The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Chapter 14, Marcellus - 1980

I'm not going to try to tell you I'm a good person. You know I'm not, and I know I'm not. But I'm not going to try to tell you that anybody else is either. I know you're not. Laurent wasn't. You come here with your own agenda and you want the story you're expecting but I'm not going to lie. And it's not because I'm angry, or because I don't like any of you. It's because I believe in what you're doing, and I didn't get my boyfriend a present for Christmas. Because he was gross to me around that time, too.

As I said to you before, I know I'm only in this because I'm nice to look at. It's true I'm really nice to look at. I look good in everything. I like money. My job is to look good. I've always looked good, too, which is why as a baby Dasius bought me from some slut addicted to coke. And believe me he brings that up, this idea that I'm stupid because of gestational drugs,  but I'm stupid because no one sent me to school when I was a child, not because I lack the ability to learn. All right I am dyslexic, but that has nothing to do with my mother. I don't mind whatever he says. At least when we argue, he's here, and as you know he rarely is, and he won't let me go with him anywhere because he thinks I'll embarrass him. Well here it comes.

Ever since I can remember I've been told to tuck my toes in. Be quiet, because children are a danger to themselves. Push back too much and its your life. Bellamy told me so, when I was little. That's who you want to hear about, Bellamy. But by the time I was old enough to make memories, he was less interested in raising children than he had been. He met Laurent in a Canadian nightclub in the early 1960s, in Montreal. He told me when I was older, when I was feeling bitter, that Laurent followed him into the bathroom and killed him in a locked toilet stall. It's very romantic, I know. He never really liked Laurent very much, but he did love him I guess. I don't know. Who cares. The subject of children was broached, and I'm told Laurent only agreed because he was desperate for Bellamy to like him. Bell had always had this idea that he could be a housewife. He wore his hair curled around his ears, the longest he had dared to grow it when living. Whenever he was home in Texas, he wore tea dresses more than anything. He used to make me fluff sandwiches and put lipstick on me. Laurent, ironically, could not stand effeminacy of this type, but Bell was free to do it at home when no one but me was looking.

We're not really supposed to ask where Dasius gets things. It embarrasses him. He has his fingers in all kinds of unsavory things, though he has assured me that stealing babies outright isn't one of them. We can assume the twins were paid for, then. Though to whom? I'm not supposed to wonder what he does at work. He wants me to be more innocent than that, though of course that's complete farce. Bell demanded children because he didn't think he would get them, because he wanted to leave and needed an excuse. As a complete surprise, Pascal and Marcel showed up a few months later. They didn't cry like me, so I guess they were born clean and undamaged. So Bell had to stay. Laurent installed them in a house in Texas, far away from either coast, in certainly a place where Bell couldn't go out looking like he did and the children would consequently grow up distant and well-adjusted to the outside world. 

In 1965, when the twins were four years old, Marcel caught a bad flu. I hear Bell went a little crazy, and Dasius being Dasius, he decided that the cure was to replace Marcel with another child in the event of his death. He did this the way you would replace a dying dog with a puppy. He insisted on my name, Marcellus, the way you would name a dog "Spot 2". Marcel didn't die, and so now we just have confusing, creepy, alike names. The established fact that I look like Laurent in the face makes me feel that there was certainly dark stuff going on regarding my origin, but I'm not important enough to be told about it. I know that Laurent used to send Dasius boys who looked like himself as a sick little game. I know that Dasius in the past had been involved with Laurent in some way, and that he found Laurent's look intoxicating. I told you that Dasius was gross. At any rate, I'm told I cried for two years without pausing to take a breath. And by the time I was old enough to speak, my twin brothers were at private school far away in Paris, because I had been so much of a handful that Bell had begged Laurent to get rid of them. I needed him more than they did. They came home summers, but that's it. They're more French now than Texan, and need to be reminded that they are clearly Eastern European, no matter how much they dye their hair. They're idiots in Prada shoes.