was a blanket of muddy water drowning out a storm of buzzing insects. No complete thoughts formed. Random emotions rose but quickly receded as unwarranted or unrealistic.

  How can I mourn someone I don’t know anything about?

  A mother who didn’t want him. A father who couldn’t rescue him. He was no longer just the quiet, shy boy who’d always made good grades but never really made friends. He wasn’t just a loner. He was truly alone. He double-tapped the top of the window to return to the search bar and changed his criteria, looking up the state’s emancipation laws and procedures.

  — ELEVEN —

  Detective Connor Murphy drank the last of the cold coffee in his prized but stained FBI mug, purchased while on a tour at Quantico several years ago. He cocked his head at the file in front of him and sighed. He had read the details, several times. He had talked to the coroner, Rogers, and gone back over the house.

  Something is wrong.

  It wasn’t the overview—an easily forgettable citizen bled dry through puncture wounds in his neck. It wasn’t the aftermath—shredded by the neighborhood’s stray animals and rodents. It was the lack of anger. Lack of display. Lack of purpose. As if it were done because that’s what happens, like food being slaughtered for the dinner table without a second thought. Without emotion.