You Suck: A Love Story

shrugged and entered the club. Everyone, it appeared, looked more like a vampire than he did. He’d bought some black jeans and a black leather jacket at the Levi’s store while Jody was off finding something hideous for her mother for Christmas, but evidently he should have been looking for some black lipstick and something cobalt- or fuchsia-colored to weave into his hair. And in retrospect, the flannel shirt may have been a mistake. He looked like he’d shown up at the sacrificial mass of the damned ready to fix the dishwasher.
    The music changed to an ethereal female chorus of Celtic nonsense. With a techno beat. And robots complaining. Grumpy robots.
    He tried to listen around it, the way Jody had taught him. With all the black light, strobes, and black clothing, his newly heightened senses were overloading. He tried to focus on people’s faces, their life auras, look through the haze of heat, hairspray, and patchouli for the girl he’d met at Walgreens.
    Tommy had felt alone in a crowd before, even inferior to everyone in a crowd, but now he felt, well, different. It wasn’t just the clothes and the makeup, it was the humanity. He wasn’t part of it. Heightened senses or not, he felt like he had his nose pressed against the window, looking in. The problem was, it was the window of a donut shop.
    “Hey!” Someone grabbed his arm and he wheeled around so quickly that the girl nearly tumbled over backwards, startled.
    “Fuck! Dude.”
    “Hi,” Tommy said. “Wow.” Thinking, Ah, jelly donut. It was the girl from Walgreens. She was nearly a foot shorter than he, and a little skinny. To night she’d gone with the waifish look, wearing striped stockings with holes ripped in them and a shiny red PVC mini skirt. She’d traded in her Lord Byron shirt for a tank top, black, of course, with dripping red letters that read GOT BLOOD?, and fishnet gloves that went halfway up her biceps. Her makeup was sad-clown marionette: black tears drawn streaming down either side of her face. She crooked her finger to get him to bend down so she could shout into his ear over the music.
    “My name’s Abby Normal.”
    Tommy spoke into her ear; she smelled of hairspray and what was that? Raspberry? “My name is Flood,” he said. “C. Thomas Flood.” It was his pen name. The C didn’t really stand for anything, he just liked the sound of it. “Call me Flood,” he added. Tommy was a stupid name for a vampire, but Flood-ah, Flood-there was disaster and power there, and a hint of mystery, he thought.
    Abby smiled like a cat in a tuna cannery. “Flood,” she said. “Flood.”
    She was trying it on, it seemed to Tommy. He imagined that she’d have a black vinyl binder at school and she’d soon be writing Mrs. Flood surrounded by a heart with an arrow through it on the cover in her own blood. He’d never seen a girl so obviously attracted to him, and he realized that he had no experience in dealing with it. For a moment he flashed on the three vampire brides of Dracula who try to seduce Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s classic novel. (He’d been studying all the vampire fiction he could get his hands on since meeting Jody, since it didn’t appear that anyone had written a good how-to book on vampirism.) Could he really deal with three luscious vampire brides? Would he have to bring them a kid in a sack the way Dracula does in the book? How many kids a week would it take to keep them happy? And where did you get kid sacks? And although he hadn’t discussed it with Jody, he was pretty sure she was not going to be happy sharing him with two other luscious vampire brides, even if he brought her sacks and sacks full of kids. They’d need a bigger apartment. One with a washer and dryer in the building, because there’d be a lot of bloodstained lingerie to be washed. Vampire logistics were a nightmare. You should get a castle and a staff when you got your fangs. How was he going to do all of this? “This sucks,” Tommy finally said, overwhelmed by the enormity of his responsibilities.
    Abby looked startled, then a little hurt. “Sorry,” she said. “You want to get out of here?”
    “Oh, no, I didn’t mean-I mean, uh, yes. Let us go.”
    “Do you still need to get your heroin?”
    “What? No, that matter is taken care of.”
    “You know, Byron and Shelley did opiates,” Abby said. “Laudanum. It was like cough syrup.”
    Then, for no reason that he could think of, Tommy said, “Those scamps, they loved to get