Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things

Margie Fuston

• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781534474581
• eBook ISBN: 9781534474598

An ALA Morris Award Finalist?! In this "equal parts heartbreaking and joyful" ( School Library Journal ) debut YA novel that's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown meets They Both Die at the End, a teen girl takes a trip to New Orleans with her estranged best friend to find a vampire to save her dying father. Victoria and her dad have shared a love of the undead since the first vampire revealed his existence on live TV. Public fear soon drove the vampires back into hiding, yet Victoria and her father still dream about finding a vampire together. But when her dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer, it's clear that's not going to happen. Instead, Victoria vows to find a vampire herself—so that she can become one and then save her father.Armed with research, speculations, and desperation—and helped by her estranged best friend, Henry—Victoria travels to New Orleans in search of a miracle. There she meets Nicholas, a mysterious young man who might give her what she desires. But first, he needs Victoria to prove she loves life enough to live forever. She agrees to complete a series of challenges, from scarfing sugar-drenched beignets to singing with a jazz band, all to show she has what it takes to be immortal. But truly living while her father is dying feels like a betrayal. Victoria must figure out how to experience joy and grief at once, trusting all the while that Nicholas will hold up his end of the bargain…because the alternative is too impossible to imagine.

I don’t know how to live in this world

if these are the choices, if everything just gets

stripped away. I don’t see the point.

—Buffy the Vampire Slayer

One

Be strong like Buffy. I repeat the mantra in my head as I glare into the garish fluorescent lights. But all I can think about is the episode where Buffy’s mom dies, and they keep showing the body, eyes wide and staring, and I imagine what Dad would look like. Eyes open or closed?

I bite the inside of my cheek. Be strong like Buffy.

Plastered smile in place, I look down at Dad, just in case he’s watching. He’s not. He slouches on the arm of an extra-large wheelchair, the only one still available from the hospital lobby. He’s always been tall and thin, but now three of him could sit in the wide seat.

When he first got sick, the hospital offered an insurance-bought wheelchair for us to take home, but back then my dad shook his head and smiled. You can’t show cancer any bit of weakness, he said, winking at me so we both laughed. Mom tried to take it, but we overruled her.

No one jokes now.

The paper covering the exam table crinkles as I squirm to get comfortable. My left leg’s gone dead. Numb, I mean. Not dead.

Mom turns her hard blue eyes on me, and I stop. She wanted me to stay home—told me I didn’t need to be here for this. I don’t know if she’s worried about me or how my emotions might affect Dad, but she should know by now that I can hide my feelings as well as she can.

Dad catches my eye and runs a hand over the stray tufts of hair the chemo hasn’t stolen yet. “Do I still look like Count Dracula?” he asks, lips parting into something like a grin.

Before cancer, Dad had a round face and thick brows and black hair he kept slicked back in an out-of-fashion look my mom constantly teased him for. But he loved it. He looked exactly like Bela Lugosi, the original Dracula. We always joke Dad is Lugosi’s long-lost relative.

“You might be sliding into Christopher Lee territory now.” Lee played Dracula after Lugosi, and his hair wasn’t quite as great.

Dad snorts, and the sound is soft and weak. “Even Gerald looks better than me now. I’ve got more in common with Count Orlok.” And then he grins, really grins. His eyes crinkle in the corners like they do when he’s told a joke he’s already laughing at and he’s waiting for me to catch up to his wit.

I laugh. Dad and I are vampire connoisseurs. We’ve seen every vampire movie and television show and documentary ever made at least ten times. Joking about the undead feels normal. He even mentioned Gerald. I thought he’d forgotten what today is, but maybe not. It’s not like he could wake up this morning and make his usual vampire pancakes with sliced strawberries as bloody fangs. But we could still be celebrating later.

I search his face for some indication he remembers. Nothing.

I realize I’m still laughing and stop. My eyes are wet, and I don’t even remember letting the tears sneak in.

Dad stops laughing when I do. His face slackens and his eyes drift away. He does that a lot now. I wonder what he’s thinking or if he’s trying to exist without thinking, like I do sometimes.

Mom shifts her gaze between us like she doesn’t get us at all. Her brow creases as I wipe at my eyes, but she doesn’t need to worry. I’m still in control.

What would it be like without Dad here? Just me and Mom—two people who don’t understand each other. Dad’s always been the one thing to connect us. Sometimes Mom smiles at one of his corny jokes or even laughs at one of mine if Dad goads her into it. He’s a fraying thread between us.

I tilt my head back and blink into the lights again.

The door clicks open, and Dad’s oncologist comes in. He’s young and looks like a professional tennis player, and it never ceases to bug me. Seeing him next to my dad doesn’t seem fair. I want an ancient doctor who should have retired ten years ago.

“David, how are you?” He reaches out and shakes Dad’s hand without waiting for an answer. It’s such a ridiculous question. The whole world knows how he is.

The doctor shakes Mom’s hand and then mine. At least he’s nice. He always acknowledges that I’m here and I’m an adult and I can handle whatever he throws at us—unlike my mom, who’s always staring at me like she’s waiting for me to break.

He pulls up his rolling stool. “The chemo’s stopped working,” he says. No prelude, no staring at his papers before speaking, no pre–bad news sigh. He blurts it. Leaving us no time to brace ourselves.

Silence stretches, and if nobody breaks it, then maybe we can stay in this moment forever and refuse to acknowledge what the doctor said. But then Mom nods, making the words real. My parents are holding hands, fingers interlaced like high school sweethearts.

My treacherous heart speeds, beating faster than I thought possible. Adrenaline rips through me, yelling at me to fight this, but what am I supposed to attack? I pull in breath after breath, calming my body, telling it not to be afraid. Dad’s still here. He’s right in front of me. Nothing’s over until it’s over. Dad taught me that.

I shake my head, but nobody notices. “What’s the next step?” I ask.

Everyone turns to me. Mom’s eyes are vacant, but a muscle in her jaw twitches, and she can’t hold my stare. Dad’s eyes are harder to read. Sadness lurks in them but also relief. The relief kills me. How could he possibly feel that? Doesn’t he understand what this will mean for us? We’ll never get to travel together like we planned—visit the places our favorite movies were filmed or the places where vampire myths were born. We won’t go to anymore midnight showings of the latest vampire movies. We won’t get to have chocolate shakes afterward at the twenty-four-hour Denny’s and dissect how well the movie vampire’s traits matched up with vampire lore. I won’t do those things without him. I won’t. He must realize this. I catch his eye, and he gives me the smallest nod. He knows, but he looks so tired. Like a man who can’t keep fighting no matter how much he’s losing by giving up. My eyes sting, and I can’t look at him anymore.

I turn to the doctor’s smooth, patient face. “We’re out of options,” he says.

“What about clinical trials?” I ask.

He shakes his head slowly. “We’re too far advanced for that.”

His use of “we’re” pisses me off. We’re not the ones going through it. He gets to go home tonight and have his tennis match, or sit in front of his television with a beer, or kiss his pretty spouse. He doesn’t see the pain that my dad’s in all day every day. He’s not a part of this.

I drag in a deep breath and try to force down the fear leaking into the hollow of my stomach. Dad’s not dead yet. I put those four words on repeat in my mind.

“How long?” Mom asks.

“A month. Maybe less.”

If pancreatic cancer were a vampire, it wouldn’t be well-groomed Lestat, and it definitely wouldn’t be sparkly Edward. No, it’d be the vampire horde from 30 Days of Night—merciless, bloody, ravaging a whole town until nothing is left.

But no, even that’s not right. Cancer is so merciless that even the cruelest of vampires can’t compete. Cancer takes its time. At least the townsfolk in 30 Days of Night died quickly—a few moments of terror and then boom, nothing. That’s got to be better. Anything’s got to be better than this.

Two hundred and forty-six days and counting.

“Do you have any questions?”

Why? The word’s been running through my head again and again. Nobody ever answers. Not even God, and Dad says he has all the answers. I’m sure the doctor can’t, either.

Dad grips the doctor’s hand, thanking him. I’m not sure what he’s so thankful for, but he’s always been like this, seeing reasons to be grateful where I see none. I used to admire that in him, but now I want to grab his shoulders and shake him until he admits we have nothing to be thankful for at this moment.

I wheel Dad out of the hospital, trying to avoid the sharp corners with his chair. I bump his feet into the wall more than once, and Mom asks me to be careful. Dad doesn’t seem to notice.

---

When we get home, Dad ends up where he spends most of his time now: the hospital bed set up in the spare bedroom. He insisted Mom’s snoring kept him up at night, and we’d laughed about it, but I know he did it for her. He moans a lot in his sleep now. Probably didn’t want her to hear. I thought she should have argued with him a little, but she let him go.

She lets things go too easily.

Mom gives him his morphine drops the second we settle in. She never forgets a dose. She cares for him with the efficiency of a well-programmed robot, but today she slows down and tucks my old 101 Dalmatians comforter under his chin. He claims it’s the most comfortable blanket in the house. He stopped her from throwing it out at least a dozen times.

She rests her hand on one of the faded puppies and leans down, touching her lips to his forehead.

I stare at the empty television. This isn’t the routine. It means something has changed.

“Anna,” Dad says softly as Mom pulls away from him. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Mom leans back in slightly, like she’ll collapse against his chest with the smallest nudge.

My stomach clenches, and in my head, I recite all the Dracula movies from oldest to newest. I cannot watch my mother break. She never gets emotional, and if she loses it now, everything will be too real, but I can’t leave the room either, or that will be my admission that this is actually happening.

But she sucks in a deep breath, and her back goes rigid. “I’m fine, love.” Her fingers squeeze the comforter before she pulls away. Her hard eyes find mine, and she nods. We’re together in this then. Nothing has changed. We’re not going to curl into sobbing balls of grief while Dad’s still here.

Mom leaves, and I don’t give Dad a chance to ask me if I want to talk. “Do you want to sleep?” I ask.

He shakes his head even as it droops toward his chest. “I can sleep when…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I know what he stopped himself from saying. I can sleep when I’m dead. He used to sleep six hours a night and still be the chirpiest person in the house every morning, frying up bacon or eggs and flipping blueberry pancakes with unnatural energy. When I was little, I thought he was a vampire because I never saw him sleep. When I was older, I’d still ask if he was sure he wasn’t one of the undead, and he’d chuckle and lift one of his bushy brows in the classic Dracula look. I’d laugh hard enough to lose some of my orange juice down my chin, Jessica would roll her eyes, and Mom would sigh. But there would be a hint of a smile on Mom’s face as she ate her scrambled eggs.

Dad’s not a vampire. If he were undead, he’d still be able to make jokes about dying. I wish he would say the words, so we could laugh like it means nothing.

Leaving it unsaid takes up an impossible space inside this too small room.

I swallow, pick up the television remote, and click on the guide. Every station has some sort of vampire-related special airing.

Today’s the tenth anniversary of the day Gerald Durand announced to the world that he was a real-life vampire. And I don’t mean one of those blood-drinking humans. I mean an immortal creature of the night.

Gerald was short and thin with stringy black hair that hid his gaunt cheeks when he wasn’t tucking it behind his ears. His clothes were mismatched—modern slacks, a brocade waistcoat with faded gold stitching, a yellowing white shirt with ruffles at the neck and wrists—a collection of pieces from different eras with little care for how they went together. But despite all that, he held himself like a prince as he sat in a chair across from Lester Holt and smiled coyly when asked how many humans he’d killed. He said the number didn’t matter. What mattered was he didn’t kill them now, and it was well past time for vampires to live openly and peacefully with people.

Dad, Jessica, and I cemented ourselves in front of the television for weeks, witnessing it all unfold with our mouths hanging open, ignoring Mom’s protests that we were too young to watch that nonsense. But nothing could tear us away because we were already vampire lovers in our house before—minus Mom, who never liked anything she deemed fantasy. Dad had always been obsessed with vampires and had classic movie posters hanging in his office with Bela Lugosi in various menacing poses, usually with his eyebrows drawn together or a hand around a woman’s neck. Jessica and I would sneak in and stare at them—sometimes making up stories to go with the images. Her favorite was of Lugosi with his arms in the air like he might reach out and grab you. I always thought he looked funny in that one, not scary. My favorite was The Lost Boys poster though. I liked the way David smirked at me as if he had a secret. I wanted that secret.

We begged Dad when we were little to let us watch those movies with him, and sometimes he’d let us watch a clip, but most of the time we stuck to The Little Vampire.

I wanted vampires to be real, so Gerald didn’t scare me. I was a kid who already believed in ghosts and fairies and impossible things, so all I felt watching Gerald was fascination. The world was what I’d always imagined: huge with possibilities.

Not everyone felt that way. Most people thought he was performing an elaborate prank. But then he stabbed a knife into his chest on live television and the world watched the wound heal. Everyone wanted to meet him and ask him questions, even though he never quite gave answers. A few other vampires joined him in the press, and it seemed like everything would change.

But then a child went...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
• Chapter Twenty-Five
• Chapter Twenty-Six
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright