Not Quite a Vampire Story

It's hard being a vampire and an elementary school teacher.

For one thing, there isn’t enough caffeinated blood in the world to push me through all the yelling, and the screeching, and the adamant refusals to “stay in your seats.”

Traditionally, vampires sleep during the day but that is out of the question for me. Sleep in general is out of the question for me because vampires who are teachers seldom sleep.

There is always another math worksheet for me to grade, another lesson to plan on deciduous trees, another pair of sneakers to find for the student who doesn’t have any and who won’t be allowed to go on the field trip without them.

My solution to that last problem will be to use what little time I have left of the night to break into a random victim’s home and steal a pair of sneakers. Then, when it turns out to be the home of one of my other students, the principal will call a conference to discuss the original student who now has a pair of sneakers for the field trip, but at the cost of being labeled as a burgeoning thief.

And then he will be banned from the field trip.

The other student will also have to miss the field trip. He will be attending a funeral.

I accidentally ate his grandmother.

When I do happen to catch a moment of quiet, it will almost always be interrupted by a student.

They will want to know if I can tie their shoes, or help them make their mother a birthday card, or if I believe in God, or have a dog, or if it's true what they say on the news that the world is going to be ending because people are not very good at taking care of it.

I will have fleeting images of my jaw unhinging to its full capacity to bite their head off—but I will never do it, because then I would be out of a job, and also, small children are not very filling sources of blood.

Instead, I tie the shoes, I pull out the glitter pens for the card, and make them promise to give them back, even though I know they won’t. I tell them that I cannot talk about G-o-d at school and I don’t say the word because last time I did my throat burst into flames and they had to call in a substitute, and she quit in the middle of the day after one of my students glued her hair to the back of her chair. I don’t have a dog, but I let them think I do because then they draw pictures of dogs for me and I hang them up around the room. I cannot comment on the world ending because I am not a scientist, but next week I will bring in jugs and cartons from my latest victim’s fridge (he wasn’t going to be using them anyway) so I can put together a unit on recycling.

When there are parents who don’t believe in recycling, the principal will call another conference. This time it will be with Mr. and Mrs. Brad and Casey Warton, who I suspect would taste like the inside of a sports car if I took a bite of them. It will be all I can do not to flick my arm out across the table, and sink my nails into the flesh on their necks as I bring them closer to my mouth, and tell them I am going to dump their corpses in the recycling, and maybe that will teach them to–

The principal looks up from the sheet of paper he has been reading.

"I don't think you need me to go on,” he says.

I notice I've been fidgeting with my lanyard and I force myself to stop. I have never been on this side of the desk before today.

I understand why my students hate it.

"I'm not a vampire," I say, in case there was any question about it.

The look he gives me across the desk tells me there wasn't.

He drags a slow hand down the grey whiskers on his face.

I recognize that gesture. I did the same thing yesterday when one of my students told me he dropped the hall pass in the toilet.

"Obviously not, Ms. Kemp,” he says.

"It's just something I do–" I say, and I realize I'm about to say 'for fun’, but I'm not entirely sure if that's true.

"And then post online, apparently," he says. "For our parents to see. " He reaches for his stained coffee mug but he’s not drinking it. He’s just staring into it forlornly.

"I was drunk," I say, "I'm sorry.”

“Oh,” he says, swirling the coffee mug, “that clears it right up.” He takes a sip, then makes a face. I can tell it is bitter. The coffee in the teachers' lounge always is. I had my own coffee maker in my classroom until my students knocked it over in the middle of hurling books at each other.

I knew I could have gone to their parents about it, and maybe even gotten reimbursed.

I also knew that one of those students had made more than one drawing of a small stick figure, with a scribbled version of her red hair, hiding under a bed from a larger stick figure.

So I didn’t.

He says, “Do I even want to know why?”

I say, “Why I was drinking?”

He stares at me like I’ve just thrown his coffee into his face.

“No, not why you were drinking. I don’t care why you were drinking, you are allowed to drink, Ms. Kemp.”

My name drips with resentment when he says it.

“What you are not allowed to do,” he continues, “is write a fantasy novel for the world to see about–” He peers back down at the paper through his glasses.

I wish he wouldn’t.

“–Your jaw unhinging to bite a child’s head off, and–” he brings the paper closer to his face, “–putting two parents' bodies in the recycling to teach them the importance of environmental conservation.”

He sets the paper down and looks back up at me. The wrinkles on his forehead seem deeper than they were at the start of this conversation.

“I never said I–” I catch myself and stop.

“I never said the vampire,” I say, correcting myself, “would bite a child’s head off.”

He squints back down at the paper, then dryly says, “Oh yes. You were just thinking about it.”

“That’s not true,” I say, because it isn’t, not really.

“Yes, there are a lot of things in here that aren’t true,” he says, his tone sounding angry for the first time. “Like what happened with Jacob. You know he stole those sneakers from his classmate so he could go on the field trip, Ms. Kemp. Not you. I thought we resolved this matter privately, but now I’ve got parents calling to ask not only why we’ve got a serial killer for a teacher, but also why we let her steal things from–’’

“I liked my version better,” I say.

He blinks at me as if I’m a fly that he’s just heard buzzing on the other side of the desk. “What?”

“I liked my version better,” I say again. “That’s why I wrote it.”

He is still looking at me like he’s never seen me before. Or maybe it's that he is seeing me for the first time.

“What on Earth,” he says, “is that supposed to mean?”

I say, “Jacob only stole those shoes because he knows his mom can’t afford to buy him any.”

He scoffs. “That’s not a reason to–”

“Did you know that he didn’t even ask her to buy him any,” I say, “because he didn’t want to make her feel bad?”

The principal goes quiet at that. His hand twitches on top of the desk. His watch gleams in the overhead light. The second hand ticks slowly forward.

I don’t know how long we’ve been at this conversation. I wonder how my students are treating the substitute. I hope it's better than the last one.

“He didn’t tell me that,” he says.

“He told me,” I say, and it comes out fiercer than I expected it to. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest. It should have been pounding this whole time with the amount of trouble I was in, but for some reason it picked right now.

I say, “So I liked my version better.”

He watches me, then raises his thinning eyebrows. “The version where you fly into Steven Warton’s house as a bat and steal his shoes? And then eat his grandmother?”

I think I detect a hint of amusement in his tone but I don’t want to trick myself into believing he’s on my side.

“She is very much still alive, and that kid has too many shoes,” I say defensively. “He wears a new pair every day–and why does a first grader need designer shoes? White designer shoes for goodness' sake. Don’t his parents know what happens on a playground?” I cross my arms and sink back into my chair before I say too much else.

The principal lifts his coffee mug to his mouth. I can tell he is trying to conceal the smallest of smiles.

“Apparently not,” he says, “or we wouldn’t be getting calls about them getting ruined.”

He places the mug back down on the desk. His expression changes.

“There are resources we can offer to Jacob’s mother to–”

“I already did,” I say.

“Of course you did,” he says.

I am not sure if that is meant to be a compliment, but it certainly feels like one.

“You know,” he says after a moment, "I wish the recycling project had worked out too. I don’t think it’s fair that–” He stops himself. “Well, you know.”

I do know.

I cast my gaze down at my lanyard with the array of faded stickers my students stuck on it when I wasn’t looking. I can feel this conversation is circling around something that has probably been on both our minds since he called me down to his office. I don’t want to drag it out any further than I have to.

I decide to go for it.

“Am I fired, Mr. Holman?”

His face twists, probably with the thought of having to find a new teacher to hire who isn’t going to want to leave after the first year. Or the first day.

He says, “I’m not sure we can afford to do that.”

I relax back into my seat a little.

“But,” he continues, “it’s not entirely up to me.”

I nod. I figured as much. The entire administration department probably has a copy of my story printed out on each of their desks at this point.

He looks down at the one on his desk, then back at me. “I guess what I’m more interested in knowing, Ms. Kemp,” he says, “is if you still want to be a teacher?”

The question hits me in a way I hadn’t been expecting. Anyone who read my story would probably think that I don’t want to be a teacher, that I hate it, that I’m trying to get fired, even.

That wasn’t true.

It was more so that I hated how much I wanted to be a teacher. That I wanted it so much I’d let it destroy me, or make me cry, or do something really, really stupid like get drunk and post a story about everything that bothered me, because it was better than writing my letter of resignation.

Obviously that hadn’t worked out exactly how I’d wanted.

My eyes are roving under the desk on the carpet that probably hasn’t been updated in years. I catch sight of my heart-patterned socks sticking out from the top of my boots.

Today is silly sock day. My class earned it after they each scored 90% or above on their latest spelling test. The hardest word for them was ‘tricky’ which was ironic, and made me laugh, and then they all looked at me like I had seventy-two heads when I tried to explain why.

I don’t know how to answer his question, but I do know I want to be around for another silly sock day.

“I don’t know what else I could be,” I tell him truthfully.

He shifts in his seat and I can tell from his face that he’s relieved.

“A vampire, apparently,” he says. The hint of amusement is clear that time.

I let out a small laugh.

“Or a writer who only writes when drunk, I suppose,” he adds.

I wince a little.

“I guess I deserve that.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” he says, though it isn’t unkind.

He picks up his coffee mug again. He stops before it meets his mouth. “I did want to ask,” he starts to say, “why a vampire, Ms. Kemp?”

My face must be doing something in response to that because he quickly adds, “I’m asking off the record.”

I consider how to answer. I could say it's because vampires are powerful, or strong, or vicious, and anyone who messes with them, (or yells at them on the phone about a report card), quickly finds themselves regretting the day they were born.

But I knew that wasn’t really why.

I wouldn’t be a teacher if I wanted power or to avoid people who would yell at me on the phone. It was more than that. It was the sort of thing you would only know about vampires if you stayed up late reading books about them to try to take your mind off everything that was going to happen the next day inside the walls of a classroom holding twenty-three different little lives.

“That’s the thing,” I say.

“Vampires don’t have hearts.”