Vampire Teeth

Katherine had asked Jim to pick Tiffany up after school. For Jim, this was either a sign of Katherine’s unfounded optimism, or her profound desperation.

The first and only time he met Tiffany was a disaster. Katherine told him that Tiffany loved Italian food, so he took them to his favorite restaurant. Katherine and Tiffany both showed up looking disgruntled, and the tension was palpable from the moment they stepped through the door.

“Sorry we’re late,” Katherine sighed as she gave Jim a hug. “She refused to change her teeth.”

“Her what?” he asked, looking over at Tiffany. She stared up at him through the purple and red extensions falling into her heavily lined eyes. She did not smile.

“Her teeth.” Katherine shook her head. “She glued these fangs onto her teeth and she won’t take them off - even after I reminded her that she just got her braces off - ”

A sharp incisor peaked out as Tiffany sneered.

“ - and she did not get braces just to immediately ruin her teeth.”

Jim offered Tiffany his hand. “Well, I think they’re a very, er, interesting choice. Did you get them at the dentist?”

“No,” Tiffany huffed, looking at Jim as if he were the dumbest person she had ever met. “I got them at the mall.”

As Katherine reprimanded Tiffany for being rude, the hostess came over to seat them, and they followed her into the restaurant. Jim slid his extended hand back into his pocket, feeling a bit stung but not at all surprised.

The waiter came by with glasses of water and a basket of garlic bread. Steam wafted the delightful aroma into the air, and Jim inhaled deeply. “I love fresh garlic bread,” he said, offering the basket to Tiffany.

She shrank away from the bread. “I can’t eat garlic.”

Katherine whipped her head to look at her. “Excuse me?”

“I said, I can’t eat garlic!”

“Nonsense - you’ve eaten it loads of times!”

Tiffany shook her head so hard that her extensions smacked her in the face. “Vampires don’t eat garlic.”

Katherine’s face went blank. “Vampires - what?” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “Young lady, are you telling me that you think you’re a vampire?”

If Jim listened close enough, he was pretty sure he could hear the whistling noise made by Katherine’s rising blood pressure. “Italian restaurants are bad places for Draculas,” he pointed out, but neither of them were listening.

“Tiffany Jane Lawson, have you lost your mind?” she shrieked. The diners at the closest table looked over, and Jim gave them a short wave.

Katherine dropped her voice to a whisper and laid into Tiffany, who crossed her arms and shut her mother out. When Katherine ran out of steam, Tiffany was still stonewalling her and refused to eat anything on the menu. In the end, she ordered plain spaghetti with no sauce and no meatballs, and she didn’t speak for the rest of the night.

“So…what grade are you in?” Jim asked as he dug into his eggplant parmesan.

“Oh, don’t even try,” spat Katherine, deliberately not looking at Tiffany.

Jim went home that night and decided that maybe things would have gone better if their first meeting hadn’t been in public. Perhaps something more homey and low-key would have been less stressful for everyone. Before he could suggest something, though, Katherine called him a few days later to ask for a favor.

“I’m slammed at work,” she groaned. “I have to stay late for the rest of the week, and I can’t pick Tiffany up after school. Can you do it?”

“Er….” he trailed off. On one hand, he would love to help Katherine. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine a scenario where this ended well for anyone.

“You don’t have to watch her - she’s old enough to stay home alone. I just need someone to drive her. Please?”

Jim cleared his throat. “Of course, honey. I'll do it.”

The first day in the after-school pickup line, Tiffany refused to get into his car and loudly proclaimed that he was a complete stranger. Unfortunately for her, Katherine anticipated this and called the school that morning to give them Jim’s full name and license plate number. After Jim showed the principal his ID, Tiffany threw her backpack into his backseat and slammed the door behind her.

He looked up at her in the rearview window. “Seatbelts, please.” Tiffany glowered but fastened it.

Jim tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “So, how was school today?”

“Fine.” Tiffany’s arms were folded tight in front of her. She didn’t have her extensions in anymore, and from the few words she said, it didn’t seem like she had her vampire teeth either.

He nodded. “That’s good.” He tapped the steering wheel again - this was the longest red light of his life. “Hey, do you mind if I put on some music?”

He took her stony silence as agreement and flipped on the radio. The car was filled with the sounds of a strumming guitar and Tom Petty’s dulcet voice musing about flight.

Jim smiled and relaxed into his seat, but Tiffany was less pleased. “Ugh. This is boring.”

He frowned as he unplugged his phone from the console. “Well…do you want to play your own music?” he asked, offering her the end of a USB cable.

Tiffany snatched the cord and plugged it into her own phone. A pulsing drum beat came through the car speakers, prickling Jim’s ears. It sounded…familiar? An electric guitar joined the drums and teased his memory some more. He knew this song, but he just couldn’t place it….

Suddenly, a loud noise almost made him jump out of his skin.

“OH AH-AH-AH-AH!”

It was louder, much louder than the drums and the guitar had been. Jim didn’t hear it as much as he felt it reverberate in his skull. He slammed on the breaks and barely registered the angry honking behind him. He knew his ear drums hadn’t burst, but the way they ached made it seem like they very nearly did.

Tiffany was giggling as he reached for the volume and dialed it down to something tolerable. In hindsight, Jim realized that he should have seen that coming - Tiffany seemed like the kind of person who liked her music loud. At least he now remembered what the song was.

“I didn’t think kids these days knew Down With the Sickness,” he said as calmly as he could. “Next time, how about you play it at a reasonable volume?”

Tiffany didn’t respond, but Jim let the song keep going. “My college roommate played this all the time,” he continued. “Weird guy. I mean, he was nice, but he listened to some odd stuff. He got really into Tuvan throat singing.”

He could see Tiffany perk up in the rearview mirror. “What?”

“Tuvan throat singing. He got CDs from the library and played them for a month.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Me neither, until him.”

There was a pause before Tiffany asked, “What’s it like?”

“Hmm. Well, it’s hard to describe.”

“Is it weird?”

Jim scratched his head. “I’d say it’s more magical than weird. It’s hard to believe that kind of a sound could be made by a human voice, but it’s beautiful.” He pulled into the driveway and turned to face Tiffany. “Alright. Your mom said you’d be okay alone, but do you want any help?”

She rolled her eyes and grabbed her backpack. “No.”

“Okay. When you get in, could you wave at me from the front window?”

“Why?”

“I want to make sure you made it inside safely. Will you give me a wave?”

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s so weird. Fine, I’ll wave.”

“Thank you. Call me or your mom if you need anything.”

But Tiffany had already scrambled out of the backseat and slammed the car door in lieu of saying good-bye. Jim watched her open the front door, and a moment later, she waved halfheartedly out the window.

Jim waved back before reversing out of the driveway and heading home.

The second day in the pickup line, Tiffany didn’t pretend that Jim was a child-snatching stranger and climbed into his car without protest.

“Seatbelts, please.” Jim said. Tiffany huffed but clicked the belt into place.

There was a moment of silence as Jim debated whether he should try asking how school went, but Tiffany spoke first. “I looked up that throat singing. It’s weird.”

The way she said weird didn’t sound like an insult. Quite the opposite - she was practically gushing.

“Do you like weird stuff?” Jim asked.

She shrugged. “I guess.” 

“What do you like about it?”

She exhaled, but it was a light and airy sound. “I think, I like how different it is?”

“Different than what’s popular right now?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“What else do you like, besides weird things?” He immediately answered his own question. “Oh right, you like vampires. Do you like Twilight?”

Tiffany scoffed. “Twilight is lame.”

A teenage girl who didn’t like Twilight? Jim supposed that, statistically speaking, there had to be a few. “Okay, no Twilight. Do you like Buffy?”

“Duh. She’s the coolest.”

Jim bit his lip and tried not to laugh. “Buffy is pretty cool,” he agreed. “But I think the coolest vampire movie is Nosferatu. Have you seen it?”

“Yeah.”

“Really!”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Huh!” He grinned. “I’m impressed, I really am. Most adults haven’t seen it. It’s about a hundred years old, but it’s still fantastic.”

“I like old movies,” Tiffany said.

“No kidding!”

Tiffany opened her mouth and paused before continuing. “I used to watch them with my dad.”

Jim inhaled sharply. The atmosphere in the car had shifted. Tiffany was almost bubbly when she talked about the throat singing, but now Jim felt her slipping away. He could sense that this was still something tender for her, like a bruise that had changed colors but hadn’t yet healed.

“Did you two watch Dracula together?” he asked. “The one with Bela Lugosi?”

Tiffany’s response was monotone. “Yeah.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Have you seen the Spanish version?”

“No?” Tiffany squinted at him. “What?”

“Oh,” Jim began, “it’s a great story. Listen to this. When they made silent movies, they were really easy to release in a bunch of different countries. They didn’t have to be dubbed, right?”

“Right.”

“The studios made a ton of money that way. When movies started to have sound and dialogue, it was harder to release them in countries that didn’t speak English, and the studios weren’t making as much money.”

“That makes sense.”

“So they had to figure out a way to reach foreign markets again. Dubbing and subtitles weren’t very popular yet. So this is what they did: when they were filming Dracula, they filmed a Spanish language version of the movie at the same time. A different film crew and a different cast used the same sets as the English language Dracula after they stopped filming for the night.”

“What?” Tiffany snorted. “That’s crazy.”

“It is crazy. Hard to imagine something like that happening today.”

“So they filmed the same movie twice? Just in Spanish instead of English?”

“Ah,” said Jim with a smile. “Here’s where it gets really interesting. Because it wasn’t going to be released in the United States, the Spanish production had more freedom and less censorship. Film scholars think it’s a better movie. It’s definitely more…sultry.”

“You can say sexy,” said Tiffany, crossing her arms. “I’m not a kid.”

Jim strongly disagreed with both parts of her statement, but kept it to himself. “And that’s the story of the Spanish language Dracula. Not many people know it exists, but if you like old movies, it’s definitely one to watch.” He pulled into her driveway. “Alright. Were you okay alone yesterday?”

Tiffany sighed loudly. “Yes. I just said I’m not a kid.”

“Okay. I just wanted to ask. You can call me or your mom whenever you need to.”

“Ugh.” Tiffany was unclipping her seatbelt and scrambling out of the car.

“And thank you for waving yesterday! Don’t forget to do it again.”

“Ugh. Fine. Bye.” She slammed the door closed and marched up to her house. Jim waited for her to wave. He waved back and drove home.

The third day in the after school pick-up line, Tiffany got into his car and fastened her seatbelt before Jim got a chance to ask.

“I have something for you,” he said, passing her a beat-up paperback.

Tiffany traced the raised lettering on the cover. “Salem’s Lot,” she read.

“It’s about vampires,” said Jim. “Have you read it?”

“No.”

“I was about your age when I started reading Stephen King,” he said. He wondered if that was perhaps too young to start reading adult horror, and then realized that he should have thought about this before giving it to Tiffany.

Oh well. Too late now.

“I should warn you that it’s pretty scary.”

“I know,” said Tiffany. The book had been read so many times that the flimsy spine had cracked and started to peel. She was picking at one of the strips that was coming loose from the binding.

“You won’t be scared reading it?”

Jim expected another prickly response, but to his surprise, Tiffany shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She was silent for a second and then said, “My dad liked Stephen King.”

There it was - that tenderness. He knew it himself. “Yeah. My dad did too. That book, that was his copy.”

Tiffany immediately stopped picking at the spine. Her fingers curled around the book protectively. “My dad had a really big Stephen King collection. I don’t remember seeing this one, though.”

“I think it was the second book King ever published,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve read it.” He flipped through his memories, trying to recall what exactly happened in the book - was this wildly inappropriate to give to a teenager? - but he didn’t so much remember reading the book as much as he remembered laying in bed after turning off the lights and feebly trying to calm his spooked mind.

He dug deeper, and a second memory resurfaced: him, about Tiffany’s age, watching his dad sit in his favorite chair with a mug of tea in one hand and the already shabby paperback in the other. His dad caught his eye and winked. “You can read it after me,” he said. “Just don’t tell your mom.”

“Did Stephen King write more books about vampires?” Tiffany asked him as they pulled into her driveway.

“I think they come up in some of his short stories,” said Jim, “but Salem’s Lot is his best known vampire story.”

Tiffany looked down at the paperback. “I was just thinking that, if I like this one, maybe I’ll try reading some of his other books too.”

“His son wrote a vampire book, if memory serves.”

“Have you read it?”

Jim shook his head. “No. I want to, but I just never made the time.”

Tiffany shrugged. “I’ll let you know if it’s any good.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Jim smiled. “Okay. You know to call me or your mom if you need anything -”

“- and to wave in the window when I get inside, I know,” said Tiffany, sliding out of Jim’s car.

“Thank you,” said Jim. “Oh, and Tiffany? Don’t tell your mother about the book. She, uh, probably won’t like you reading it.”

Tiffany clutched the book to her chest and grinned. “I’ll keep it on the down low. Bye, Jim.”

She entered the house and gave Jim a wave from the window. Jim waved back, and headed home.