Madrugada

Freaks and Teeth

There's always one kid in the class who's a complete freak, and that was Angie. And in high school, you don't really want to be branded as anything because you'll be stuck with it for the rest of your life. This is tenth grade. It's the real world.

Angie would sit in the back of the room and never speak, always biting at her lips. We'd be in math class (it's the only class I had with her, thank God), and out of the corner of my eye, I'd just see her fingers practically in her mouth, or her teeth gnashing her pink lipstick. Sometimes her lower lip would stick out and I would see her widen her eyes and look at her hands and there would be blood all over them. It was disgusting. I tried to stay as far away from her as possible at all times. But one day, it wasn't so easy.

The weather was rainy and cold and there was a math test sitting in front of me. Angie had sat right next to me that day and I visibly shifted so I was facing the opposite direction. I didn't want to known as a freak. Her brown hair was as straight as a board and she looked pale. Really ghost-like. Her lips were dark red; she'd been biting them and they kept scabbing over. Whenever she leaned down to write on her paper, her pencil would scribble ridiculously fast and her hair would obscure her face, like she didn't want to be seen. So of course I knew something was up.

"Marcus," my teacher called out to me. "Eyes on your own work." I realized I'd been staring at Angie and angled my eyes back to the paper. Great. Now I was either a public cheater or interested in Angie. I'd much rather take the former.

Out of nowhere, I heard a muffled plink! like there was a leak right over Angie's desk. Ever so carefully I snuck a glance at the brown haired girl. She stared at her paper, her eyes magnified because the ridiculous glasses on her face, which were already weird enough, but then I looked closer. There was a trail of blood from her lips to her test, dripping like a faucet. A literal faucet.

Apparently I had been staring for so long that she finally turned and looked directly at me. I gasped; her eyes were huge, round as saucers, like a deer in the headlights. She didn't look away and I didn't either because goddamn, there was blood literally dripping down from her face. But then her lips parted like she was about to speak, revealing two sharp, bright-white canine teeth extending to her lower lip, right where the blood was running from.

"Angie?" I gasped. "Are you okay?"

She didn't say anything. She just kept looking at me, completely horrified. I couldn't drag my eyes away from her teeth -- they were so pointed, so sharp, like a...vampire?

She whipped her hand up to cover her mouth. "Teething," she muttered cryptically behind her fingers, like I was supposed to understand whatever that statement meant. "It was supposed to happen tonight. Not now."

"What?"

"Marcus, Angie, is everything okay?" my teacher's voice broke the disturbed silence. We swung our heads back to face our papers. "Yeah! Fine!" I called out, because Angie was getting up from her seat and giving me one last fleeting look of fear before bolting to the door.

"Angie? Where are you--" my teacher tried to follow the girl outside and the panic on her face was obvious. Everyone was staring and I watched their eyes move from Angie to the blood on her desk, speculating out loud. Angie and my teacher disappeared into the hallway, the door swinging shut behind them. Then the murmurs started as everyone laughed nervously and started talking to each other, their eyes on me.

I stared at my test. The numbers stared back. I tried to process what had just happened. So all the times Angie had her lips bleed, it was because she was a vampire? Is that even real? Or did I just imagine it? No way. Those teeth were way too real.