The Society of S

I wanted to correct his terminology. I wanted to reason with him, to scold him for playing with fire. But more than any of that, I wanted blood.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Definitely,” he said.

My mouth opened instinctively as I bent toward him, and I heard him say, “Wow. You’re the real thing!”

That was the night I learned restraint. I took only enough blood to dull my hunger. When I pulled away from him, he looked up at me, his pupils dilated, an expression of ecstasy in his eyes. “You really did it,” he said.

I pulled away, wiping my mouth with my jacket sleeve. “Don’t tell anyone.” I didn’t want to look at him. Already I felt ashamed.

“I’ll never tell.” His hand rubbed at the wound in his neck, and he pulled it away to look at his blood. “Wow.”

“Put pressure on it.” I found a tissue in my jacket pocket and handed it to him.

He pressed the tissue against his neck. “That was amazing,” he said. “I — I love you.”

“You don’t even know me.”

He held out his free hand. “I’m Joshua,” he said. “And now I’m a vampire, like you.”

No, you’re not, I wanted to say. But I didn’t contradict him. He was only role-playing, after all.

I might have stayed on in Asheville forever. I had a place to live, friends (of a sort), and a willing source of nourishment. But gradually, I began to emerge from the haze. The way we lived made me more and more uneasy; every day seemed the same, more or less. I wasn’t learning or accomplishing anything. And every night, waiting for me, instead of sleep, was the fact that I’d killed a man.

I rationalized that he fully deserved it. The assurance with which he’d found the forest road and the way he’d laughed at my struggling persuaded me that he’d done to other women what he tried to do to me. Yet my behavior — purely instinctive — in the end could not be excused. Everything my father had taught me argued against what I had done.

At other times I questioned the value of that education. What did it matter to know history, literature, science, or philosophy? All that knowledge hadn’t kept me from murder, and it wasn’t serving me now in any practical sense. I’d survived; that was all that mattered.

During the months of haze, my dreams were murky, often violent, populated by beasts and shadows and jagged trees. In the dreams I ran, chased by something I never saw. Often I awoke with the sense that I’d been trying to call for help, but the words wouldn’t come; sometimes I wondered if the inarticulate sounds that I made in my dreams were actually vocalized.

I’d open my eyes to the same untidy room filled with the possessions of someone I’d never met. No one ever came to see if I was all right. Those were the times when I longed for the mother I’d never met. But what would she think of having a vampire daughter?

Gradually, my dreams began to take on more structure — as if I were dreaming chapters of a story that continued, night after night. The same characters — a man, a woman, a birdlike other — moved through a deep blue landscape among exotic plants and gentle animals. Sometimes they traveled together, but more often they were separate, and I, the dreamer, was privy to each of their thoughts and feelings. They were each looking for something never specified; each felt lonely or sad at times, but they all were patient, curious, even optimistic. I loved them without knowing them well. Going to sleep now seemed more interesting than being awake — a good reason for thinking it was time to leave Asheville.

Joshua was another good reason. He called me his girlfriend, although we’d never kissed or even held hands. I thought of him as a younger brother — pesky at times, but part of the “family.” He seemed always to be around, and he talked of moving into the house. I told him that I needed my space.

One night after dinner (a burrito for him, a half-pint of Joshua’s blood for me), we sat on the floor of my room, both of us leaning against the wall, dazed. Years later I saw a movie about heroin addicts, and the characters evoked Joshua and me in Asheville, in our postprandial state.

“Annie,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

“No,” I said.

He looked so young, sitting by the wall in his scruffy jeans, pressing a paper towel against his neck. I tried to always bite in the same place, to minimize possible infection. I didn’t know then that vampires are germ-free.

“Don’t you love me?” His eyes reminded me of those of another faithful hound, Wally — Kathleen’s dog.

“No.”

I treated him terribly, didn’t I? And no matter what I said or did, he stayed around for more.

“Well, I love you.” He looked as if he might cry, and I suddenly thought, Enough.

“Go home,” I said. “I need to be alone.”

Reluctant, but ever obedient, he stood up. “You’re still my girlfriend, Annie?”

“I’m nobody’s girlfriend,” I said. “Go home.”

Spring arrived, and the whole world turned green. The lacy new leaves on the trees filtered sunlight, their patterns reminding me of a kaleidoscope; the air felt soft. I stretched my fingers close to my eyes and watched sunlight shine through them, watched blood pulse through them. I told Jane that the day was like a poem. She looked at me as if I were a lunatic. “I’m majoring in sociology,” she said. “My days aren’t like poems.”

All I knew about sociology was what my father once said: “Sociology is a poor excuse for science.”

“By the way,” she said, “Joshua called this morning. Twice.”

“He’s annoying,” I said.

“The boy makes me nervous,” Jane said. “It’s like you put a spell over him.”

We were walking through downtown, wearing sunglasses for the first time that year, on our way to a shoe store. Jane always seemed to have plenty of cash, but it was likely that she’d steal a pair, anyway. I felt a sudden claustrophobic sense of oppression — by her, by Joshua, even by the harmless wizards and werewolves.

“I’m thinking of moving on,” I heard myself saying.

“Where to?”

Where, indeed? “To Savannah,” I said. “I have a relative there.”

She nodded. “Want to go this weekend?”

As easily as that, the decision was made.

I didn’t say goodbye to anyone but Paul. “Does Joshua know you’re going?” he asked me.

I said, “No, and please don’t tell him.”

“Annie, that’s cold,” he said. But he gave me a goodbye hug, anyway.

Jane drove fast. The car sped down I-26, and I shuddered as we passed the ramp where Robert Reedy had picked me up.

“You cold?” Jane asked.

I shook my head. “Don’t we turn onto 95 for Savannah?”

“We’re stopping in Charleston first,” she said. “I need to see the rents.”

“The rents?”

“Parents,” she said. And she turned the radio on, loud.

Within an hour we were in Charleston, and Jane stopped the car at a wrought-iron gate. “It’s me,” she said into a speaker, and the gate swung open.

We drove up a winding driveway bordered by tall trees studded with enormous dewy white blossoms; they’re called Southern magnolias, I learned later. The car stopped before a white brick mansion. I suppose I should have been surprised that she was rich, but somehow I wasn’t.

We ended up spending the night. Jane’s parents were tight-faced blond-haired middle-aged people who talked and talked about money. Even when they talked about family — Jane’s brother, a cousin, an uncle — they talked about how much money they had, and what they were spending it on. They fed us shrimp and grits, and enormous crabs whose shells they smashed with silver mallets in order to suck out the meat. They asked questions about Jane’s schoolwork, which she answered ambiguously: “Not really,” or “Kind of,” or “Whatever.” She made a point of checking text messages on her cell phone several times during dinner.

Jane treated them even more contemptuously than I’d treated Joshua. By the next morning, I understood why she shoplifted: it was her way of expressing further contempt for her parents and their materialism.

Nonetheless, when her father handed her a wad of bills as we left, she took them and stuffed them into a pocket of her jeans.

“Well, that’s done,” she said. She spat out the window, and we drove on.

Jane took the Savannah Highway, Route 17, out of Charleston, and after we left the city I got my first sight of the “Low Country.” On either side of the road, reddish-brown marsh grass rippled in the wind. Gray creeks shone like veins of silver in the fields of grass. I rolled down the car window and breathed in the air, which smelled of damp flowers. It made me a little light-headed. I opened my backpack to take a swallow of tonic.

“What is that stuff, anyway?” Jane asked.

“Medicine for my anemia.” I lied without even thinking, these days. The bottle was three-quarters empty. I wondered what I’d do when it was gone.

Jane picked up her cell phone and called Paul. I tuned out her voice.

We passed a sign for Bee Ferry Landing and a gift shop called Blue Heron; the names made me think of my mother. I hadn’t thought of her much in Asheville, but this landscape evoked her, made me imagine her as a girl, growing up amid the marshes and the bittersweet smells. Had she driven down this road when she ran away from us? Had she seen the same signs I was seeing? Had she felt happy, as if she were coming home?

We passed the Savannah River, sapphire-blue, and arrived downtown by lunchtime.

Jane set down her cell phone. “You hungry?” She looked eager to be on her way back to Asheville, and Paul.

“No.” Of course I was hungry, but not for fast food, or even shrimp and grits. “You can let me out anywhere.”

She pulled over near an intersection. I thanked her, but she waved her hand. “The Lounge Wizards will miss you,” she said. “And God, Joshua will probably kill himself.”

“I hope not.” I knew she was joking. I also knew Joshua might want to do such a thing. But I didn’t think he was capable of carrying it out.

We both said “See you,” without conviction.

I watched the gray sedan drive away, much too fast, and I wished her well. We hadn’t been friends, really, but she’d offered me what companionship she could. For that I was grateful.