Vampire Books Suck

If I could do it without attracting a lot of attention, I'd rip this crap teen romance vampire novel to shreds with my slightly pointed teeth. I know that it is written as fiction, and given the secretive nature of my race, your people don't really have anything close to fact in your libraries. But skimming the first chapter of this trash is enough to make me want to hurl. I look at one of you next to me, a blonde middle-school kid with a ponytail. Ugh. She's got the same book in her hand, and I can tell that she wants to devour it with her eyes the same way I'd like to with my mouth. She looks up with this stupid grin on her braces-clad teeth.

"Ishn't it aweshome?" she slurs, a string of saliva hanging precariously from her metal brackets.

"Oh, yeah, schluper great," I say, subconsciously imitating her sloppy speech patterns, "Jusht love it." I look like her, kind of. We're about the same age, or so it seems. I'm maybe thirteen. I don't know, because I wake up with a different face, a different body, every morning. It's the only way we can blend. We have evolved in a divergent path from your race, and we've done it much faster. I guess nature knows that we have more to lose.

I think about the things that I would tell this girl about my people, the ones that are mocked by the book she's smashing into her flat chest.

I think the first thing I'd tell her is that we're not hot. If anything, we're a little uglier than the rest of you. Sure, it's a little disappointing. But it helps us to live in world that you control. We're nothing like the sharp jawed, flaxen haired beauties on your books. People pay attention to beautiful people.

We're not bloodthirsty savages, but we don't want to be your friends either. We do what we have to do to survive. Very few of us are tormented by our food choice, because there is no other choice. Those who develop a vegetarian conscience starve to death. So far, there is no other option. Sorry, little blonde girl.

Vampires aren't made. We're not venomous. You can't "catch" our disease, because it lies within our genes. We are born with the telltale black dot on the inside of our eyelids, screaming not for our mother's milk, but the blood of your race. It comes naturally to us. We know no difference. We are born of our vampire parents, and we have the same needs and wants and hopes and fears, just as your progeny inherits traits from you.

We're not goth. I myself prefer a casual style, and own a variety of clothes for the different ages I wake up as each day. I really like the color blue, but we're all different.

The girl has left the vampire novel, tucking it under her arm to spend her allowance on later. She's browsing among the youth magazines, picking up one with the headline, "Hot Teen Hunk Spills All!"

We don't want to fall in love with you. You are our food. I'm sure that you're lovely to others of your own species, but we're not into getting attached to things that we hunt. You love to eat hamburgers, but would you marry a cow? And yes, we are pretty similar to you in our physical characteristics. In the animal world, I'm sure you could call it mimicry. But you and I are both 99 percent similar to chimpanzees, and you don't see us kissing the apes.

We are not immortal. Unlike you though, we cannot die of natural causes. We can only be murdered. There are things which will kill us, but they are not sharpened blocks of wood or metallic bullets. That's a secret I'll take to the grave, although I suppose it won't matter if I make it there.

We are constantly changing, except for three periods in our lives in which our image remains static. In our childhood, we are cute, just like human babies. We maintain the same body type, changing only to grow in the same manner that you change, and at the same rate. Mothers, in pregnancy, stay in the same form as well. The third period in which we stay the same is in death, in which we turn to ashes without burning.

You should know that we don't just bite people. At least not anymore. We make it more subtle.

I'm fast. Exceptionally fast. I wait until the pretty blonde girl walks out of the store, alone. Then I pounce, too fast for the eye to see. I streak across the parking lot, effortlessly dragging her beside me in a fraction of a second. I travel over vast distances, to the most secluded spot I can find. She's in shock, sprawled on the ground. I broke her back with my impact.

"Sorry, chica," I say, "Guess today wasn't your day." I draw a box cutter and a small vial from my designer purse. A stabbing. So sad. Tragic, the papers will say. A life taken so young. She probably played clarinet. No fingerprints were found on the scene. I have none. I use the vial so that I don't have to leave DNA with an unheard-of number of chromosomes.

As I stand up, wiping the red stains from my mouth, I'm sad that I can't take it all. It's not like she's going to need it. But we've been mandated to leave enough as not to arouse suspicion. This is why I must sip a little every day. In years nearer to the beginning of my life, we could have drained a single body of blood and lived for five years. But now, with only one good swallow allowed, I have to kill every day and go to bed (yes, I sleep, yes, at night) unsatisfied.

I shudder, because I can't help but to feel a little disgusted. After all, I'll have to wake up with a metal mouth tomorrow.