You Suck: A Love Story

confidence she’d felt earlier draining away. Maybe the night wasn’t hers after all.
    Jody backed away a step. “No. You don’t just take the weak and the sick, do you? You take anyone.”
    “Take? What do you mean, take?” He was furiously trying to push the cigarette case back to her across the counter.
    He didn’t know. He was like she was when she’d awakened that first night as a vampire and had no idea what she had become. “You don’t even know, do you?”
    “Know what?” He picked up the cigarette case again. “Wait a second, can you see this thing glowing?”
    “No glow. It just felt like it belonged here.” This poor guy, he didn’t even know. “What’s your name?”
    She asked.
    “Charlie Asher. This is Asher’s.”
    “Well Charlie, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t know exactly what you are, and it doesn’t seem like you know. You don’t, do you?”
    He blushed. Jody could see his face flush with heat. “I’ve been going through some changes lately.”
    Jody nodded. He really would have been perfect as a minion-if he hadn’t been some bizarre supernatural creature. She’d just gotten used to the idea of vampires being real, and it took some serious blood drinking to drive that reality home, and now there were other-other-things? Still, Jody felt bad for him, “Okay,” she said. “I know what it’s like, uh, to find yourself thrown into a situation where forces beyond your control are changing you into someone, something you don’t have an owner’s manual for. I understand what it is to not know. But someone, somewhere, does know. Someone can tell you what’s going on.” And hopefully they aren’t just fucking with you, she wanted to add, but thought better of it.
    “What are you talking about?” he asked.
    “You make people die, don’t you Charlie?” She didn’t know why she said it, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was true. Like when all her other senses had been dialed to eleven, she could sense something new, like noise on the line, and it was telling her this.
    “But how do you-?”
    “Because it’s what I do,” Jody said. “Not like you, but it’s what I do. Find them, Charlie. Backtrack and find whoever was there when your world changed.”
    She shouldn’t have said that, she knew it as she was saying it. She’d just handed him an item that had been owned by someone she’d taken not twenty minutes ago. But even as regret for passing out incriminating evidence hit her, she also realized that she had left Tommy out there to wave in the wind just like this guy. Even if it was only for a few hours, Tommy had no idea how to go about being a vampire-truth be told, he hadn’t really been that good at being a human. He was just a doofy guy from Indiana and she’d abandoned him to the merciless city.
    She turned and ran out of the shop.
    C ocoa?” Tommy said. “You look cold.” He’d given her his jacket out on the street.
    He’s so gallant, Abby thought. He probably wants me to drink cocoa to get my blood sugar up before he sucks the life from my veins.
    Abby had lived much of her life waiting for something extraordinary to happen. No matter where she had been, there was a world somewhere that was more interesting. She’d progressed from wanting to live in a fantastic, kawaii-cute plastic world of Hello Kitty, to being a Day-Glo, Manga lollipop space girl in platform sneakers, and then just a couple of years ago she had moved into the dark gothic world of pseudo vampires, suicidal poets, and romantic disappointment. It was a dark, seductive world where you got to sleep really late on the weekends. She’d been true to her dark nature, too, trying to maintain an aspect of exhausted mopeyness while channeling any enthusiasm she felt into a vehicle for imminent disappointment, and above all, suppressing the deep-seated perkiness that her friend Lily said she’d never shed when she’d refused to throw away her Hello Kitty backpack or let go of her Nintendog virtual beagle puppy.
    “He has virtual parvo,” Lily had said. “You have to put him down.”
    “He doesn’t have parvo,” Abby had insisted. “He’s just tired.”
    “He’s doomed, and you’re cute, and hopelessly perky,” Lily taunted.
    “I am not. I’m complex and I’m dark.”
    “You’re perky and your e-dog has i-parvo.”
    “As Azrael is my witness, I will never be perky again,” said Abby, her wrist set tragically to her forehead. Lily stood with her as she