The Season of Risks

Chapter Seven

For the next few months, reading and writing and attending class took up most of my time, along with the sorting work I did at the campus recycling center. The busier I stayed, the less time I spent brooding about Cameron. He hadn't called since the night of the reception. And we'd agreed that I shouldn't call him unless it was an emergency. It was part of what he called keeping our relationship "low profile."
The prickling sensation became almost constant. Some days it felt stronger than others, but it rarely went away entirely. It felt as irritating as living with a perpetual dull headache.
I mentioned the sensation to Dr. Cho when I e-mailed her my review of the new tonic; I asked her if maybe my hormones weren't a little too intense. She wrote back that teenage girls and raging hormones went together like oysters and pearls-a comment I found vaguely Zen-like and not especially helpful. But she did adjust the tonic formula, and later she mailed me a case of the stuff.
When I wrote again, to thank her, I asked if vampires might be more prone to depression than humans-a question I doubt I'd have asked had we met in person.
She wrote back almost immediately: "This is another area in which insufficient research has been conducted. But speaking from my own professional practice and personal experience, I think it likely that we are more susceptible to depression, and to elation as well. Our senses are keener, and we experience life with greater intensity than the majority of mortals do."
Something Jacey said helped me come to terms with my feelings. Her parents had given her a subscription to the New York Times, and one day at lunch she read me portions of an article about an experimental drug called ZIP. When injected into the brains of rats, the drug caused immediate loss of long-term memory.
Jacey read, "'This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues," said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a neurobiologist at Harvard.'"
The article said the drug didn't affect short-term memory and that its effects were reversible; you had to keep taking it to block the long-term memories, and if you stopped, they flooded back.
"Imagine that," she said. "You could give your brain a makeover. Take away all the memories that cause you pain."
"Would that be a good thing?" I was trying to imagine living without remembering the deaths of Kathleen and Autumn. Yes, I'd be a happier person, but I wouldn't be me. "Aren't we defined by our bad experiences as much as by our good ones?"
"I don't know." Jacey dragged a fork through her plate of macaroni and cheese. "There are some things I'd prefer not to remember."
Aside from Autumn's death, I had no idea what "some things" might be, and I wasn't about to ask. How little I knew her, this person I considered my close friend.
Then I thought of Cameron. Given the pain of separation, would I prefer to forget him completely?
No. I wanted to keep my memories of him, even if they hurt. I thought, Yes, you can give your brain a makeover. But what about your heart?
In the journals I've kept since I was twelve, negative entries take up more space than positive ones. I suspect it's because we remember painful moments in greater detail than pleasant ones; our memory networks function best when we're having strong emotional reactions. Sad to say, twenty years from now I'll probably remember the night of the reception more clearly than the day Cameron first kissed me.
Not everything that year was depressing. There were fall days that began with crisp blue mornings, led to golden afternoons, and ended in starlit nights perfumed by the incense of burning leaves. We rode horses, read books, and stayed up late talking about trivia or debating weighty questions that we were all too young to fully understand.
Except, perhaps, for Sloan. I didn't know how old he was, but his depth of understanding and grasp of issues clearly exceeded everyone else's. He also had a healthy appreciation for absurdity.
Our creative writing classes were dedicated to fiction workshops in October; the professor said she wanted to get the fiction over with first, so that we'd have more time to focus later on poetry. And one of the first stories we workshopped was written by Sloan.
The writer had to distribute copies of the manuscript during the class before the one in which we discussed it. So far, most of the stories had been written in the present tense and sounded as if the writer had thrown them together at the last minute. Professor Warner had a list of things we couldn't say in the workshop discussion. We could suggest that a character was so intriguing he deserved more development, but we couldn't say that the character was stereotypical or badly drawn or boring. Every comment had to be phrased as a positive suggestion.
The night after Sloan passed out his story, I came back to the dorm to find Jacey lying flat on the floor of our room, her face streaked with tears.
Immediately I knelt next to her. "What's wrong?"
She shook her head silently, then burst out laughing. More tears ran down her face. When she finally could talk, she said, "Sloan's story. You have to read it."
I did.
The story featured a grandmother who, although quite dead, was addicted to heroin and whiskey and spent her quality time shooting small animals. She had a passionate romance with a politician she'd met at an anti-nuclear-power rally, but their affair was doomed since he was Catholic and she was Protestant. The story ended when the two of them crashed their UFO. "As their craft plummeted toward Earth, Emily Newgate knew they were going to go to hell," the ending read, "but she didn't mind, so long as they both ended up in the same hell."
In the space of five pages, Sloan managed to break every single one of Professor Warner's taboos. And, despite the inane material, his writing style was flawless.
My reaction to the story was more subdued than Jacey's. Yes, it was funny. But it also seemed more than a little juvenile to break all the rules simply because you could.
Professor Warner began the next class with a lecture. "Writing is a serious art, not a game," it began. Although she never mentioned his name, we all knew whom she was talking about.
Sloan sat very straight in the chair next to mine. Art is a game, he thought.
"And a writing workshop is an opportunity to learn, not to play." Professor Warner's face was crimson as she paced the front of the classroom.
Suddenly Sloan stood up. "I apologize," he said. "I wasted everyone's time, and I'm sorry. I usually overreact to rules and regulations. It's a childish habit of mine, and one of these days I hope to outgrow it."
Professor Warner looked confused, but not angry. She told Sloan to sit down. Then she gave us a writing assignment-describe the room you remember best from your childhood-that took up the rest of the class. I had no problem describing my bedroom in Saratoga Springs, from its dark blue drapes to the old oak bed to the lithophane lamp on the bedside table.
When I finished, I looked up. Everyone else was still writing. Professor Warner watched Sloan, her face still puzzled. She was thinking, Am I a bad teacher? I felt sorry for her.
Once again, I waited outside the classroom building to talk to Sloan. When he came out, I said, "That was a brave thing to do."
He shook his head. "Sometimes I act like a five-year-old."
We walked along the path, away from the buildings. A breeze came up, making me hug my sweater to my skin. "How old are you?" I asked.
"Oh, that's a good question." He bent to pick up a rock, examined it, let it fall to the ground again. He looked behind us before he spoke. "I was fifteen when I was taken."
I hadn't heard that expression before. "You mean, when you became other?"
"Yes. But now I'm twenty-two."
"How can that be?"
"I had the injection, you know. In Ireland they call it Septimal. Don't they have it here?"
I didn't know. "It's an aging drug?"
"Yeah," he said. "Septimal. One shot takes you along seven years. More than that, if the dose is adjusted. You can be any age you want. I figured twenty-two was good. Peak strength and mental ability, you know?" He kicked another stone out of the way. "Only sometimes, it's like I revert. Act like a kid again."
"How does the drug work?"
"It accelerates your cell growth, so you get taller, your bones get stronger, that sort of thing. Your face changes, looks more adult. Your brain ages, too." He looked at me. "How old are you?"
"I crossed when I was thirteen. That was two years ago."
"And thirteen feels too young." He didn't phrase it as a question. "Yeah, I get that. Although you don't look your age, really. Actually, I've been studying you."
"Me?" We'd come to the second barn, where the art students had studios.
"I did a sketch of you in class one day. Want to see it?" He gestured toward the barn's upper story.
I'd been in that barn only once. It smelled pleasantly of turpentine used by the artists and faintly of horses, who'd been kept there until they were moved to a more modern stable down the road.
We climbed a ladder to the loft, which had been partitioned into studios. Skylights had been built into the roof. Sloan's studio had a threadbare carpet on its floor, an easel, and a table, smeared with generations of paint, that held brushes, a palette, and tubes of color. Two chairs with cane seats stood against the wall, which also was smeared with paint. A card table stacked with paper and sketchbooks had been set in the corner.
"Do you draw?" Sloan asked, watching me take it all in.
"Not well." My father had taught me simple sketching techniques, but we both agreed that I showed no special aptitude for art.
Sloan took a sketchbook from the table, opened it, and set it on the easel. "This is the drawing I made the day I met you."
It was a landscape, almost scientific in the precision of its details. At first glance it resembled a black and white photograph of a hillside with a stream meandering through the background.
But when you looked twice-and you had to look twice, because the drawing pulled you back into it-each trunk, each twig, each blade of grass had been subtly altered, made unnatural. Real trunks didn't have quite that texture. Actual twigs didn't form those patterns. And the grasses, naturally graceful, were so bent and twisted that they looked arthritic, menacing.
The aberrations were subtle enough to barely register at first. As I looked deeper, they contrived to produce a sense of unease, even nausea. I tried to look away, but my eyes stayed with the drawing, fascinated by the force of its repulsiveness. The strange landscape, each detail precise but somehow wrong, pulled me into it. The tall grasses seemed to beckon and threaten, all at once. A wave of vertigo came over me, and I had to step back, touch the wall for support.
Sloan was watching me intently. "I wanted to make something unsettling," he said.
The dizziness passed. "Why did you want to do that?"
"It's how I see the natural world," he said. "Every living thing embodies its own death."
"Very wabi-sabi." I sat on the floor, my eyes still on the sketch. Even from this angle, it arrested my eyes. I braced my hands on the carpet and willed myself to turn my head and look away.
Sloan picked up the sketchbook and leafed through its pages. Then he folded the book and set it on the easel again.
This sketch seemed to have nothing in common with the other one. My first reaction, had I seen both works in a gallery, would have been that they weren't made by the same artist. The sketch was me.
The face I tried so hard to glimpse in the mirror gazed back at me, recognizable despite a lack of detail. With a few pencil strokes he had made a realistic, complex portrait. Sloan was a talented artist indeed.
I stood up and walked to the easel. My eyes, very like my mother's, gazed back at me. I had her chin, too. My nose was a blend-not as small as hers or as long as my father's. But I had his mouth. Ears like hers.
"What do you think?" Sloan crossed his arms.
"Oh, I like it. Very much." I couldn't take my eyes off myself. For the first time I knew how others saw me.
The impression the sketch gave me was of someone who was curious, sensitive, vulnerable. I decided that I liked her. "It doesn't make me uneasy at all. Why is it so different from the other one?"
"Because you're not going to die." He sat on the floor, looking up at me, and the words, translucent crimson, wafted like dust motes.
And for the first time in a long while, I felt glad I was a vampire.
"I'd like to do a real portrait of you, if you're willing to sit for it," Sloan said.
Yes, I was willing. I wanted to see more.