Preface
I was burning. I hadn't felt like this in… well I could stop there. I hadn't ever felt like this.
Chapter 1
My name is Evangeline. That is all that I really know. You could ask me how old I am, what my favorite food is, if I'm alive… I wouldn't know. I suppose I could tell you when I was born, but it wouldn't make sense for me to be sitting here in a high school cafeteria if I was born on December 24th, 1939. I could tell you when I was reborn, but I think it would be more appropriate to tell you about the day my life stopped making sense.
* * *
It was the night of my senior prom, and my date, Johnny, had just invited me to his house. I had been so elated when he'd asked me to the big dance that I never suspected that he had ulterior motives. We were sitting on his back porch, and I was marveling over his dark, almost red eyes; his long wavy hair, when he suddenly turned towards me and roughly grabbed me by the shoulders. His now hungry eyes bored into mine. "Goodbye, Evangeline," were the last words I heard him say as his teeth ripped into my neck. He had ulterior motives, just not the ones I expected.
"You won't have her!" someone bellowed. Not seconds after Johnny attacked me, I heard that same someone growl and knock Johnny off of me. I could tell there was a fight going on, but I was bleeding and burning. For the first time in my life, I felt real pain. It was more than just pain, however; that implies a certain amount of understanding. There was no understanding in this torture. It seemed like eternity that I burned. I couldn't tell day from night, nor could I hear my own cries of pain. After a while I began to become aware of time passing. I wondering who, or what, had torn my near-murderer from me. Why had he left me here so long? I wanted to look for my savior, but I still couldn't move from the bloodstained deck that served as a stage to the night that I was changed forever.
* * *
I am a vampire. That was something that I realized when I felt the inhuman speed of my movements as I lifted myself up off Johnny's deck, saw my beautiful reflection in the broken glass of his wrecked car, and finally felt the urge to do something I'd never done before: kill a human. My throat ached for their blood, but I knew that I couldn't kill someone. That would truly make me a monster. I ran as far as I could, leaving behind all humans but clinging to my humanity.
I dug myself into the ground, and I sat there for hours contemplating what I had become. I was so thirsty I was sure I was going to be driven insane. As I was sitting in my little hovel, I heard a heartbeat. I knew my heart was still, so I stood up silently. A huge deer was nibbling on some saplings. I could hear it's heart thumping, it's blood rushing, and in an instant I had snapped its neck and drained it of all its blood. I was both disgusted and awed, and I then I realized that I had found a new way to fight what I had become.
* * *
Fifty- two years later
I never heard the voice of the man that both saved me and abandoned me again after the night I was changed. I searched for him years after that, but to no avail. So here I am, in high school.
Again.
I suppose I could've just become a nomad, but being that far away from my past would only make me less human. And I never really gave up hope that I'd find him, and out in the middle of some random forest didn't really strike me as the best place to look for someone. Right now I was searching for a needle in a haystack, but just searching the wilderness for him seemed even more unreasonable.
So, I chose to live a different kind of lonely life. I was sitting at a five-person lunch table, all alone. I looked at my food. I hadn't eaten human food since I first tried to when I began my pathetic little facade. I remembered all too clearly what that egg salad sandwich had smelled like two weeks after I had choked it down out of curiosity… Yuck.
Graduation was in a few weeks, so I would be free to move on to a new high school, college, whatever. It didn't really matter to me anymore. You could hardly describe my existence as free.
I'd always dreamed of finding more of my kind, but I remembered the monster that Johnny had been and decided that even if I did find more vampires, they would probably be like him. In any case, I decided to go further north. Alaska, maybe… something told me that I might have more luck there. Ha, luck. That would be a change.
