You Suck: A Love Story

needle exchange programs all over town. They’re listed in the Bay Guardian.”
    “Thanks,” said flannel. He turned and Abby grabbed him again.
    “We’re going to be at the Glas Kat. There’s a Goth club to night. Five-hundred block of Fourth Street. I know a dealer there. You know, for your heroin.”
    The flannel-shirt guy nodded, and looked at Byron’s picture on her shirt again, then at her face.
    Fucksocks. He’s so looking at my streaking eye makeup.
    “Thanks, milady,” said Flannel Shirt. And he was gone, off over the dark moors of the tampon aisle.
    “What was that about?” whined Jared. “He’s so, so Happy Days.” Jared White Wolf spent a lot of time watching Nick at Nite when he wasn’t brooding or fussing with his appearance.
    Abby walked into the flap of Jared’s black duster and pounded his slight chest with her palms. “Didn’t you see. Didn’t you see?”
    “What, you acting like a complete ho?”
    “He had fangs,” Abby said.
    “Well, so do I,” Jared said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pair of perfect, dentistry-quality vampire fangs. “Duh, everybody does.”
    “Yeah, but his grew! I saw them. Let’s go,” Abby said, pulling Jared White Wolf by his great bat-wing lapels. “I have to change into something hot before we go to the club.”
    “Wait, I want to get some Halls. My throat is raw from all the cloves we smoked last night.”
    “Hurry.” The buckles of Abby’s black platform boots jangled as she dragged her friend past the lipsticks and hair products before he could get interested.
    “Okay,” said Jared, “but if I don’t meet a cute guy tonight, you have to stay up all night and hold me while I cry.”
    Y ou should try black lipstick sometime,” Tommy said to Jody as they approached their building, their arms loaded with packages. He was still thinking about the kids at the drugstore. It was the first time since tenth grade that he’d used his knowledge of Romantic poetry. For a while he’d tried molding himself into the tragic Romantic hero, brooding and staring clench-jawed off into space as he composed dark verse in his head. But it turned out that trying to appear tragic in Incontinence, Indiana, was redundant, and his mother kept shouting at him and making him forget his rhymes. “Tommy, if you keep grinding your teeth like that, they’ll wear away and you’ll have to have dentures like Aunt Ester.” Tommy only wished his beard was as heavy as Aunt Ester’s-then he could stare out over the moors while he stroked it pensively.
    “Yeah,” Jody said, “because I need to make it more obvious that I’m an undead creature that feeds on the blood of the living.”
    “You make it sound so sordid.”
    “No, I meant it in a nice way.”
    “Oh.”
    “Because it’s not like people wouldn’t understand if they found out we were vampires, because we slipped up and, oh, I don’t know, UNSHEATHED OUR FANGS IN THE FUCKING DRUGSTORE!”
    Tommy almost dropped his packages. She hadn’t said a word about that all night. He’d hoped she hadn’t noticed. “It was an accident.”
    “You called that girl ‘milady.’”
    “She was impressed with my Byron.”
    “Yeah, well, your Byron was probably sticking out a little, too, wasn’t he?”
    “It wasn’t like that.”
    “You drooled.” Jody paused at their security door and dug into her jacket for her key.
    Tommy stepped around her. “I’m still new at this. I think I’m doing pretty well. My ghastly pallor obviously impressed the lady at the needle exchange.” He reached into his bag and fanned out a handful of sterile-wrapped and capped syringes.
    “Congratulations, you can now pass as an HIV-positive heroin addict.”
    “Tres chic.” He grinned like he imagined a sexy Italian man-whore might.
    “Who drools in public,” Jody said.
    Damn, she’s immune to my sexy Italian man-whore grin, Tommy thought. He said, “Be nice, I’m new.
    My lips don’t fit together right when my fangs are out.”
    She turned the key and swung the door open. There, passed out on the landing, was William the huge cat guy and sleeping on his chest, Chet the huge cat.
    “I told you it would work,” Tommy said.
    Jody stepped into the stairwell and closed the door behind her. “You go first.”
    F ifteen minutes later, as he placed five syringes full of blood in their refrigerator, Tommy said, “This vampire thing is going to be great.”
    He’d had a moment when he’d bitten William-not