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“Happy birthday, Em.”
She crinkled the rudimentary wrapping paper off the present and opened the box. It was a knife—a dagger, to be exact; not that Em would ever hurt a fly with it. The dagger was a replica of Willow’s dagger from her favorite show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
“Oh my God.” Em’s deep blue eyes lit up, her trademark smile beaming in the orange light. A gust of wind blew her jagged, side-swept fringe out of place, which she quickly pushed back over her eye. “I can’t believe you got this for me.” She practically tackled me with all the force her small frame could muster. “You’re the best.”
We rolled around on the grass, embracing each other. We were sitting on the Hill, where we always went to hang out or make out. The air smelled of pine and clouds. I carved the moment into my brain like a sculptor and a masterpiece.
“You’re welcome,” I grinned, giving her a peck on the cheek. “So…did you have a good birthday?”
“Now I definitely have,” she laughed. “Definitely beats the last one.”
As it was getting late, we decided to take a shortcut through Saint Anthony Cemetery to get home. The idea of just walking around a cemetery was not strange to us; if anything, we actually found it fun. We get called a lot of things for the things we like and the way that we dress, many of them derogatory in nature, but I don’t care. I think graves and dead shit are cool.
It was another thing to walk around a cemetery late at night.
The area sat on a gentle, grassy slope, with lots of large trees planted around. The stale scent of incense and wet ground tingled in my nose. The trees were so expansive that they blocked out any moonlight that could leak through. I opened my cell phone and used the light of the screen to see in front of me.
I could just barely make out Em’s face when she said, “Race ya!”
“Wait–wh-” I stutter-laughed. “Em, wait! I can’t fucking see!”
“C’mon!” she giggled. Her voice sounded really distant now. I tried to run and catch up with her, but, despite my long-ass legs, I’m not exactly an athlete. I probably spend more time reading books and surfing the web than I do on my feet.
Just as I was huffing and puffing from jogging twenty feet, the most flesh-crawling, God-fearing, core-shaking shriek I had ever heard in my life echoed out from the area ahead of me.
“EM!” I screamed.
Despite myself, I ran and ran in her direction, tripping occasionally and desperately trying to dodge headstones and trees. Once I got to where I thought was far enough, there was nothing there.
“Em!” I called out. “Em, where are you?”
I tried her cell, but there was no service. I wandered around, calling out to her, but there was no one there.
My first instinct should have been to contact the police or local authorities or whatever, but here’s the thing: I don’t exactly trust them. I heard from a friend that they completely ignored a missing person’s report of a nearby Hispanic girl because her family didn’t speak English. Not to mention how all the cops around town behave like petty high schoolers—especially towards kids like us. Besides, she hadn’t even been missing for 24 hours yet, so there was probably nothing they could do. They wouldn’t care anyways.
I sat for a while on a nearby bus stop bench, as if doing that would make her suddenly appear. Thoughts flooded my mind. Was she hurt? Kidnapped? Dead? If that was the case, I thought, I may as well be too.
Defeated and hopeless, I went home.
—————
In the morning, I called her home phone to ask her stepdad if she had come home last night. He said, “I don’t fucking know”, but that she probably did at some point, because “all the fucking milk is gone, and it wasn’t when I last checked”. I asked him to let me know if she comes home, and he promptly hung up.
With nothing left to do, I took my daily bike route to school. Despite how greasy and sweaty it makes my bangs, I wore my helmet, because I’m anything but a reckless moron.
As I coasted down the gentle incline, I saw a large, flat lump of red on the ground in the distance. I thought it was probably someone’s sweater that they had thrown out the window or something, but as I got closer, I saw it: a poor fawn, gutted to the extreme, flies swarming it. Coyotes , I thought, and brushed it off.
When I arrived at school, I immediately felt her absence, a gaping hole in my reality. We may be dating, but she’s been my best friend for years. We have a small friend group of fellow misfits, but they’re not always around, and a lot of them go behind the Gymnasium to smoke. Em hates the smell of smoke. It reminds her of her stepdad.
Somehow, just by existing, I got myself into trouble.
“Where you going, faggot?”
I tried to keep walking, but they caught up to me when I was alone in the hall. Brandon Lee and his two friends stalked toward me, cornering me in a space between a locker and a wall. Brandon grabbed my wrists and pressed me up against the wall as his friends giggled along.
“What do you want?” I said in a smaller voice than I’d like to admit. They all laughed, as if just seeing me was the funniest joke they’ve ever heard.
One of them, a girl named Becky, smirked. “Why don’t you throw yourself off the nearest bridge?” she said with a smile. “Maybe then you’ll actually do us all a favor.”
I thrashed against Brandon’s hold, but it was no use. I looked around for help, but the halls were empty. God, I wish Em was here.
Brandon flung me into a locker. My head hit the cold, solid metal with a loud clang . More laughter. He stepped forward, towering over my aching body.
“If I see you here again,” he said, “I’ll bash your fucking head in.”
He kicked the locker beside me to make me jump, just for good measure. His friends laughed at my flinch of terror. At last, they walked away, leaving me on the floor, tears threatening to break the surface.
But, just as I was about to choke back a sob, I saw a pair of bright pink super-high-top sneakers walking towards me. Still curled up on the floor, I slowly looked up.
“Hi, AJ.” Em smiled.
“Em!” My face lit up. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She helped me up, explaining that she “got spooked” by what she thought was a ghost in the cemetery, gripping her throat. I called bullshit, but she seemed serious. She said she ran as far as she could, and eventually went home. And her cell phone died. Alright. Good enough for me.
Things carried on as normal, except she didn’t hum any Paramore songs like she always did on our way to the Hill after school. In fact, the Hill seemed almost alien to her, even though we had been there, like, hundreds of times. She didn’t quite fit in the environment the way she did yesterday.
When I got home, I checked her MySpace and LiveJournal for any updates or clues as to what was going on with her. Was she being influenced by some creep-o online? Was she suicidal? She would probably tell me if she was. Or maybe she wouldn’t—that’s kind of the point of suicide. Just the mere thought of it dug a gaping hole into my gut, soon to swallow me whole and kill me.
The next day, the local news reported that Brandon Lee had been found dead in the forest.
I didn’t know what to think. Logically, this was good for me, since he literally threatened to kill me if he saw me walk the halls again. Karma and all that. But I couldn’t think that. His family and friends were heartbroken. People dying wasn’t good for anyone. Right?
Our school held an assembly in the gymnasium with a memorial service for him, which the whole school had to attend, and where Becky and Lance were, of course, invited to speak. They seemed genuinely crushed by his loss, but I had a hard time feeling for them knowing the kind of people that they were. I knew I wasn’t the only one. Most kids knew how cruel Brandon was, but we were still practically forced to mourn him. Many of our friends either squatted in the bathrooms or just flat-out ditched so they didn’t have to go. Em and I couldn’t get out of it.
Our principal stepped up to the lectern and spoke: “We are gathered here today to honor the life of our beloved student, Brandon Tobias Lee.”
I sat next to Em on the bleachers, both of us blank-faced and fidgety. Well, I was the one fidgeting; we both have ADHD, so we always squirm in our seats or do shit with our hands and feet when we have to stay in one place for a while. The weird thing was, she wasn’t fidgeting… at all . In fact, I had never seen her so still. I didn’t even know if her chest was moving up and down. It made me fidget even more.
That evening, before bed, I put in my My Chemical Romance Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge CD and blasted it through my headphones. That CD is the most valuable thing I own. Em first introduced me to My Chem a couple years ago, just when we were just starting to become friends. Last summer, we finally got to see them live in concert. It was a two-and-a-half hour drive from our tiny town to the nearest city, but it was so worth it. At that concert, she kissed me for the first time.
As I closed my eyes, I pictured her sparkly eye makeup and the striped leggings that she wore that night. I remembered the way she looked at me towards the end of “Helena”: fiery, hungry eyes, charged by the thrill of the moment, piercing right through me. I’d wanted her so badly for so long, but I was always afraid to make the first move. Maybe it was the excitement of the crowd or the wild, flashing lights, but, this time, I didn’t hold back. With one look, I made my love known.
Then, as the guitars crashed into the last chorus, she grabbed my sweatshirt and pulled me in for a kiss.
The air was electric. My head spun out of orbit. And, in that moment, despite being surrounded by thousands of people, it felt like we were the only kids on Earth. I slept with that image in my mind, gripping it tightly with all I had.
—————
There was talk of the authorities getting involved with the case around Brandon’s death, and about it being a possible murder (which it totally was), but our town hates that kind of negative publicity. They just deemed it a hunting accident and swept it under the rug like they did with everything else. It really was that easy. That terrified me.
Most things were alright after that. Without their evil leader to instigate things, Becky and Lance kind of just left me alone. But, after a few weeks or so, Em started to fall very, very ill.
She had missed a couple days of school, so I went over to her house to check on her. Her dickbag of a stepdad answered the door, of course. He looked at me funny, studying me up and down in the way he always does, before telling me she was in bed. I greeted her nana, who was sitting in a chair in the living room, watching TV. Nana had dementia, but she still vaguely remembered me. She greeted me kindly.
Em’s room had a dark, punk-goth flair to it, but it had pops of hot pink and electric blue in the decorations and band posters. She had a bunch of plushies with Xs for eyes sitting on her dresser. She even had names for all of them. I loved that.
When I saw her, my heart took a nosedive. Her complexion was pale and her lips were gray, her eyes dull with maroon circles under them. I approached her, asking, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she lied, “s’just a little cold.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m just sick.”
I tilted my head forward and looked into her eyes. “Em,” I said. “ What’s going on ?” I asked again, now demanding her. I never really demanded anything before.
Without saying anything, she got up and slipped on her black skeleton jacket. I followed her into the forest of evergreen trees near her house.
“You’re not gonna believe me, so I’m just gonna show you.” She proceeded to use her Buffy knife to kill a rabbit. I was a little startled, as she had never expressed this kind of violence before. She opened up the rabbit and sipped from it, like she was sucking the juice out of a piece of watermelon. A bit of color immediately returned to her lips. What the fuck .
“I have to feed to stay alive,” she said, as if to make sure my pale expression wasn’t a look of confusion.
“When did this—”
“That night,” she interrupted, “at the graveyard.”
“Cemetery,” I corrected.
“Whatever.”
She might’ve expected me to freak out, but I didn’t. At least, not on the surface. Whenever I don’t know how to react, my face just remains blank. My mind, however, was swimming with questions—and I was drowning in them.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She leaned back against a tree, looking solemnly into the distance. “I can’t remember,” she said. “But I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Great. That definitely answers all my questions.
Something told me I shouldn’t press further, but that didn’t stop me from feeling all kinds of wrong. Something about her movements was uncanny, almost like a scarily realistic theme park animatronic. I couldn’t predict what she would do next. When she looked into my eyes, her gaze was… different.
Em later messaged me online explaining that the animal blood would hardly satiate her condition. She compared it to “a small cup of Mott’s applesauce after a full day of vigorous hiking”, which made me relieved that, even after all of this, she still had her sense of humor. I told her that if she needed human blood, I’d give her some of mine, but she said she needed more than I could ever give her while alive . I had to pause and re-read that part. A painful chill crept up my spine. Did she mean…?
No. No. I couldn’t do it. Hell, I couldn’t even kill a spider in my sister’s bathroom—I always scooped them up and saved them, putting them back outside. Whatever she was asking of me, I knew it wouldn’t end well. But, if I didn’t, she would die. I saw her sickly face—she was practically cheating on me with the grim reaper himself. If it were the other way around, I know she'd do it for me. I told her I needed more time to think.
That night, I put in my Joy Division CD and flopped onto my bed. As long as I had my precious CDs, I could try and inject some noise into my brain to muddle the chaos. I closed my eyes, and a part of me wished I was into doing drugs like the other kids in town. Maybe that would make all of this seem a little less crazy.
* * *
I agreed to help Em take the life of a local convicted pedophile who was currently out on probation. I didn’t think it was as cruel to kill someone who had committed such monstrous acts. If they deserved it, and we only killed evil people, then it would balance itself out. I was helping, in a way.
…Right?
On Thursday night, we hatched the plan. We rode bikes to his house, which was isolated from the rest of the neighborhood next to a bunch of evergreens and a small lake. It wasn’t a large house, but it didn’t have much light around it, which was optimal for stealth purposes. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do the killing—that was her job. She took her knife with her, even though it wasn't really meant for actual killing. I snuck around the side of the house to the garage and started banging on it. When I thought I had gotten a few good ones in, I ran and Em opened the back door and went inside. By the time he went outside of the garage, she was already in the house. I peeked out from behind a tree to watch him look around the garage door. He was a white male, relatively tall, in his mid-50s, probably. He was balding, and wore rectangle glasses. That’s the only glimpse I got of him when he was alive.
I didn’t watch her do it. I couldn’t. He’s a bad person , I told myself. I had to think about how many people he’d hurt, how many lives he’d ruined. Not if he had a family, or if he felt a gruesome fear before he realized what was happening to him.
Em stood up, wiping the blood from her lips. “You can turn back around now,” she said.
The bloody corpse of the stranger laid at her feet, his eyes still open. A pang of horror shot through me at the sight of it. But what was I supposed to do? Let her die ?
“Come here.” Though gentle, her voice sounded distorted, the deep growl of another entity laid on top of her own.
I stepped forward. Oh God, oh God , my mind raced. I could hear my own heart pumping into oblivion. I put on a blank face so as not to put her off, but, on the inside, the foul energy of the scene overtook me.
Apart from the bloodstains all over her white, low-cut shirt, she looked like the same Em as always. I thought of all the times we sat on the hill, the wind gently blowing her poofy blonde hair. The way her bangs swept over her right eye, nearly covering it. Her bright eyes, full of warmth that could melt my outer shell with just a glance. Her classic smile, complete with slightly crooked teeth. Her spunky striped leggings and gloves. Holding her hand. Loving her.
The images disappeared as quickly as they flashed in my mind. I snapped back. This is bad , my inner voice screamed. This is so, so bad. She’s a murderer. I can’t do this.
“Get rid of the body,” She said in her normal voice, lightly touching my shoulder.
So I did.
It was nasty. I had to dissociate in order to get through it. I ended up shoveling the excess into a garbage bag and throwing it into the lake.
At least no one will miss him , I thought.
And no one did. Not one person noticed he was gone.
I had night terrors for a week. In all of them, the man was coming back from the dead to strangle me and pull me down into hell with him. I only really remembered the hell part, all I know is that I woke up in a cold sweat, gripping my own throat.
We would still go to the hill after school, but it was more quiet. When I’d bring my CD player, Em never asked me to put on her favorite songs anymore. She would stare into space, but when I touched her, her head would snap towards me like some sort of animal instinct. She still smiled, and it was still beautiful. When I looked into her eyes, however, there was no warmth. Maybe it was just getting colder outside. It was November, after all.
When I got home, I poured myself into practicing electric guitar—a black Fender jazzmaster that I got for Christmas last year. I crashed into the chords until my fingers bled, releasing all the suffocating tension in my chest and mind into my cheap, tiny amp.
—————
Whenever the sun had just set over the Hill, Em would tell me things—things she told no one else. Once, she told me that her grandmother had now forgotten her name, only referring to her affectionately as “sweet girl.” Another time, she told me that her stepdad had once thrown a glass bottle at her when she came home fifteen minutes past curfew, and that has since pervaded my mind every time I’ve seen him.
A few months ago, though, she told me that her friend Bella Jean had confided in her about how a man at her work had tried to rape her. I remember being shocked and horrified, but not surprised, considering how the adults in power act around this town; it’s no wonder she didn’t go to the police. Bella Jean had never dated since then.
With that in mind, Em and I decided to take him next.
She had gone a while without drinking this time, around three weeks. She wasn’t going to school as much anymore, much to my dismay. No one seemed to notice or care.
We took notes from the last time. Our last attempt was messy and crude, but now, we were more prepared. We brought rubber gloves, gasoline, and a lighter for disposal. This guy lived in a more populated neighborhood, so we had to be a little more careful.
I peeked inside the front window. The guy was in his late 30s, early 40s at most. He had what I call an “asshole face”, similar to the sex offender and every cop in town. He was on the couch watching late night cartoons on TV. He had a few empty beer bottles beside him on the table. Bella Jean said that she used to work with him at a packaging warehouse she used to be at, and that he was quite friendly. Too friendly. My stomach squirmed at the image.
This time, Em snuck around the back gate and knocked all his trash cans and potted plants over. When he heard the crash , he got up and walked to the other side of the house. When he was far enough, I picked the lock (I learned how from a website a few years ago) and crept in. This time, I was right across the hall when Em slit his throat right in the doorway to the backyard patio. I dissociated again, pretending I was seeing some sort of special effects or theatrical performance.
All of a sudden, Em snapped up from her drinking and stared at something across from her. Behind me was a little boy with light brown hair and blue space pajamas. He was staring at his father’s lifeless body, his mouth slightly agape and his lower lip pushed out. Shit .
Then, the unthinkable happened. In a fit of hunger, fear, and pure demonic evil, Em lunged at the child and tore his head off with just her teeth. Blood splattered everywhere—all over her, all over the beige walls, all over me. As I was washed away in red, I saw a hellflame in Em’s eyes. She feasted upon the boy’s flesh and blood with no remorse. I saw the animal in her, the beast, the entity. The undead. It felt as if all the ghosts in the world were flooding my body—forcing me out, but also pushing me around until I came loose. I was a murderer. I was a murderer this whole time. Em may have still been alive, but my girlfriend was not. If I didn’t do something now, more innocent people were going to die—and, if I continued, I was going to, as well.
She lit the entire house ablaze to rid of all and any evidence.
I usually don’t cry. Actually, I don’t even remember the last time I really did. But, that night, I curled up in bed and sobbed to my favorite music. I mourned for the little boy who had done nothing but been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mourned for Em, and whatever it was that had taken her. I mourned for myself. I clung tightly to the sheets, as if grasping for dear life. My body writhed and my face contorted as I screamed into the pillows, still trying to be quiet enough so no one in the house would hear. Even getting kicked in the guts wasn’t this painful. I held my stomach, as if someone had ripped me open only to let me bleed for years on end. It was more than just someone dying. She was changed . And, whether I would admit it or not, so was I.
Though I was perpetually on edge, I couldn’t do anything until she was weak enough again, about to go for her next kill. In my free time, I practiced my acoustic guitar, but it made me miss the days that I would play for her. Em—whatever she was—didn’t even listen to music anymore. I wonder if she still even remembered the concert. I wondered if she still loved me. I wondered if love would be enough for me to be able to end it.
I started to devise a plan. I knew I probably couldn’t take her down with just any normal swiss army knife, and I couldn’t easily get a gun (besides, someone would hear the gunshot) to shoot her with a silver bullet. So, I snuck into Woodshop at school on a day she was absent and carved myself a couple of good old-fashioned stakes. I’m not the best at carving, but I made sure they were sharp enough to pierce skin. If I had to do any further damage, I fashioned a shiv out of some of my dad’s work tools, just in case. Now, all I had to do was act normal and wait.
Thirteen days after the Incident, we visited the Hill once more. I brought my CD player and played the My Chem CD. She sat still as a rock, slowly batting her heavily-lined eyes with deep, dark red circles under her eyes. Even after everything, she was still so beautiful to me.
“Do you remember the first time you kissed me?” I dared to ask. My stomach immediately jolted after I said it. I took subtle deep breaths to calm my heart rate, but it was of little use.
“Uh…yeah,” she said. I could tell she was trying to move more now, consciously trying to make her chest rise and fall. “It was… the concert. Right?” I tried not to, but I looked straight into her eyes. Dull. Ice-cold.
I turned up the music so she wouldn’t hear my heart beating out of my chest. The stakes were tucked away in my shirt, the shiv hidden in one of my combat boots. I desperately tried not to shake and tremble, but I felt the agony rising up within me again.
“I loved that night,” I said, looking forward to the sunset. “I loved you.”
Then, in the swiftest motion I could muster, I lunged at her with one of the stakes. I pinned her down on the grass as the CD skipped. Despite being low on fuel, she was still quite strong, so she grabbed my wrist and held my arm up just above her chest. I strained to break away, gritting my teeth, a twinge in my throat. Her eyes lit up with fire once more, and she opened her mouth to reveal a whole set of razor-sharp, but slightly crooked, teeth. She hissed and shrieked and cried out in inhuman screeches, her face contorted with anger. She went at me for a bite, but I dodged, and we both went tumbling down the hill.
I kicked and struggled against her, breathing heavily as she tried to lunge at me again and again. At last, I took a nearby rock and knocked her in the head with it. She went down, and I had a brief period before she would be up again. I loomed over her, stake in hand.
But I hesitated. I kneeled over her dazed body; her long, pale hair was all mussed and matted with sticks, her face all roughed up with blood and scrapes. For a moment, I could see the girl who loved me—the girl who was here with me just a few months ago. I saw the one person who made my life worth living. But I also saw the child she had murdered in cold blood. I saw all the people who have yet to be taken, who would soon be gone if I didn’t do this.
If I had gone just a moment more, she would have gotten me, and it would’ve all been over.
I staked her in the chest, wailing as the tears streamed down my face. As I pulled the bloody piece of wood out of her torso, I crumbled. I laid over her limp body, holding her—or, rather, what was left of her. Even so, I knew that I had been holding her corpse for months.