The Season of Risks

Chapter Eight

As October lurched toward November, we heard about our spring internship assignments. Sophomores at Hillhouse traditionally spent the first half of the spring semester working in the "real world," in locations far from both campus and home, at jobs related to their programs of study.
Since my major was interdisciplinary studies, with a concentration in communications, the internship office sent my student profile to newspapers, magazines, online publications, and similar companies. My fantasy had been to work for a newspaper in DC, covering Cameron's campaign. Even if we couldn't technically be together, I could at least be in the crowds watching him, then writing about him.
Instead, I learned, I'd be spending spring in New York, interning at NetFriend, the social networking website company. Exactly what I'd be doing there wasn't described, except that I had a start date, an address, and a job title: "intern."
I guess my disappointment showed, because Jacey tried to make me feel better. "You'll have a ball in New York," she said.
Her assignment was working at a day care center in Pittsburgh, observing how the theories she'd learned in her education classes worked in the real world. "Pittsburgh!" she said, her eyes shining. "I've always wanted to go to Pittsburgh."
Sloan would remain on campus, finishing his junior year. It would be odd not to have him around to talk to, I thought.
I wanted to call Cameron, to tell him about my assignment. But this was no emergency.
When I called Dashay, she said, "New York? Not bad. Maybe we'll come up and visit you. See a show."
"How's Bennett?" I asked.
"He's making some improvements to the stables," she said. Then she changed the subject to horses.
Meanwhile, the only news I had of Cameron came from a newspaper.
Jacey and I were among a very few Hillhouse students who cared about politics.
Her subscription to the New York Times meant that I saw photographs of Cameron nearly every week.
"He's pretty cool," she said one morning, holding up an article headlined, CAMERON CAMPAIGN DONATIONS TOP $5 MILLION. Next to it, the photo showed him smiling, but his eyes looked tired.
"Remember when we heard him in Savannah?" Jacey said. She didn't know that I'd seen him several times since our class field trip. "I thought back then that he might be our next president, and now I'm sure of it."
I wondered if she'd be so positive if she knew he was a vampire. In any case, Cameron wouldn't even be officially nominated until his party's convention next summer. And anything could happen before that.
"It's too soon to tell," I said, but I was thinking, Why doesn't he call me?
I began doing most of my schoolwork in Sloan's studio, sitting on the floor with my laptop, books spread around me. As I studied, he worked on my portrait. We didn't talk much. We felt comfortable sharing silence.
My third time there, I made a point of looking at the canvas as I was leaving. All it contained was a partial sketch of the wall behind my chair.
Sloan leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets. "I begin with the not-Ari in order to see the Ari."
He sounded more cryptic than Professor Itou. But I'd heard of the concept of negative space, and so I did the polite thing: I nodded as if I completely understood. In order to see what is, you must consider what is not, I told myself.
Professor Itou's influence marked every one of his students. Several began to talk as he talked, in abbreviated bursts of words, and walk as he walked, eyes directed toward the floor or on the fields beyond the windows. He made us want to see beyond the real. I imagined his life as always artful.
And, during the third week of October, he taught us what it was like to be dead.
"Now we come to Butoh." Professor Itou gestured toward the classroom window. A few leaves clung to the trees outside, but the branches were mostly bare. "The dance of darkness."
As he defined it, Butoh wasn't so much a style of dance as the antithesis of style, a reaction to classical dance forms. It had developed in Japan after World War II, during a period of unrest and rebellion.
"A celebration. Grotesque. You might say. It subverts. What you think. Is dance," he said. "Pranks and chaos. They make Butoh."
I'd finally got to the point where I thought I understood wabi-sabi, but Butoh completely eluded me-until the professor played us a videotape of a performance.
A naked man, his thin body painted black as if horribly burned, moved across a field of snow. His body twisted and contorted and spasmed into positions I'd never imagined a human could assume. The stark contrast between the dancer and his environment frightened me; it spoke of decay and death, and yet managed to be beautiful, graceful, powerful. Its unnaturalness seemed natural. Finally the dancer spiraled and fell facedown into the snow. We knew he was dead.
No one said a word for a long time after the video ended. Then the professor made a raspy sound deep in his throat to get our attention. He beckoned for us to leave our seats and come to the front of the classroom. Only Sloan remained in his chair. I couldn't hear what he was thinking.
As we stood there, Professor Itou came to us, one by one, and tapped our shoulders. One by one, we began to dance.
It was a dreadful dance, a rite of recognition that we, too, were going to die. I barely saw the others. I forgot who I was as my body twisted and contracted, simulating death. No one had taught me how to do this, but somehow my body knew.
I don't know how long the dance went on. When I stopped, I felt utterly empty. Sloan wasn't in the room. The rest of us left the class without speaking.
Later that night Dashay called me. "So what are you learning, child?" she asked.
"Learning how to die," I said. It took me half an hour to explain it to her, and when she'd stopped asking questions, she said, "Well, I didn't learn anything like that in my liberal arts education."
"Too bad," I said.
"Uh-huh. I guess." She sounded skeptical. "Listen, Ari, your mother called me. She doesn't want to call you because I guess your voice would make her cry, but me she can talk to. She wants to know why you never answered her letters."
I hadn't received any letters, I told Dashay. Yes, I faithfully checked my mailbox. Our boxes were open receptacles mounted in rows on the walls of the dining hall basement. Mine was almost always empty.
"She sent you three of them. You think someone is stealing your mail?"
It was entirely possible, although I couldn't imagine why anyone would want my mail. "Tell Mae not to worry," I said. "Tell her I'll write to her, and she can send me her thoughts in my dreams."
"I will do that," Dashay said. "But I won't be telling her about your dance of darkness, and I hope you won't tell her, either. That's the sort of thing to make a mother worry."
After the experience of Butoh, Halloween didn't seem at all scary. But then it never did, to me.
Many students considered it their favorite holiday-a chance to wear costumes and makeup more extreme than what they wore every day. Most came to class in disguise. Sloan and I stood out by looking comparatively normal.
When classes were over for the day, Sloan and I were heading for the artists' barn when Richard Meek swooped down from the hillside. He wore a black cape and artificial fangs, and he lunged at us. "I'm here to bite you!" he shouted.
We sidestepped him without pausing, leaving him to attack the students behind us.
"It's a shame, really," Sloan said. "People like him will never get beyond the stereotypes, will they?"
Richard had other stereotypes that bothered me more than that one. "For him," I said, "being a vampire is only a Halloween game."
Sloan stopped walking and looked around to make sure no one else was listening. "Don't you want to show them who we are?" His skin looked unnaturally pale in the faint light, and his eyes had a strange gleam to them.
I shrugged. Of course I did, but I'd been taught not to do that.
"Well, I'd like to show them." We began to walk again. He imitated Richard: "I'm here to bite you!"
"Maybe you need a stronger tonic," I said. To my relief, he laughed. I glanced at his lips and found myself wondering, guiltily, what it might be like to kiss them. I hadn't heard from Cameron since the party in Savannah more than a month ago.
Once in Sloan's studio, I usually went to my spot on the frayed carpet and he to the easel. But we couldn't settle down that day. I fidgeted, picking up silver tubes of paint from the table and setting them down again. Viridian. Cadmium yellow. Burnt umber. Alizarin crimson. The names had a kind of poetry for me.
Sloan watched me for a while. Then I heard him say, "I'm not going to fall in love with you." His voice was so low he might have been talking to himself.
Should I have pretended not to have heard?
Instead, I said, "Why not?" I looked over at him. His face looked even paler than before as he hunched against the wall.
"My heart's broken," he said. "It can't be mended."
"Tell me how it happened." My voice had an urgency that surprised me.
Feeling weak, I sat on the floor, and he told me.
Sloan had grown up in the Falls Road area of Belfast-"an ugly part of the ugliest city I know," he said-a neighborhood known as a frequent location for the Troubles, the Irish phrase for the persistent outbreaks of hostility between Protestants and Catholics. His family was Catholic.
"Dad was on the dole," he said. "Ma had her hands full: five girls and two boys to mind. I was the baby of the family."
He said that from an early age he'd felt like an outsider at home and at school. "My brother is a skanger. You don't know that word? He shaves his head, wears gold chains and trainers, goes crazy over football, drinks too much, sleeps with every woman he can get. There are thousands exactly like him. But see, Ma loves that. She understands him, talks to him in ways she never could with me."
I wondered if his parents might be vampires, but I didn't interrupt.
"I'm the artist in the family." He said it with scorn. "From the time I was a wee lad, I always had a pencil and paper in my hand. For a while they thought I was gay. Then, when I fell in love with Delia, that was even worse, because she's Protestant." His eyes moved rapidly around the room, as if searching for something. Finally he said, "She's a quiet sort. Never has much to say."
How can religion obsess people so? "Couldn't you have kept her a secret?"
He laughed, a bitter sound. "We tried. We needn't have bothered. Belfast is more like a small town than a city, and everybody keeps an eye on everybody else. Try keeping secrets when you live in a house where nine people sleep in three bedrooms.
"And then, what takes the biscuit: I was bit by a vampire." His words turned that translucent crimson color. "Strange to say, it happened on Halloween, when I was fifteen. Seeing Richard in his clown suit brought it back to me just now. There aren't many vampires in the north; they congregate in the south, where people tend to be more tolerant. And besides, the Vunderworld has a strong network, based in Cork, that helps out with relocating newcomers-places to stay, where to find tonic, how to sign up for the dole, if necessary. That's not on over here?"
I couldn't say. "I know it exists," I said. "I just don't know how active it is."
"Anyway, this bloke grabs me at a bonfire. I thought he wanted to fight, and I was more than willing. The best fighters in my neighborhood were the skinny lads like me, not the burly skangers. But instead he bites me, and next thing I know I'm biting him back." Sloan spread out his hands in what I thought must have been another Mentori sign. "You know what comes next."
I remembered my own early days, after I first bit someone: the physical discomfort, the mood swings, the overpowering thirst for blood.
"After that, things got even worse at home. They sensed I'd changed, gone from oddball to some kind of freak, and they didn't like it. My dad said if I didn't shape up, they'd disown me. That was his idea of a joke. So I left."
I tried to imagine leaving my parents, never wanting to see them again. "Don't you miss your family?"
"Only one of my sisters. But once I'd crossed over, she became frightened of me. I could tell by the look in her eyes. It was something of a relief to get away." He stared at the floor, his hair hiding most of his face.
He told me he'd traveled south, to Dublin, changed his name, worked as a dishwasher in a pub. In time he became a barman, and thanks to chatty customers he learned about Hillhouse and about Septimal. "I'd won a few art competitions, and I liked the idea of a school without grades," he said. "So I wrote to them asking about scholarships, and they sent me the forms."
"What happened to Delia?"
He winced. "She stopped loving me, once I became what I am. She told me she couldn't love someone who wasn't human. She wants to have a family one day, and you know how it is for us."
How it might be. He didn't realize I was the product of a union between a vampire and a mortal, and I didn't think this was the time to tell him. But one day, I thought, I might try to have children myself.
"When I looked over the application forms, I decided I might as well take the Septimal. I thought being older would help me bear up. And it has. It's a lot easier, being twenty-two." He sighed. "Listen to me, nattering on."
"Did it hurt?"
"The Septimal? No, not really. It's like any other injection, you know. Stings a bit. And after, when it takes effect, you feel out of sorts from time to time. Growing pains, you might say."
"Did you know that when you talk about vampires, your words are the same color as"-I reached for the tube of paint on the table-"alizarin crimson?"
"I hadn't noticed. You're right." He took his hands out of his pockets and straightened his shoulders. "I want to hear your story. I want to know why it's so important for you to get older. But not tonight. At the moment, I'm keen to get on with the portrait, if that's all right with you."
I opened a textbook, but the words I read didn't register. After I thought about all Sloan had been through, I decided it was a good thing that he couldn't fall in love with me. He seemed even more complicated than I was. And besides, Cameron was still on my mind-and somewhere in my heart.
And that night, he was on my phone. When I answered it, I was walking back from dinner with Jacey. I held up a hand of apology to her and she walked on, already pulling her own phone from her jacket pocket.
The sound of his voice made me wish he was standing next to me, breathing in the dampness, watching the students in their silly costumes, and hearing eerie music coming from the theater building. I absorbed his voice as if it were music, barely paying attention to the words, until he said, "Ari? Are you still there?"
"I'm here."
"So that's okay with you, then?"
"What did you say?" That voice of his, it soothed me so that I heard rhythm and melody more than words.
He said a security company was running background checks on everyone associated with him: friends, employees, his advisors, and his probable running mate. And me.
"Basically everyone who's part of my life," he said.
So I was part of his life? The words warmed me. "What's a background check?" I asked.
"They look at public records relating to your credit history, educational background-that sort of thing. This is only a precaution. If the campaign goes ahead, the media will be scrutinizing everyone around me, looking for scandals."
I took a deep breath. "But I'm not around you. I haven't heard from you in weeks. I don't know why you'd bother to have someone examine my past."
Two noisy students costumed as a skeleton and a devil swept toward me, and I stepped off the path.
His next words came out in a rush. "But don't you remember the talk we had about needing to be patient? Just because we can't be together now doesn't mean we won't be, someday."
"When?"
He sighed. "When you're older."
"How much older?"
"Well, I've been thinking about that," he said. "Your records have you listed at age nineteen, right?"
"This isn't going to work," I said. "I have a fake ID saying I'm nineteen, yes. And I have a forged birth certificate I used to get a driver's license. But Hillhouse records list my real age." They'd admitted me as a prodigy, based on my test scores and admission essays.
He didn't speak for a moment. I watched two students dressed as ghosts come down the path.
"Let me think about this," he said. "Maybe there's a way those records can be altered."
I wanted to ask how, then realized I was better off not knowing. Doing such a thing sounded risky, even criminal, to me. "Okay, say that happens," I said. "What's the magic age that lets us be together?"
"Twenty-one, twenty-two. Somewhere in that range. That's what my aides say. So we'd only have to wait two or three years."
Two years sounded like an eternity. "Why do we have to wait? Can't we at least spend a weekend together?"
There, I'd done it. As my mother said, sometimes a woman has to take the initiative.
"You know I'd love to spend a weekend with you." His voice was softer and lower now. "But we can't risk it. So much is at stake. And the timing isn't right. When it is, we'll be together."
I tried to see it as he did: we could be together for a real eternity. But when I tried to imagine life with Cameron, I couldn't see beyond the present: the distance, the "age problem," the need to keep everything secret.
"I know it's hard," he said, his voice nearly a whisper. "I've been waiting for you for centuries."
The two ghosts came closer. They seemed to shimmer and float through the air. Their forms looked vaguely human, not like sheets with eyeholes cut out. Good costumes, I decided.
Then, as they neared me, what had been two distinct forms moving along the path dissolved into nothingness. It was as if the damp October night had consumed them, absorbed their essences, spirited them away.
"Ari? Are you there?"
I shivered.