Seven Minutes to Midnight

37

I woke up very late in the day, with an extreme headache. In the bathroom I downed a cocktail of vitamins, then sat to rest on the edge of the tub with my head between my knees. Even with my slightly faded sunburn, I looked pale in the mirror.

But today was the day. My father would arrive to pick me up in a couple of hours.

I felt cold even though the radio in the kitchen announced that it was going to be a hot, humid day with a strong chance of thundershowers. I lifted my eyes to the black clouds in the sky and prayed that Lane would not show up. The sun might have been the thing keeping him away during the day time—even if he insisted it only made his eyes hurt a little.

Since school had ended, I hadn't been scanning the newspaper during breakfast. I hadn't even really been eating breakfast, unless my mom was awake and decided to cook. She had decided to cook this morning, but apparently had decided to go to bed after working all night. I warmed up my omelet and bacon in the microwave and tore in.

Loss of blood had made me very hungry.

The newspaper was lying on the table with the crossword puzzle half-filled in as usual, and I slid it over and opened up to the local news section. I could remember being alarmed the night before, but not until I saw an article about a missing child did I remember why.

Veronica.

I bolted out of my chair and snatched up the cordless phone, dialing her number with a strip of bacon hanging out of my mouth.

"Hello?"

"Veronica!" I mumbled through the bacon before pulling it out of my mouth and repeating, "Thank God you're okay—"

"Hello?"

"Hello? It's Amy—"

"We're not home right now, but if you leave a message we'll call you back!"

I usually called Veronica on her cell phone, and had entirely forgotten about the stupid message on her family's answering machine.

"It's Amy, call me back," I muttered and hit the end button.

Still chewing on the bacon, I ran upstairs as fast as I could without passing out and dug through my backpack until I found my cell phone.

"Hello?" She sounded like she'd been sleeping.

"Veronica! Are you okay?"

"Yeah... Why are you calling me?"

"Oh, I just thought... I was worried, I guess. But everything's fine."

"Okay...?"

I glanced at my clock. Dad would be there to pick me up at four, and it was after two. "Um, look, I'm going away for a while, until school starts. To be safe, you know?"

"Where are you going?" Instantly her voice didn't sound so sleepy.

"Someplace safe. You know why."

"No, Amy, I don't." Now she sounded mad. "What's the deal?"

"I just... I can't be around Lane anymore. I can't."

"Relax, Amy—you don't need to go running away because of him."

"Yes, I do."

"At least tell me where you're going."

"I'm going to ... I'll call you when I get there, okay?"

"No, it's not okay! I'm your best friend! You need to tell me what's going on!"

That was when I hung up on her. I couldn't lie. And I could feel the tiniest pull on my willpower through the earpiece of the phone, a little twitch saying, "It's okay to tell her. She couldn't possibly be a vampire. She wouldn't tell Lane anything." But the rest of my brain, a big chunk of it, had been screaming: "She'll tell him, she'll tell him everything and then you'll never get away." I wasn't even sure that I would get away.

I packed up my toothbrush and the other things I needed and looked around at my bedroom. It hit me like a brick to the face: I might never come back here. The most likely conclusion to my current situation was my drained corpse being uncovered years from now, or never. I imagined my mother coming into my room, looking for some kind of clue as to where I might have disappeared to. Maybe she would read our vampire stories and hand them over to the police, who would think that I was seriously disturbed and possibly taken in by a Satanic cult. Maybe they would even think I had decided to kill myself. What would they think of my self-portrait, a straightforward view of myself, my eyes looking emptily outward? I never kept a journal, didn't have the interest in my own life to record it, so they wouldn't find any reference to Lane there. I stood looking at all of my stuff. There would be no trace of him here. I didn't think Veronica, Frank, or I had ever even referred to Lane in our emails. I had mentioned him only in the text of the stories I had written immediately after he had joined our games. Taken over our games. Made them games no longer.

No police investigator would ever believe that Lane was a real person.

I dragged my things downstairs and waited for my father sitting on the couch, completely exhausted. How much blood did Lane take each time? How much blood did the human body have? And how quickly did the body produce blood? I wasn't sure I would be able to get out of bed tomorrow if my plan didn't work. If Lane had been lying to me about needing to be invited in.

Trust, I needed to trust him, that's what he kept saying. I didn't know if it was another form of mind control, hypnosis or something, to make me trust him just by saying it over and over, and if I trusted him then I would believe his lies.

I didn't have the energy to look for the remote for the television, so I allowed my eyes to wander over the framed pictures on the mantel and hung on the walls. School portraits of me throughout the years. Candid shots with my mother, usually with her holding the camera out at arm's length, printed in black and white and framed. Pictures of me from when I was a baby, playing in the tub and wearing sunglasses too big for my face and drawing at the kitchen table. Wearing a smock and smeared in paint, grinning beside an easel holding a picture I'd painted of my house.

I was all my mother had.

And she was upstairs sleeping as I watched my father's Dodge Durango pull into the driveway, dwarfing my mother's little Camry.

I struggled up out of the cushions. I needed to go say good-bye. When I stood up the swarm of black dots reappeared in my vision, and I stood there swaying until they cleared. Then I opened the door.

"Hi, Dad," I said.

It had been a couple of years since I'd seen my father, even though he lives right in Oakridge. He'd lost some hair. He'd gained some paunch. He was wearing a polo shirt and stiff jeans.

"Hello, Amy," he said.

He didn't approach me for a hug. Instead he hung back and said, "Do you need help carrying anything?"

"Um, yeah. I have a suitcase." I pointed toward the couch. "I need to go tell Mom I'm going."

"Of course, whatever you need. I'll be waiting in the car."

He seemed to be relieved to have something to do as well as an excuse not to make conversation with me. I headed upstairs, pausing to rest once he had hauled my suitcase outside.

"Mom?" I tapped lightly on her door.

There was no answer.  

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Mwahaha, a little cliffhanger for you...