Post by Miep on Jul 23, 2010 22:01:10 GMT -5
Okay, so this is the story I said I was outlining and writing and whatnot on the blog. I figured I'd start you off with the very begginning of the storyy. I don't have much but I'll be adding more. So...I guess tell me what you think?
JACK
Two more years. I could go that long. I’d be gone from this school after a year and on to somewhere else and then I would be done with high school. I probably wouldn’t go to college. What would be the point? Just to hang around petty humans for another four plus years? Sorry, that wasn’t my cup of tea. I wasn’t one for hanging around humans. And this is why I changed schools every year. I simply got bored with them and my parents allowed me to move somewhere else. Where ever I wanted really, because they traveled through Europe and Asia, but kept me in school. Why? I’m not too sure, but apparently they genuinely care about my education. I don’t.
It’s not that I don’t like humans, it’s just that they create little dramas that are stupid, petty, and boring. Being a vampire, I can listen in on people’s thoughts as well as hear the quietist conversations, even if they’re taking place across the room. That would be enough to entertain me…if any of their conversations were worth listening to. I’ve heard just about everything there is to hear that is cliché about a human teenager. From crushes to infatuation, sluttish girl dramas, occasionally pig-headed guys high-five-ing each other for banging the hottest girl in school. It didn’t get much more dynamic than that. And it was truly boring, like watching the same episode of a bad soap opera every day.
So, this year I wasn’t any more enthused when I changed to Whitehall high school in Whitehall, Montana. I rather liked the state of Montana; there were mountains and lots of forests to hunt in, better prey, and I liked to snowboard. Whitehall was a rather small town. Small towns could be either better or worse than big towns; it depends on the type of people there. Better towns usually have rather interesting people in it and they tend to come in several different varieties. Goths, nerds, jocks, hippies, druggies, etc., all coexisting in one town. But sometimes small towns were worse, because instead of variety, you get the opposite; an entire town filled with the same brand names, the same snobby attitudes, the same characters, the same colors, the same everything. Those towns are maddening.
If anyone had a problem convulsing inside of them such as mine, or even remotely similar, I might be a little more intrigued during the year. So far, I have not come across anyone like this. And to be honest, I was pretty envious of the humans. They would be able to grow, get old, and die, and in between that, change. Sure, I’ll grow until I can’t grow anymore and I am actually 18 years old now, but when I hit full growth, I will stay frozen like that forever. The only way to kill me is the old fashioned way; to behead me. But that would be incredibly hard to do unless performed by another vampire, because neither human tools nor strength was enough to crack the skin and spine of a vampire. And I wish I would come across another vampire because I hated being one. Not only was I bound to live a boring life for all of eternity—unless I found another vampire willing to kill me—I was also a monster. I could hear the heart beats of every person sitting in a room, and the aroma coming off their skin always makes my mouth water. It’s a disgusting thing, to crave the life of others, to kill things to sustain myself; it was a selfish way of life and so I hated myself and my existence.
My first day went pretty much as expected, the same as every other year. I went through the normal ritual of arriving at a new school: go to the office, get stared at while walking down the hall, get your schedule and a sheet to have your teachers sign, get stared at some more, some teacher tries to “make your day better” by introducing you to the whole class and making you say something about yourself. I always have that pre-planned, the one-sentence-about-yourself thing. Anytime a teacher makes me stand up in front of a class I always say, “Well, I like vampire movies.” And then people tend to sign me off as weird and proceed to keep their distance and whisper things when they think I can’t hear. Well, being a vampire, I can hear really everything. But they don’t know that…
I looked down at the sheet of paper in my hands to see where I was off to first. My schedule looked a little like this:PURAVET, JACK LUCIAN 11 MALE AGE: 18
A: PER. 1: BIOLOGY III– MITCHELL, DEBRA – 7:30-8:56
PER. 2: TRIG II– WITKOM, RICHARD – 9:00-10:56
PER. 3: WORLD HISTORY II– DRAKE, RON – 11:00-12:26
PER. 4: POTERY II– GREENE, MERIDETH – 12:30-2:00
B: PER. 1: ENGLISH III– BARKER, REBECCA – 7:30-8:56
PER. 2: LATIN III– TODDS, WILLIAM – 9:00-10:56
PER. 3: PHOTOGRAPHY II– HANNAH, ROSS – 11:00-12:26
PER. 4: HERBOLOGY II– ROWLING, BEN – 12:30-2:00
So I headed off to biology with Mrs. Mitchell. When I walked in all eyes turned on me, the only thing you could hear was the squeaking of the mice in the cage in the back of the room. I swiftly turned to the teacher, an older woman, middle-aged, with fluffy red hair and too much mascara clumped in her scraggly eye-lashes. I handed her the paper and after thirty seconds she handed it back and I sat in a seat in the far back. I could see people glancing at me out of the corner of my eye as I passed by.
She went on about something that had to do with Meiosis and sex cell division. I didn’t really listen to it, I just didn’t care. Biology was a subject I already knew. And no, I didn’t study it on my own, I simply read out of an eighth grade text book. I had already covered Meiosis, Mitosis, Interphase, Anaphase, Prophase, and you get what I mean. For me, there’s no point in reviewing something from three years ago when you don’t forget anything. Actually, that came in handy when we took tests; no studying, to working hard. It’s almost like taking an open-book test, except the book is in your head.
Trigonometry was next, with Mr. Witkom. He was a younger teacher, about mid-thirties. Okay, not that much younger, but obviously younger than Mrs. Mitchell. After he’d signed the paper and handed it back, just as I was about to go find an empty seat, he called out, “Class, this is our new student, Jack Puravet. I trust you will treat him with respect, just as you treat each other. Everyone take a seat and we’ll get started.” I was the only one standing so I quickly took my seat—possibly a little quicker than I should have—and I had to actually pay some attention during this class. It wasn’t too bad, at least it was a rather new subject so it wasn’t as boring. And about an hour later we were released for lunch.
You might be wondering what I’m having for lunch today. And no, I’m not going to lure some unsuspecting little freshman girl into a janitors closet. I don’t feed off of human blood because I was trying to blend in with them. If I was in a small town like Whitehall, do you think I’d be able to hunt humans without getting discovered? I prey on animals in the woods. Rodents are good if I need a quick and light drink, something to pick my energy up so that I can successfully hunt larger animals like dear, elk, moose, lynx, foxes, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and even the occasional bear. Though, it usually depends on where I’m living for the moment and how abundant the animals are.
Vampires can eat human food. We can’t live off of it because it holds no nutritional value for us, but it tends to be ascetically pleasing. And it helps keep up a human charade.
So, so far that day I hadn’t found anything particularly interesting about the town. I was just picking through people’s conversations in the cafeteria, chewing down some greasy pizza. Nothing fun enough to listen to, so I let my eyes sweep through the faces, trying to pick out what kind of town this would be. Taking in the small variety of people, I decided it was somewhere down the middle of the two categories, better and worse. I noted that there were lots of jocks, in fact they had their own table, and a small group of what looked to be emo kids. There were different groups there as well, but they weren’t that interesting. I continued to sweep the room, in desperate want to find something interesting.
Let me just tell you this: be careful what you wish for. In that instant, a group of four girls got up together to throw out their lunches. In that group was one particular girl that happened to catch my eye. She was pretty, with long, dark mahogany colored hair that fell to her mid back in loose waves. She turned and sat down, directly facing me which helped me to get a better look at her. She was very pretty. A heart-shaped face with soft angles and cheek bones, a long neck with protruding collar bones and graceful shoulders. Her lips were full, the color of pink roses, she had a straight, small nose, and then my eyes shifted to hers. They were wide and angled, framed by incredibly long, ebony lashes and were the color of the Emerald Isle on a sunny day. Since my eyes were sharp, I could make out all of the shaded places in them, swimming around in there like koi fish in a Japanese pond.
Suddenly, she looked up at me watching her and met my eyes with a polite smile. I smiled back at her out of courtesy and then averted my eyes as quickly as possible.
I looked around at the empty table I sat at and noticed it was the only partially empty table there. Every seat in that cafeteria was filled except for the other seven seats around the circle. That was about par for my life. No one ever sat with me, talked with me, paid me any particular attention for the most part. And this was all because, being a vampire, the humans are my prey. Just like how chipmunks run from hawks, something in the humans triggers a subconscious instinct to stay away. Even if I may look more attractive, or sound intriguing or something ludicrous like that, it’s because I was born with those features, to try to lure in my prey. Even if that hawk has feathers that are good to line a chipmunk’s nest with, that chipmunk knows something is up with it. Once the hawk locks on to its target, it’s simply a test to see if the hawk can dive-bomb the rodent before it dive-bombs into cover. That’s how every predator-prey relationship in the world happens, and with this, humans tend to stray away from my company. And for good reason. I wouldn’t come near me if I were me.
It was solely this knowledge that kept me from ever approaching her purposely. For some reason beyond me, she seemed rather intriguing, and I did not want to put her—or any other person in this room, for that matter—in danger. Just by smiling at me like that, she had already just about staked her own life. Therefore, I would not allow myself to be intrigued by her or to even interact with her. It would be too risky.