HAPTER ONE
I was eighteen when I met Jake, my “bad boy” vampire boyfriend. However, Jake was only kind of a bad boy. And I was only kind of eighteen.
Technically, in terms of actual time I’d spent on the planet since my birth, I was actually nine, a fact that could creep me out and even vaguely horrify me if I thought about it too long. So, I usually didn’t. And besides, I felt eighteen. I looked eighteen, too, and also had the typical intellect and maturity of the average eighteen-year-old.
My parents had first become aware of my “hyper-aging” when I’d been around one. I could not only walk then, but run, jump, and skip, too. I seemed unnaturally coordinated for my age. I’d also recently had a growth spurt that had made me much taller and heavier than a typical one-year-old. After examining me at her clinic on our farm, my dad’s cousin, who was a doctor named Nora, told my parents that in terms of physical growth and mental development, I definitely seemed more like a normal, healthy two-year-old than a one-year-old. I’d even already become “potty-trained” by then, having started the process myself by simply telling my parents that I wanted to sit on the toilet like a “big girl,” this in itself communicating my advanced maturity simply by the fact that I was able to communicate in words so well by this point.
My rapid maturation continued, and by my second birthday, Nora assessed me as having reached the same developmental and physical milestones as a four-year-old. By my third birthday, I was essentially six. By my fourth birthday, I asked my parents if I could have eight candles on my birthday cake, since for all practical purposes, I was eight, and I didn’t want to have to suffer through the “babyish-ness” of being treated like a four-year-old, even though I actually was. My parents said yes to my candle request, since by this point, everyone had pretty much accepted the fact that I was growing in “double time,” one year for every six months I was spending on earth. From this point onward, I skipped a year every birthday, becoming two years older instead of one.
When my rapid maturation first started, my parents were scared, wondering if there was something physically wrong with me. However, after having many discussions with Nora over the course of my first few years, and after talking to a few elder Watcher vampires from different communities, they came to the conclusion that what was happening to me was simply something supernatural, the result of me having a father who was a vampire, and a mother with “magical” genes passed down from her own mother. Nora even thought that my supernatural rapid growth could be related to the fact that my conception itself had been magical, occurring even before my parents had met.
At any rate, I wasn’t very old when it became clear that I was a “magical” child. My parents seemed to have a period of mourning about the fact that I would only get “half a childhood” because of my rapid growth, but I never spent any time feeling bad about this. To me, I was still getting a full childhood; I was just experiencing it at a rapid pace.
The only thing that I did ever feel bad about was my lack of friends. Because of my rapid growth and the questions it might bring, my parents had decided to homeschool me, which meant that I didn’t get to make friends in the “wider world,” off the farm. I did, however, have “built-in” friends in the two-dozen or so kids that lived on the farm, but any friendships I was a part of never lasted long. This was because with my rapid development, it was never long before I “outgrew” a friend, with them suddenly seeming like a “baby” to me. For example, when I was six years old in terms of physical growth and mental development, I became friends with a farm girl named Alicia, who was six, too. However, a few years later, when I was eleven, she was only eight-and-a-half, and I’d begun to feel more like her big sister or a babysitter. In the end, she’d become best friends with another eight-year-old, and I’d just kind of decided to stop trying to make close friends at that point. After all, I knew it would just be a matter of time before I “outgrew” them, not to mention that since most of the other kids on the farm went to school in Sweetwater, I felt like I was somehow “set apart” from them anyway.
My only constant friends during my childhood were my family members, especially my Aunt Jen. Not knowing if she’d eventually meet someone that she’d want to have a child with, she hadn’t been turned into a vampire yet, and she was twenty-six years old when I was eighteen. However, to me and everyone else in our family, she really didn’t seem very much like twenty-six. Despite the fact that she ate massive meals constantly, her adult weight had seemed to stubbornly top out at about ninety pounds, and she never grew taller than five-foot-two. Her bouncy, energetic way of moving in the world, combined with her small stature, made her appear like something of a perpetual very young teenager, as did her heart-shaped face, round cheeks, and large eyes. Her skin was like that of a teenager’s, too, always perfectly smooth, clear, and glowing. As far as the extremely fine lines that some women started to develop in their mid-twenties, Jen didn’t have a trace. In fact, having developed a few extremely fine lines by the time she’d been turned into a vampire at age twenty-five, my mom always said that she was so envious of Jen’s skin.
One thing my mom wasn’t envious of was the fact that we kind of shared a best friend in Jen. For one thing, the older I became, the closer I got to Jen; whereas my mom had seemed to just slightly pull away from her over time, which had probably just been a consequence of my mom’s busy life more than anything. At twenty, she’d gone to college to get a degree in early childhood education, which she’d done through an accelerated program that took up a lot of her time; at twenty-three, she’d opened a childcare center in Sweetwater; and at twenty-four, she’d given birth to my twin brothers, who were now three. Then, at age twenty-five, she’d been turned into a vampire, not wanting to appear much older than my dad for all eternity. On top of all this, she’d also been a wife, and she’d also been raising a rapidly-growing daughter and homeschooling me as well. So, because of all the busyness in her life, she simply hadn’t had as much time to spend with Jen as she’d had during her first couple of years on the farm. Also, over the years, she’d become a little closer to my Aunt Mel, which was yet another thing that cut into her time available to spend with Jen.
Despite all this, I knew my mom still considered Jen to be her best friend, and Jen still considered my mom to be her best friend. However, sometimes I thought that maybe they considered themselves to be more “historical” best friends, or “honorary” best friends, or something like that. And maybe Jen and I were more “current” best friends, just as far as who spent more time with Jen on a daily basis. At any rate, I knew that I probably related to Jen more than my mom did, because while my mom sometimes seemed to be mature beyond her years, Jen still had the funny, quirky, very youthful personality that everyone in our family had told me she’d always had. Most of the time, I even forgot that Jen was actually twenty-six, and not a teenager, like me. “Jen has really matured some over the past few years,” I’d overheard my Uncle Mark telling my Aunt Carol once. However, while hanging out with Jen, I often felt like we were just two eighteen-year-olds, despite the fact that neither of us was truly eighteen. This could have been because I hardly ever hung out with anyone who was truly my age, though, so it was possible I just didn’t know what it was really like. In fact, the day that my “bad boy” vampire boyfriend Jake came to the farm, I probably hadn’t really hung out with anyone my age in over a year, not counting “forced” socialization with teens on the farm during big community barn parties and things like that, and sometimes I worked with teenagers from the farm during my shifts at the creamery. I never really connected with any of them, though, instead choosing to “connect” with books when I wasn’t working.
“Aren’t you sick of reading yet?” Jen said to me the day that Jake arrived.
Having worked an eight-hour shift at the creamery that day, I was relaxing with a book, sitting cross-legged on a bench beneath a shade tree in the side yard of the main house, where everyone in my family had lived since I’d been born.
Looking up from my book at Jen, I smiled at our little joke. For years, she’d been asking me near-daily if I was “sick of reading yet,” and my answer was always the same.
“No…not even remotely,” I told her, watching her walk from the circular dirt driveway over to me on the bench.
This was the truth. While my mom had been homeschooling me, I’d never gotten sick of reading, no matter how many books she’d assigned me to read. Now in the present, despite the fact that I’d earned my high school degree two months earlier, I still wasn’t sick of reading. In fact, now that I was free to read whatever I wanted instead of just assigned books, I was more in love with reading than ever. It was my constant friend, and my escape when I didn’t want to think about the direction of my life, which was often. Not knowing what I wanted to do for a career or study in college, I’d decided several months earlier to take a year off just to work on the farm; however, I’d been second-guessing myself about this decision, wondering if I’d made a mistake. After all, even though I’d lost interest in making friends because of the problems posed by my rapid aging, I had started to really become intrigued by the possibility of someday having a boyfriend, like maybe one I could meet in college, not that I had any idea how I’d ultimately explain my rapid aging to him. Now it didn’t even matter anyway, since I’d decided to put off college for a year, but my decision still troubled me. So, I buried my face in books whenever I wanted to avoid thinking about all this.
Once she reached me and the bench, Jen had a seat beside me, letting her breath out in a rush. “I’m tired. Teaching people how to shoot ain’t easy, you know. But someone’s gotta do it.”
After her grandparents, Bucky and Phyllis, had taught her how to shoot, Jen had grown increasingly serious about firearms training and safety; and a few years earlier, she’d become a master instructor at the gun range in Sweetwater where she herself had learned how to shoot. Depending on the week, she sometimes worked long hours giving one-on-one instruction, and she also worked in the office at the range, and at gun expos all over mid-Michigan, too. A few times a year, she even traveled various places around the country with Phyllis and Bucky to enter shooting competitions, which she often won, as evidenced by a growing collection of medals and trophies in a case in her room. Nothing made her happier than to beat much older men who’d been training with firearms all their lives, when she’d only started at eighteen and was now only twenty-six. “I showed ‘em, everyone,” she’d often say when returning home from a competition. “I showed ‘em how it’s done.”
Now that I was eighteen, or at least eighteen for all practical purposes, she’d been trying to get me into shooting; but I’d declined, just not having any real interest in it.
“But with your driver’s license saying you’re eighteen, it’d be perfectly legal for you to shoot at the range without your parents, you know,” Jen had said.
She was right about that, and she was also right that my driver’s license said that I was eighteen. That had come about because when I was sixteen, my parents had had to get a forged birth certificate for me so that I could take driver’s training.
Nonetheless, I’d told Jen that I was really pretty sure that shooting wasn’t ever going to be my thing, adding that because it was hers, it was one of the things that made her special in our family, because no one else was into it. After considering this, Jen had seemed to come to terms with being the only shooter in the family, adding that she was the only one who’d never gotten a traffic ticket, either, which was true. Mel had gotten three over the years, two for speeding and one for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign; I’d gotten one for speeding at seventeen; my mom had gotten one once for “failing to keep up with the flow of traffic”; and various other members of our family had received at least one ticket for speeding in their lives. My dad had even received a ticket for going five over the year before, which had made him have to struggle mightily not to “clear” the police officer’s memory. He’d resisted the urge, though, knowing that that would be unethical, and had instead simply accepted the ticket, making Jen the only adult in our family who’d never received a traffic violation of any kind. This was a point of pride for her, as was her firearms training and safety record, and these things made my Uncle Mark and Aunt Carol quite proud, too. They both knew Jen could be prone to “flights of fancy,” as Carol once told me. “However, she’s incredibly responsible when it comes to things that really matter,” Carol had added. “Thank God.”
Back in the present, sitting next to Jen on the bench, I told her that the cure for a long day working at the range was probably some of the freshly-churned blueberry ice cream that I’d brought home from the creamery after my shift. “Want me to go scoop some into cones and bring them back out here for us?”
Surprising me, because she hardly ever refused food, Jen shook her head. “I filled up on tacos from a drive-thru on my way home, because I wanted to make sure I had enough time to grab a shower and make myself look all pretty before all the new people arrive. You know…just in case some of them are good-looking dudes. I still haven’t given up on finding a super-hot vampire who’s single, you know, and who looks like he’s about my age, and who likes to have fun as much as I do. There’s gotta be one out there, I keep telling myself…because as far as guys in Sweetwater…well, let’s just say that none of them have been ready for Jen MacGregor yet, you know what I mean?”
I did, having heard her tales of failing to connect with certain guys she’d had crushes on over the years. However, there was one thing she’d just said that I didn’t understand, which was her comment about “new people” arriving. I’d just opened my mouth to ask her, when she suddenly checked the time on her phone screen and popped up from the bench.
“I’ve gotta run if I want to get my shower. Mel told me all the new people will be here around seven, and it’s six-thirty right now, and I probably still have bits of seaweed in my hair from when I went swimming in the lake with Phyllis and Bucky on my lunch break.”
Tucking a bookmark into the book I’d been reading, I stood. “But, just wait a second. Who are these ‘new people’ you keep talking about? And why are they coming to the farm?”
With her eyes widening, Jen gave me a comically-exaggerated look of shock and disbelief. “Where have you been the past few days? No one’s told you about all the new vampires coming to live here on the farm?”
I shook my head. “No…no one’s said a word to me.”
Suddenly, I found myself wondering if some of the “new vampires” might be male, and if so, if they might be good-looking.