A/N: This is part of a writer's challenge I am doing for myself called "Spring Cleaning." I'm going through all scrapped stories on my computer and brandishing every first chapter online to see which one is worth continuing. First story to get 10 reviews gets a second chapter. If I don't get any bites, I can move on and scrap the lot. Have a browse and see what interests you. This one is obviously about vampires.
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CHAPTER ONE
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Lately Riku had been acting weird.
Riku, Kairi, and I are best buds. Riku and I have been neighbors from birth. Kairi is a girl who moved to Destiny Islands when I was five and Riku was six. From then till now we've been inseparable. We go everywhere together, even the bathroom. Like a community of free spirits. Our playground has been the entire island since the time we could row, so anywhere you can find some bushes or squat is fair game. My best memory of peeing was the first time Kairi barged in on Riku and I. Her white clogs made a puttering sound on the dirt ground. When she asked what we were doing we responded, "peeing!" She did not faze us one bit. We didn't care. At first she said we were gross. But after we shrugged and told her to leave, she stomped to our side, squatted, pulled her underwear around her ankles, and grinned up at us. A puddle of yellow pooled underneath her. We were at once shocked, grossed out, and to be honest, secretly impressed.
When she said, "I win!" it pretty much sealed the deal on our friendship. We laughed like crazy. Like a gentleman, Riku offered her an old hanky that happened to be in his pocket and told her she could wipe herself with it. But the whole rest of the day she kept complaining that she had germs on her hands. Riku told her that salt killed germs, so she soaked her palms in the sea for about an hour before going home for the night. After about thirty minutes watching her, or what felt like thirty minutes, Riku and I caved and did it as well. So if you took a photo of the beach at that time, you'd just see three kids with their hands stuck in the waves grinning and chatting. When it was time to go home, we rowed side-by-side and talked more about bodily excretions. We had already covered peeing, so saliva was next. We all spit into the waves. Kairi asked if there was salt in spit. Riku said yeah, but more was in tears. How about pee? Not sure. Sweat? It stings when it gets in your eyes, so best guess is that it's pretty salty. Blood? Blood plasma has more than saliva. But what about blood itself? Riku bit his lip as he thought about it, chewing and chewing. Then he grinned. Pretty salty.
"Gross!" Kairi squealed. "Gross!" Riku snickered in a high pitched, mocking voice. Kairi swung for him with her oar but he dodged easily.
"Who drinks their own blood?" she snapped with wrinkled nose.
"I usually drink other people's blood," Riku responded. "Usually girls named Kairi."
"Do not!" Kairi roared, swinging her oar again. Another miss.
"Don't we both drink blood, Sora?" asked Riku. I nodded my head yes with a fat grin, showing my canines.
"Wrong!" Kairi responded. "You've got baby, dinky teeth! You couldn't suck a fly!"
"I do the sucking," Riku responded, "then I put it in Sora's mouth like a mama bird."
"Gross!" Kairi bellowed so loud some gulls fluttered from the surface of the waves ahead. "Why drink blood when you could have pizza, or ice cream, or cake?"
My stomach rumbled ominously.
"Hear that, Kairi?" Riku asked. "Better row fast. Sora's hungry."
I raised my head and howled at the sky like I was turning into a werewolf. Kairi barked that we were joking, but she looked a little scared. When I asked suddenly if she wanted to come to my house for dinner, she said that she didn't want to get eaten. Riku scoffed.
"You don't seriously believe in vampires and monsters, right, Kairi?" he drawled. Kairi shrugged and mumbled that she didn't know.
"I'm still young, so I don't know what's real and what's not, yet," she said.
"I know what's real and what's not!" I announced.
"So do I!" chimed in Riku, not to be outdone.
"Then that means you're definitely vampires!" Kairi responded in earnest. "What else would a real vampire say to human dinner?"
"Honest, Kairi!" I pleaded, surprised by the sudden feeling of anxiety that was tugging through me. Maybe it was just because Kairi's bottom lip was trembling, but I didn't want her to be scared of me or to think I was something I wasn't. And to tell you the truth, I was getting a little scared of monsters myself, and say if there were one waiting for us under the pier where all the dinghies and trawlers were tied up safe, teeth sharp and red and legs pale white under the black waves, I didn't want one of us running ahead because they were scared of the wrong person. So I convinced her with all my might until the pier emptied ahead of us and the waves really did turn black under the setting sun and my arms trembled because in the process of scaring Kairi, I'd scared myself. Because I know better I knew Riku was scared too, even though he would never admit it. His eyes darted back and forth and his arms twitched. When we finally hopped out of our boats and tied them quiet and quick as could be, we raced each other to the street lamps lining the entrance into town by the fisherman's bar and ignored the voices sitting on the deck saying that we were out past curfew and that we should be home with our mothers. But inside ourselves, when we heard the boisterous laughter and clinking glasses and chummy jokes, we relaxed and warmed up. Then we got to talking about real food on the way home. Kairi liked pizza and ice cream. I liked burgers. Riku liked fish and cake. That gave Kairi and I a good laugh. I suggested that Kairi come over to my place for pizza and burgers some night. We could even buy fish fingers for Riku. She gave an enthusiastic "yes."
Riku had ten dollars pocket money. I had two. Kairi had fifteen- why, I never figured out, but it had something to do with her being the mayor's adoptive daughter and him having "fun money." We went to the supermarket with it and bought everything from the frozen aisle. While Kairi was picking which flavor ice cream she liked best, Riku sneaked up behind her and bit her neck. She nearly had a conniption in the middle of the supermarket. When one of the cashiers peered towards us with a threatening glance, we quieted down and gathered our things. On our way out, we went past a record store the older kids in town frequented and Riku bought a PG13 movie that was on sale. When we reached my house, I snuck everyone up the paopu tree onto the balcony by my bedroom window. I always left it open a crack for fresh air. Now we tumbled through it onto my bed trying not to giggle too hard. When I found out my mom had not come home from work yet, we devised a plan to turn off the movie and hide Kairi under the sink if she barged through the front door.
We microwaved or prepared our feast piece by piece. Then we draped each dish before the television: candy, popcorn, ice cream, pizza, burger bites, ketchup, and fish fingers, side by side. I can't remember what movie we watched or what it was even about. I think it was a monster flick, but we gave up watching halfway through because almost all the food was gone and I wanted to show Kairi the cool stuff in my bedroom. First came my lamp, then my desk and chair, and lastly of course, my bed with the big bay window lofted above it. We took turns pretending to fall out of it by holding each other by the knees as the 'faller' flailed their arms over the windowsill. Then the third person would drag them in and heal them by wrapping them in my covers. When my mom finally burst through the front door and called my name, asking what I'd been doing, I said I brought Riku over and we bought food. I raced to TV and turned off the movie while Riku said hello. Then we cleaned up the plates and threw away the packages together, sneaking the remainder of the candy and popcorn into my room and eating it as we watched the sky fill with stars. When they shone brightly enough, we named the constellations. Kairi knew almost all of them.
"That's Mwynn, the mother goddess," she called up to a constellation near shrouded by the palm above my house.
"Don't all girls bleed once a month?" Riku blurted suddenly. Kairi and I stared at him like he had two heads. He seemed surprised, himself, because his cheeks went red and he sputtered like he had not meant to say what had just come out of his mouth. After leaving him to flounder for a couple seconds, Kairi shrugged and said she had heard of it, but that it hadn't happened to her, yet. She added that she thought the whole thing sounded a little scary, and that she would rather she did not have to go through with it at all.
"What if I lose too much?" she worried aloud.
"Well, what blood type are you?" I asked. She responded that she was AB (-). She said it was really rare, so her parents were already making her bank up a store just in case she had to go in for an emergency surgery or something. When I grinned and told her I was AB (-), too, her face glowed with joy.
"That's perfect, Sora!" she cheered. Riku and I gasped and shushed her in case my mother would hear. For a moment she cupped her hand over her mouth in fright. Then she relaxed and said that she and I would have someone to look after each of us, now.
"And Riku can be our transport to the hospital!" I added with a wink. Riku scoffed and said that he would not be sticking around Destiny Islands just to cart one of us to the hospital. When Kairi asked why, I rolled my eyes and told her for him that he was planning on building a raft.
"It's going to be tarp, rope, and driftwood," he continued for me. "I'll find my supplies on the beach and the island. Then I'll string it all together and set sail."
"Why don't you just walk across the Channel Bridge?" Kairi suggested. "Once you get past that, you're on the mainland and you can take a train."
"Because if I run away, the first places they'll look are the bridge and the ferry service," Riku hissed in return. Kairi pursed her lips and muttered that a search boat was way faster than a raft. Riku ignored her. He was going to build his raft, and it would be big enough and fast enough to carry him the hundred miles from Destiny Islands to the mainland, where he would blend in with the foreign population, get a job, and begin his life away from the stuffy, backwards ways of the Islanders. Kairi fell silent. She must have known the inevitable was on its way. When Riku asked her what living on the mainland had been like before she had gone to live with the mayor, she shrugged and said that she did not remember. I didn't even buy it once hundred percent, but neither of us pushed her. The air had gone tense for some reason. The spell broke when my mom knocked on my bedroom door. Kairi slithered under my bed in a flash while Riku and I covered her with our legs. When my mom came in to kiss us both good night, I protested fervently, not wanting Kairi to think I was a mama's boy. In my head, I thought I heard her laughing under my legs. Eventually my mom left us alone, and we crawled back onto my bed and snuggled up together.
"My dad's going to kill me," Kairi sighed in contentment, obviously lost for care. But neither Riku nor I were worried either. We both knew we'd made a dear friend that day, and no one could take that away from us except ourselves.
It's all a bit dreamy now. That old memory is a haze. I said already that Riku has been acting weird. His fingers tremble and his eyes burn. He grips his hands into fists. He wipes at his eyes and averts his gaze at random moments. A month back, when Kairi made a thalassa shell lucky charm in her art class and gave it to Riku to keep, he said he wouldn't need it where he was going. When his hands balled into fists again, I noticed a bandage on the soft of his arm. I don't know why, but today was the day I noticed. He shook his fist and the skin bulged like a swollen penny under gauze. I felt sick.
"I'm so angry."
Maybe I feel this way because I'm scared.
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