I couldn’t resist it any longer. He just smelled so good.
But I kept my cool. It was difficult keeping myself together as Ryan Turner, the love of my life, endured a nosebleed right next to me. I felt my heart rate increase and all my senses became intensified the instant the blood vessel in his up his nostrils bursted. He was bleeding because Abby Smith was sitting in front of him and when our school cheerleaders had prompted us to stand up and do a cheer, she jumped and knocked her head into Ryan’s nose.
I clutched the edge of the bleachers with my life. I dug my fingernails so hard into the metal that they broke in half. I locked my gaze onto the playing field in front of me, but hearing Ryan groaning in pain and I couldn’t stand it, so I closed my eyes. Part of me wanted to comfort him, because I loved him. But the other part of me wanted to plunge my fangs into his beautifully long neck and drink the life out him. It sounded mildly romantic. I imagined myself drinking the life out of Ryan and that made me laugh. I smiled, showing my teeth.
“What are you laugh—“ I turned my head to the left to follow the voice that was aimed at me. I opened my eyes and saw that I was staring straight into Abby Smith’s eyes. She was staring at me with a look of terror on her face, like she had seen a ghost. I closed my mouth and puffed out my cheeks, but it was too late. She had already seen my fangs, and in my head, I cursed myself for being so stupid. Suddenly she was screaming and pointing at me. Everyone on the field stared at me. I was frozen in fear. And everyone’s faces turned transitioned from curiosity to utter hatred. The person that was helping Ryan off the bleachers said that I wanted to kill Ryan and someone behind me began screamed at the top of their lungs to “kill the vampire”. Suddenly the entire school erupted into death threats that were aimed at me.
I had realized that when I smiled at Abby, my fangs were showing. I jumped up and tumbled down the bleachers to get away from the chaos. People were pulling on my clothes and grabbing things out of my jacket pocket. Luckily, none of them got a secure grip on me, and I was able to slip through most of the people because of my thinness.
When I got off the bleachers, I shot right because there was the nearest exit. I ran as fast as I could in my black sneakers and short-shorts. I was doubly out of shape; I hadn’t been going to the gym for weeks and it was at that moment that I truly regretted not going.
The entire school was after me. Occasionally I would glance behind me and see a few of my teachers inside the crowd. It sounded like a stampede of rabid bulls were chasing, and that they weren’t going for the red color but for me, the matador.
I dashed through the halls as quickly as I could. Fortunately, there were no classes in session because all the students had been forced to go to the Rally for homecoming, so I had less to worry about being immediately stopped in my tracks by an opening door.
I dashed around the corners of the school. I rounded the corners of the cafeteria and the court yard. Luckily my school was big, so it was difficult for everyone to keep up with me. And because I’m a vampire, I don’t get exasperated while doing things like humans do. Normally, a human’s heart rate would increase and their muscles would soon become exhausted after such exertion of their bodies, but I was not human, and that was one of the things that benefitted me from being different.
Running in circles around the school building was getting tedious and dangerous. Some students had learned my route and caught up with me. I knew because I their shouts were more distinctive and the sound of their feet hitting the ground was louder than it had been before. I needed to think of something quickly.
Finally I found something that would help. As I approached the cafeteria for the third time, the door was open, and I made a swift yet impulsive dash into it. I tumbled inside because my shoelaces were untied but that didn’t stop me from jumping up and slamming the door which then conveniently locked itself.
The cafeteria was empty and clean, so I knew that the janitors had already been inside. That was a slight relief because it would have been the end of if anyone found out I was in there. But I wasn’t out of the clear because I’d still needed a place to hide. There were no distinct hiding places; all I saw were dining tables and an empty salad bar. I whipped my head from side to side and searched the room from something that would protect me. Then I got the thought of hiding in the kitchen, so I ran as quickly as I could to it.
There were different rooms inside the kitchen that contained different things. One was where they kept the food, and one contained things like the oven or sink, where they made the food. I decided to go in to the food storage room, thinking that it would be dark and not easy to find me because it was larger than the cooking room.
I was right about the storage room; it was quite large. It was that way because it contained what seemed like an endless supply of food. I didn’t hesitate to find a secure hiding place; in the back of the room there was a nice corner that was lazily concealed by a big box that read “rice”. I thought it was perfect for me.
It was difficult moving the rice container into a position that covered me because I was wider than it, which surprised me. After struggling to fit it into a comfortable condition, I thought about getting another hiding place. There wasn’t much time for me to think, by then people would have realized that I hadn’t left the campus because it would have been impossible. The front gate to our school was locked during school hours and heavily guarded by policemen. Although there were never any immediate threats in the town, they did this because of the war. The classrooms were also locked at this hour, because of the rally. So they would only search a few places like the library and the cafeteria. I estimated that I had only been in the cafeteria for three minutes, and that although the trek from the front gate back to the library was long, I knew it wouldn’t take over eight hundred people to get back to where I was. So my only option was to leave the storage room and opt for something else. That was when I headed for the cooking room. Sure it was pretty bare and open but there were some convenient hiding places in there that someone would never guess to look: like inside the oven or one of the top cabinets.
I bolted out the storage room and the door flew open in front of me. All the imagined adrenaline I’d had in me told me to go faster and think harder, but I couldn’t especially since I was stopped by something unbelievable. There he was, standing right before me holding a bloodied towel to his nose. But he startled me, and my instincts were activated. I produced my fangs and I went in for the kill. However, for a split I felt like everything was at a standstill. It was like before I had changed, I knew that I was going after him. It felt like I could have stopped myself before it happened but of course it was too late. By the time I realized that, my teeth were already plunged into his succulent neck and I was literally sucking the life out of him. So many emotions ran through me as it happened: lust, anger, regret, hurt, love, and power. They came one after the other, like feet do when they hit the pavement. I couldn’t stop, I just couldn’t stop myself. I slurped every last bit of blood that I could from him. I couldn’t contain myself, not even after I heard his blood curdled screams and begging. As he lay there helpless, he shouted at me, calling me all kinds of things that hurt me. Finally he stopped fighting and let death come to him.
Towards the end I heard him mumbling. He mumbled about all kinds of things, like his little sister Savannah and his mother who would be extremely upset about him being gone. Then he called out names that I’d never heard before and asked them to forgive him. He asked for forgiveness of his foolishness. He thought that he was a fool for being alive, and that hit me. This guy, the love of my life, that lay dying on the ground below me believed that it was his own fault for being punished. Suddenly, he did something really amazed me. Through my darkness, I saw his bloodshot eyeballs roll lazily toward me. He lazily attempted a smile, and that was when I couldn’t take any more of it: I cried. Never had I ever felt an emotion so intense like the one I was feeling at that moment. It was something new to me because I had never felt empathy or guilt before. I had always learned in school that humans felt empathetic or guilty when they pitied themselves, but never did I feel that way because I was not human. I never connected myself to humans because it wasn’t possible. It was never heard of that vampires could empathize with their victims, or feel the same emotions as them because they were not alike. We are supposed to be different therefore we could never connect with each other on emotional levels. But why did I relate my feelings to the ones humans have had for millions of years? I definitely wasn’t human, so how come this was happening?
My tears are not like human tears. I cry tears of blood. I the thick red juice ooze from my eyes and slowly stream down my face. With the tears I felt like something else unprecedented was happening. Each drop of blood that fell off my face and onto Ryan’s cheek was like a rebirth. There was a deep feeling of light growing inside me, like I was turning into a light bulb from the inside out. Ryan was still staring at me. He was extremely pale and his lips match the color of his skin. His eyelids drooped heavily, and his eyes were still bloodshot. Painstakingly, he used his left hand to pet my hair and that made me cry even more.
“I’m so sorry” I managed to say through heavy heaves and sobbing. He said nothing to me but just smiled like I usually saw him do in the hallways during school. I buried my head into his chest, on his left ribcage and sobbed there while clutching his shirt and crying in defeat. Then that enlightened feeling slowly treaded away, and my sobs were harder than they were before.
As I laid there devastated for a few moments, I felt him tugging gently at my hair. He was in a very feeble state, and I had predicted that at any moment, he would be gone from me forever. He stared at me and for a moment I thought that he was gone. I stopped crying and paid close attention to him yet my lips quivered awfully and I still cried. My eyes were stinging. The floor around us was a bloody mess and the smell of fresh blood was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe the horror scene we were in.
Ryan finally said something to me, but I couldn’t understand what he said. He kept mumbling it over and over but I hadn’t understood what he said.
“You…” he mumbled.
“What? What are you trying to say?” I whispered.
“You… you did it.” And like that, he was gone. Not only was I confused and shocked that he chose that to be his last words, I was hurt, and my guilt was pressing me harder and harder until finally I exploded with shame. The only thing in this universe that I had ever cared about was gone, and it was my fault. Then I was filled with rage. Rage was what then controlled me. That feeling was even more intense than my feeling of guilt. I completely fell apart; anything that came by was a trigger just spurring my emotional release.
I tore off the wall paper of the kitchen, kicked its appliances until there was absolutely no more feeling inside of me. I filled my lungs with the still air of the kitchen and screamed until I could snap my vocal cords. I punched the windows of the kitchen, attempting to release the anger I’d felt from being oppressed all those years. Everything happened all to me all at once, and there was only one thought going through my head:
Why me?
Nothing in life is fair, no matter how many times they might teach you it in school or emphasize it in the courts. Never will there be a time where justice can be evenly split between people. The harsh reality is that one person is always going to have a leg up on another, and in my case, the entire human race had their leg up on me.
“What the hell?! It’s you!” I swiftly turned behind me and saw a terrified girl standing in the doorway. She turned pale and was wobbly at the knees, and she feared for her life. It was the correct response, in her case.
Almost immediately, she turned around attempted escape, but her efforts were thwarted by me. I caught up with her and grabbed her by the ends of her hair, causing her to fall backward. She screeched and that hurt my ears.
“Where are you going, bitch?” I grossly ask, licking some of Ryan’s blood off my teeth and sucking on the taste of it in my mouth. She began to cry and she wriggled herself around to get out of my grip. The part of me that was still good was about to let her go until the entry door into the cafeteria flew open—almost off its hinges. In rushed a lot of people, most of them were students. At the front of the crowd were teachers with weapons.
“Megan Fullbranch, release the girl.” A man with a blue jumpsuit holding a gun in his hand demanded. That’s silly, I thought, guns can’t kill vampires. Again, I laughed at my own thought. But then my laughter grew. I giggled and progressively transformed into full-blown laughter, hardly containing myself. This is it, I thought, this is my breaking point. Yet again I continued to burst my sides with my own thoughts.
I released my grip on the girl’s hair. She ran instinctively towards the crowd, and they took her in. I clutched my sides, held my head, did dances, bulged out my eyes, and other crazy things as I laughed. It was truly a humorous occasion.
“Alright girl, you’ve had your fun,” said the man in the jumpsuit with a gruff, manly voice.
“You sick bitch!” I heard someone shout from another part of the room. That was my kicker; it caused to fall face flat on the wax floor. I laughed until I couldn’t feel my aching sides, and until I couldn’t stand being alive anymore. I had finally realized what the universe had wanted for me all along; to recognize my defeat because of race.
I would never surmount to anything grand or popular because in the world that I lived in, the world vampire caused someone to grab a rifle and blow the head off of the next person who said it. No one would feel what I had felt, not even the ones who birthed me or have known me since birth. Don’t even ask me how they did it, I never cared to learn anyway.
There was no point of me being in school; lesson plans were planned to acknowledge heavy subjects, such as the war between my kind and humans. No matter how many lessons I was taught about feelings and what teens are supposed to react to, I would never really feel any of that because that wasn’t me. How could I feel if I was literally alienated by the people I lived with and was quite literally, dead on the inside?
As I lay on the ground, the crowd came for me, finally assessing that it was there time to kill. But them coming for me wasn’t what got to me. I began to think about Ryan, and there was something about him that constantly popped into my mind.
The crowd gathered round me, but all I could think about was Ryan. What was it that he was trying tell me?
At that point, I heard a sharp, piercing scream and cries. Perhaps they’d found Ryan’s mutilated body in the kitchen.
“She killed him!” I heard. I had recognized the voice as the voice from the girl who I was about to kill earlier. It didn’t matter to me though, because as she would be creating a memory that would pain her for the rest of her long and innocent life, I was being dragged to my fate by other people in the cafeteria. Most of these people were there because they wanted to kill me, but almost everyone else, especially the adults, were just going to use me as their scapegoat for all the other sick things the vampires had done in past.
“I didn’t even know she was a vampire.” And that was another killer comment.
Suddenly it all felt like a dream; my arms had been pulled above my head and it felt as if they were almost being pulled out their sockets. I was being lifted off the ground and being brought to my death. I felt a powerful blow to my left side and what felt like a sharp blade that ripped through my right arm. Pain seared through me like none that I had ever felt before. But none of it mattered to me because in my head I was already gone. I was far away from where I had been. It was like I had been in a dream. I closed my eyes and waited for death to come. But when I did, I had strange feeling that something else was in the room, watching my body be mutilated by the students and staff. It took one hard blow to the head to make me force my eyes open. When I did, I saw Ryan. There he was, looking graceful and…angelic. I supposed his ghost would have shown up sooner or later after I drained him because I was used to seeing ghosts. But after getting one hard looking at him, I realized that he was no ghost, and in fact, an angel. I don’t why this thought had come to me; perhaps the blinding white light that blazed off his figure was what got me or his ever inviting face made me think that he was an angel. I never believed in that sort of thing though, until I saw my own figure, standing next to him.
I was there, smiling, happy, and seemed just as inviting as he was. As the people pounded into me I studied the figures floating just above their heads. It was strange to watch myself watching me being killed. And I had the best smile on my face, not like the one I had pulled at the homecoming rally. And I was still pale. Someone had punched my real eyes in, but I still had the power to see through one of them. I watched the two figures smile at me, watching the grotesque scene. Rage filled me again. I was jealous of Ryan, that he had been such an innocent person, and died a less cruel death than I had. And I cursed myself for being so stupid to have loved him and to watch myself die. It all angered me. And I felt like I had to fight back, to curse myself and Ryan for the pain I was put through. But of course I couldn’t fight back. Most of my bones were broken, and everyone else in the cafeteria had pinned me to a cafeteria table. I wouldn’t have been able to fight them off anyways. After having given up, I noticed that the image of me and Ryan were fading away. I begged for them come back, I couldn’t let them leave. I wanted them back to help me, save me, from the madness.
Yet again I was filled with overpowering emotion that they had been leaving. I was thrusted into a fit of sadness. It was there and then that I finally gave up hope. Hope, I scoffed. The word drifted in my head like a log in the rapids, being forced down a waterfall and plummeting to the bottom. That was it. Nothing really mattered, like I wanted it to at first. I had always hoped for the vampires making peace with the humans. I always hoped that I would have a better life unlike the one I was living. I thought that by going to a human school, somehow people would forget what I was and like me for who I was. I had always hoped that one day things would be better. It was hope that made me see Ryan’s and mine ghosts. Everyone knows that vampires don’t turn into ghosts. But of course, it was all this hoping that brought me to my death in the end. Hope was my fault, and had I never encountered it, perhaps things would have been better.
This realization really got to me. And it was then that I figured out what Ryan said. He said to me that I’ll never be anything to this world. He was right; I had never done the world a greater good by sitting around and hoping and by pretending to be something I was not. I was doomed from the start. Humans would never get over their obnoxious ways of keeping to themselves and shaming anything else that was not a human. I was better off staying with my own kind. But I wanted there to be a solution-- I wanted there to be some way out of the cycle of madness.
I pondered on the thoughts running through my head, and for once in my godforsaken life, I felt at peace. It was my time, and no matter how sickened I had felt at the thought of not completing my goal, and not saving the world, I had to go. At the thought of leaving, I smiled and waited for darkness to take its place. At least I would die with a smile on my face, I thought.
And after thinking that, I received yet another blow to my head, but it was that blow that took me out of my misery. I was hit, and finally, my lights were out.
Finished.