When I was little, my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to run around playing tag anymore. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to run, period.
This cheesed four-year-old me. All my friends were scampering about, climbing over jungle gyms and tackling each other. I stood off to the side, my mother’s hand clamped about my own. She and I walked on the jungle gym. Her hand kept me from running off across the woodchips.
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t run. I thought it was just some dumb rule meant to keep me in line, like the ones that went: bed by seven thirty and no movies on a school night. My mother worked from home. I came home from kindergarten one day and she was in a meeting, so I left to join my friends in the park. We played tag. We tried to put a baseball through a basketball hoop. We ran circuits on the playground and climbed up the slides.
Then I fell over.
It had happened before. I had thought nothing of it. Didn’t everyone get tired and fall over when they played?
One boy hesitated and asked if I was alright. I said yes and tried to stand.
I fell back over.
“Are you tired?” he wanted to know.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m breathing too hard, I think.”
“My sister has asthma,” he told me. “She sounds like that sometimes. Her breathing gets tight and squeaky. Do you have asthma?”
“I don’t think so,” I panted, trying to breathe. “My parents said I’m— I’m sick—”
My lungs felt like they were closing, my throat filling with cotton balls. I couldn’t force air through. The tightness only got worse as I panicked. The other boys stood around me, unsure of what to do and hoping I’d start breathing normally again.
That was the first time I thought I was going to die. But my breathing eased. I stood on shaky legs and went home. My mother noticed how pale I was and told me not to run so much and to be very, very careful. I was sick, she said. I had to stay safe.
My illness is: my body sucks at staying alive.
My lungs suck. They were the first to go, back when I was four. My parents took me to several doctors, but none of them could diagnose me. I just had bad lungs.
My bones suck. I guess they were the first to go, really, because I was born with sucky bones. They’re brittle, and I’ve broken them seven times. Once I tripped, landed on my arm, and the bone cracked. I hadn’t twisted it at all— it just broke.
My blood sucks. At age eight I developed pretty serious anemia. I have to take iron supplements. They’re disgusting.
My heart sucks. It started sucking during seventh grade history class, when I picked up my dropped pencil. I stood suddenly, my head swam, and it felt like two, giant hands were crushing my heart in iron fingers. The world blackened and woke up in the hospital.
So far, the rest of my organs are in normal working condition, but I often wonder if I’ll wake up with a broken pancreas and type one diabetes. Since my body seems to be deteriorating at a steady rate, I suspect that will be the case. I’m not sure I’ll make it to my forties.
On top of my general suckiness, I’m weak as a baby. I can’t perform most exercises without endangering myself, so my muscle tone is zilch. And instead of getting heavy due to inactivity, my body is under so much stress simply trying to keep me alive that I’m skinny like a stick. At five-seven, I hit a whopping one hundred and thirteen pounds. I am, in one word, pathetic.
“Will? Willam Matthews? Gym class?”
I huffed air towards my flop of curling red bangs. “Dude. It’s yoga.”
Buck grinned. His teeth flashed under the flourescent lights of the gym. “I dunno… warrior III is grueling.”
I kicked my mat so it rolled itself out. Buck was already lounging like a cat upon his, looking like he owned the whole school. His red hair glowed. His hair was not like mine; mine was brick. His was fire.
“Do you do yoga?” I ventured. I hadn’t the faintest clue what warrior III meant, nor was I feeling particularly warrior-y.
“Naw. I just need the credit. But I can do tree pose. And— uh— criss-cross-apple-sauce. Lotus? Is that what it’s called?”
“No idea.”
I sat down and let my air escape. Inhale four, hold seven, exhale eight. Most people used this technique to relieve stress. I did it so I wouldn’t hyperventilate and die.
The rest of the class sat on yoga mats in a big circle. Three were already criss-cross-apple-sauce-lotus-whatever. Several more were on their phones. One guy was whacking his friend with a rolled-up mat. Classy.
The gym teacher walked in, told the boy to knock it off, and sat on her own yoga mat. “We’re starting easy,” she announced. “We’ll do some light warm-ups followed by strengthening poses and relaxation. Many of you may struggle at first; yoga is a lot harder than it looks. Don’t worry if you’re not flexible enough. Alright, first we’ll stand and raise our arms. Breathe in…”
She walked us through a sun salutation. I was introduced to warriors I and II. Buck nailed the tree pose.
“Fold yourself downward,” she continued, lowering her nose toward her knees. “Walk out to downward dog…”
I pressed my hands to the mat and sucked in a breath as blood rushed to my head. My chest twinged. Four, seven, eight, c’mon, you stupid internal organs—
Buck's elbow pressed into my bicep. The sudden, sharp feeling helped me focus, and my breath evened. My best friend resumed downward dog like nothing had happened, his heels pressed to the mat. (He was already stupid good at sports. Who said he could be flexible, too?)
“Thank you,” I whispered.
His grey eyes shot to mine, peering at me below his arm. His hair dripped down like a flow of lava. Stop dying, he mouthed.
Class finished. We piled into the storage room to put away our mats, then headed to the locker rooms to change. I didn’t like changing rooms much; they smelled like boy-sweat and mold, and everyone could see how skinny I was. Usually I could hide behind jeans and baggy T-shirts, but after gym my thin frame was on full display.
But as a high school junior, I’d been with these guys for at least three years, many of them for longer. They’d gotten used to my sickness and general pathetic aura.
And they were all scared of Buck.
The teenage boy in question had finished changing back into his jeans and Queen hoodie, the band’s elaborate coat of arms gracing his back. Buck sat on one of the low metal benches, kicking his foot as he waited for me to finish. He’d adopted me back in ninth grade, when we’d moved up to high school. I’d gone to Frederick Allen Memorial Middle School. Buck had skipped grades K through eight.
He hadn’t skipped them, he often insisted. He’d just taken them earlier than everyone else. Ninth grade was the extent of his schooling, but he’d taken the grade again because by tenth grade— according to him-- everyone had found their clique and he didn’t want to be left out. I always scoffed at that, because someone like Buck never struggled to make friends.
‘Followers’ would be a better word. Buck had followers, not friends.
I didn’t count as a follower. I didn’t follow Buck around. If anything, he followed me around. He’d adhered to me in the first week of ninth grade and hadn’t unstuck since. Maybe it was because I wasn’t afraid of him, unlike the rest of the school. I was always so close to dying that death didn’t quite scare me anymore.
I shut my locker. Buck leapt to his feet, graceful as water. He grabbed his backpack, then, before I could beat him to it, grabbed mine. I rolled my eyes, but kept my mouth shut. This had happened enough times that I knew protesting would get me nowhere.
The bell announcing the end of school blared over the loudspeaker. Buck slapped my shoulder like I’d seen other guys in my class smack their buddies, except right before impact he softened the blow to a pat. Willam Matthews is breakable, my class’s unsaid rule went. Don’t break him.
“Move it,” Buck said. “I’m hungry.”
The locker room went quiet. I rolled my eyes. “Dude.”
Buck turned, a glint in his eye. “Willam. The ice cream shop closes at four. Four! It’s three fifteen! We gotta book it.”
“I hate booking it.”
He dragged me to the locker room door. “Then why are you always reading?”
“You’re hilarious.”
The door shut with a bang behind us. Buck liked dramatic exits. He liked dramatic entrances. He liked being dramatic.
I raised my eyebrow at him. “Was that really necessary?”
Buck was cackling. “Did you see their faces? They looked like they were going to wet themselves!”
I grumbled, trying in vain to wrest my backpack from Buck. “You’re going to get more parental complaints.”
He scoffed. “What’re they gonna do? Expel me?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll just go somewhere else.”
I was quiet. Truth was, I didn’t want him to go somewhere else. He was the only person who didn’t visibly pity me. More than that, he was my friend.
Buck cocked his head and grinned. “They’re saying I’m gonna drain you dry.”
“Ooh, like we’ve never heard that one before.”
Buck paused for a moment, still listening to the conversation in the locker room. “Apparently we always go for the weakest in the herd.”
“That’s more insulting to me than to you. Who’re they trashing, again?”
He snickered. “It’s true, though. You’re weak like a tall, skinny baby.”
“Gee, thanks.”
We approached an intersection between two halls. A tenth grader on her way to after-school freedom stepped out in front of us, and I crashed into Buck to avoid flattening her. “Sorry!” she said. “Wasn’t looking.”
“Totally fine,” I assured her. “Have a nice day.”
She continued down the hall. I walked a few paces, then turned when Buck didn’t follow. “I thought you wanted to get ice crea—”
His eyes—
His eyes were—
Buck pinched his nose between his left thumb and forefinger, as if he smelled something bad. “Dammit. Sorry about that.”
“Whe— when was the last time you… you know…”
“Last week.” Today was Thursday. It must’ve been at least five days ago. “Oh, wipe that look off your face. We can go a month before things turn south.”
I’d said I wasn’t really afraid of death. But it was hard not to feel your blood run cold when a predator’s eyes stared at you like—
Buck was a vampire. The vampires lived mostly outside of human politics and commerce, keeping to their manors. They were allowed to live in human nations, provided they obeyed that nation’s laws. Otherwise, they did as they pleased, ruling their Shires and defending their boundaries. The vampire Shires ignored human national borders, forming a matrix of kingdoms above the human countries.
Vampires did not kill people. If one did, humans were, by agreement, allowed to hunt and slay them. Instead, vampires typically consumed animal blood, though a surprising number of humans consented to donating blood or actually being bitten. Vampires needed to eat and drink human food, too, as consistently as a human would.
Buck was a subject of Mythem Shire and lived in the lord’s manor. But, since he hadn’t been able to finish his education before he was Turned, he attended my high school. He said he wanted to. Nut.
“Maybe you should drink blood more often,” I said, calming down. “If you look like that after a week. You’d feel better, anyway.”
He started off after me. “I’m fine.”
I frowned. “Are you sure? Cause that looked kind of bad…” Buck’s eyes only looked like that when he was really thirsty. Like he was fighting the world to keep from moving.
“No! It’s just— you surprised me, that’s all.”
I snickered, feeling relaxed now that Buck had gone back to normal. “O-kay. But if I trip on the sidewalk and run into you, you better not—”
Buck lept, covering the space between us. My back pressed into the wall as he grabbed my shoulders. “I. Would. Never. Hurt. You.”
I swallowed. My heart thundered in my ears.
Buck let out a stream of air. “Idiot,” he grumbled, releasing me and stalking away.
I chased after him. “You’re pretty weird, dude.”
He scoffed, the tension draining from his shoulders as he grabbed my arm to stop me from running. “I’m not the one who can’t walk the mile, much less run it.”
“Way to make it about me.”
“Whatever.” He shifted the weight of our backpacks. “C’mon. We’ll miss the ice cream.”
This cheesed four-year-old me. All my friends were scampering about, climbing over jungle gyms and tackling each other. I stood off to the side, my mother’s hand clamped about my own. She and I walked on the jungle gym. Her hand kept me from running off across the woodchips.
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t run. I thought it was just some dumb rule meant to keep me in line, like the ones that went: bed by seven thirty and no movies on a school night. My mother worked from home. I came home from kindergarten one day and she was in a meeting, so I left to join my friends in the park. We played tag. We tried to put a baseball through a basketball hoop. We ran circuits on the playground and climbed up the slides.
Then I fell over.
It had happened before. I had thought nothing of it. Didn’t everyone get tired and fall over when they played?
One boy hesitated and asked if I was alright. I said yes and tried to stand.
I fell back over.
“Are you tired?” he wanted to know.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m breathing too hard, I think.”
“My sister has asthma,” he told me. “She sounds like that sometimes. Her breathing gets tight and squeaky. Do you have asthma?”
“I don’t think so,” I panted, trying to breathe. “My parents said I’m— I’m sick—”
My lungs felt like they were closing, my throat filling with cotton balls. I couldn’t force air through. The tightness only got worse as I panicked. The other boys stood around me, unsure of what to do and hoping I’d start breathing normally again.
That was the first time I thought I was going to die. But my breathing eased. I stood on shaky legs and went home. My mother noticed how pale I was and told me not to run so much and to be very, very careful. I was sick, she said. I had to stay safe.
My illness is: my body sucks at staying alive.
My lungs suck. They were the first to go, back when I was four. My parents took me to several doctors, but none of them could diagnose me. I just had bad lungs.
My bones suck. I guess they were the first to go, really, because I was born with sucky bones. They’re brittle, and I’ve broken them seven times. Once I tripped, landed on my arm, and the bone cracked. I hadn’t twisted it at all— it just broke.
My blood sucks. At age eight I developed pretty serious anemia. I have to take iron supplements. They’re disgusting.
My heart sucks. It started sucking during seventh grade history class, when I picked up my dropped pencil. I stood suddenly, my head swam, and it felt like two, giant hands were crushing my heart in iron fingers. The world blackened and woke up in the hospital.
So far, the rest of my organs are in normal working condition, but I often wonder if I’ll wake up with a broken pancreas and type one diabetes. Since my body seems to be deteriorating at a steady rate, I suspect that will be the case. I’m not sure I’ll make it to my forties.
On top of my general suckiness, I’m weak as a baby. I can’t perform most exercises without endangering myself, so my muscle tone is zilch. And instead of getting heavy due to inactivity, my body is under so much stress simply trying to keep me alive that I’m skinny like a stick. At five-seven, I hit a whopping one hundred and thirteen pounds. I am, in one word, pathetic.
“Will? Willam Matthews? Gym class?”
I huffed air towards my flop of curling red bangs. “Dude. It’s yoga.”
Buck grinned. His teeth flashed under the flourescent lights of the gym. “I dunno… warrior III is grueling.”
I kicked my mat so it rolled itself out. Buck was already lounging like a cat upon his, looking like he owned the whole school. His red hair glowed. His hair was not like mine; mine was brick. His was fire.
“Do you do yoga?” I ventured. I hadn’t the faintest clue what warrior III meant, nor was I feeling particularly warrior-y.
“Naw. I just need the credit. But I can do tree pose. And— uh— criss-cross-apple-sauce. Lotus? Is that what it’s called?”
“No idea.”
I sat down and let my air escape. Inhale four, hold seven, exhale eight. Most people used this technique to relieve stress. I did it so I wouldn’t hyperventilate and die.
The rest of the class sat on yoga mats in a big circle. Three were already criss-cross-apple-sauce-lotus-whatever. Several more were on their phones. One guy was whacking his friend with a rolled-up mat. Classy.
The gym teacher walked in, told the boy to knock it off, and sat on her own yoga mat. “We’re starting easy,” she announced. “We’ll do some light warm-ups followed by strengthening poses and relaxation. Many of you may struggle at first; yoga is a lot harder than it looks. Don’t worry if you’re not flexible enough. Alright, first we’ll stand and raise our arms. Breathe in…”
She walked us through a sun salutation. I was introduced to warriors I and II. Buck nailed the tree pose.
“Fold yourself downward,” she continued, lowering her nose toward her knees. “Walk out to downward dog…”
I pressed my hands to the mat and sucked in a breath as blood rushed to my head. My chest twinged. Four, seven, eight, c’mon, you stupid internal organs—
Buck's elbow pressed into my bicep. The sudden, sharp feeling helped me focus, and my breath evened. My best friend resumed downward dog like nothing had happened, his heels pressed to the mat. (He was already stupid good at sports. Who said he could be flexible, too?)
“Thank you,” I whispered.
His grey eyes shot to mine, peering at me below his arm. His hair dripped down like a flow of lava. Stop dying, he mouthed.
Class finished. We piled into the storage room to put away our mats, then headed to the locker rooms to change. I didn’t like changing rooms much; they smelled like boy-sweat and mold, and everyone could see how skinny I was. Usually I could hide behind jeans and baggy T-shirts, but after gym my thin frame was on full display.
But as a high school junior, I’d been with these guys for at least three years, many of them for longer. They’d gotten used to my sickness and general pathetic aura.
And they were all scared of Buck.
The teenage boy in question had finished changing back into his jeans and Queen hoodie, the band’s elaborate coat of arms gracing his back. Buck sat on one of the low metal benches, kicking his foot as he waited for me to finish. He’d adopted me back in ninth grade, when we’d moved up to high school. I’d gone to Frederick Allen Memorial Middle School. Buck had skipped grades K through eight.
He hadn’t skipped them, he often insisted. He’d just taken them earlier than everyone else. Ninth grade was the extent of his schooling, but he’d taken the grade again because by tenth grade— according to him-- everyone had found their clique and he didn’t want to be left out. I always scoffed at that, because someone like Buck never struggled to make friends.
‘Followers’ would be a better word. Buck had followers, not friends.
I didn’t count as a follower. I didn’t follow Buck around. If anything, he followed me around. He’d adhered to me in the first week of ninth grade and hadn’t unstuck since. Maybe it was because I wasn’t afraid of him, unlike the rest of the school. I was always so close to dying that death didn’t quite scare me anymore.
I shut my locker. Buck leapt to his feet, graceful as water. He grabbed his backpack, then, before I could beat him to it, grabbed mine. I rolled my eyes, but kept my mouth shut. This had happened enough times that I knew protesting would get me nowhere.
The bell announcing the end of school blared over the loudspeaker. Buck slapped my shoulder like I’d seen other guys in my class smack their buddies, except right before impact he softened the blow to a pat. Willam Matthews is breakable, my class’s unsaid rule went. Don’t break him.
“Move it,” Buck said. “I’m hungry.”
The locker room went quiet. I rolled my eyes. “Dude.”
Buck turned, a glint in his eye. “Willam. The ice cream shop closes at four. Four! It’s three fifteen! We gotta book it.”
“I hate booking it.”
He dragged me to the locker room door. “Then why are you always reading?”
“You’re hilarious.”
The door shut with a bang behind us. Buck liked dramatic exits. He liked dramatic entrances. He liked being dramatic.
I raised my eyebrow at him. “Was that really necessary?”
Buck was cackling. “Did you see their faces? They looked like they were going to wet themselves!”
I grumbled, trying in vain to wrest my backpack from Buck. “You’re going to get more parental complaints.”
He scoffed. “What’re they gonna do? Expel me?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll just go somewhere else.”
I was quiet. Truth was, I didn’t want him to go somewhere else. He was the only person who didn’t visibly pity me. More than that, he was my friend.
Buck cocked his head and grinned. “They’re saying I’m gonna drain you dry.”
“Ooh, like we’ve never heard that one before.”
Buck paused for a moment, still listening to the conversation in the locker room. “Apparently we always go for the weakest in the herd.”
“That’s more insulting to me than to you. Who’re they trashing, again?”
He snickered. “It’s true, though. You’re weak like a tall, skinny baby.”
“Gee, thanks.”
We approached an intersection between two halls. A tenth grader on her way to after-school freedom stepped out in front of us, and I crashed into Buck to avoid flattening her. “Sorry!” she said. “Wasn’t looking.”
“Totally fine,” I assured her. “Have a nice day.”
She continued down the hall. I walked a few paces, then turned when Buck didn’t follow. “I thought you wanted to get ice crea—”
His eyes—
His eyes were—
Buck pinched his nose between his left thumb and forefinger, as if he smelled something bad. “Dammit. Sorry about that.”
“Whe— when was the last time you… you know…”
“Last week.” Today was Thursday. It must’ve been at least five days ago. “Oh, wipe that look off your face. We can go a month before things turn south.”
I’d said I wasn’t really afraid of death. But it was hard not to feel your blood run cold when a predator’s eyes stared at you like—
Buck was a vampire. The vampires lived mostly outside of human politics and commerce, keeping to their manors. They were allowed to live in human nations, provided they obeyed that nation’s laws. Otherwise, they did as they pleased, ruling their Shires and defending their boundaries. The vampire Shires ignored human national borders, forming a matrix of kingdoms above the human countries.
Vampires did not kill people. If one did, humans were, by agreement, allowed to hunt and slay them. Instead, vampires typically consumed animal blood, though a surprising number of humans consented to donating blood or actually being bitten. Vampires needed to eat and drink human food, too, as consistently as a human would.
Buck was a subject of Mythem Shire and lived in the lord’s manor. But, since he hadn’t been able to finish his education before he was Turned, he attended my high school. He said he wanted to. Nut.
“Maybe you should drink blood more often,” I said, calming down. “If you look like that after a week. You’d feel better, anyway.”
He started off after me. “I’m fine.”
I frowned. “Are you sure? Cause that looked kind of bad…” Buck’s eyes only looked like that when he was really thirsty. Like he was fighting the world to keep from moving.
“No! It’s just— you surprised me, that’s all.”
I snickered, feeling relaxed now that Buck had gone back to normal. “O-kay. But if I trip on the sidewalk and run into you, you better not—”
Buck lept, covering the space between us. My back pressed into the wall as he grabbed my shoulders. “I. Would. Never. Hurt. You.”
I swallowed. My heart thundered in my ears.
Buck let out a stream of air. “Idiot,” he grumbled, releasing me and stalking away.
I chased after him. “You’re pretty weird, dude.”
He scoffed, the tension draining from his shoulders as he grabbed my arm to stop me from running. “I’m not the one who can’t walk the mile, much less run it.”
“Way to make it about me.”
“Whatever.” He shifted the weight of our backpacks. “C’mon. We’ll miss the ice cream.”
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