NINE
It turned out that coordinating the fortifications around the farm not only gave me a sense of purpose, but gave me a sense of power as well. Finally, I was actually doing something to help against the Warrens. I no longer felt helpless, and I no longer wanted to flee. In fact, I now felt silly and cowardly for ever having wanted to. Also, the further along I got with the fortifications, the more certain I became that the Warrens would never defeat us Watchers. That was another thing, too. I could now finally say us Watchers without feeling like something of a fraud because I wasn’t a vampire. It felt good and only added to my increasing sense of power.
Coordinating the fortifications around the farm wasn’t an easy task, though. For one thing, it took anywhere from eight to fourteen hours of my time daily, which required Mel and Carol to give me significant help with childcare. Mark also helped with Chrissy, even though he was incredibly busy at his legal practice.
As far as Hayden, he tried to share in childcare duties as much as he possibly could, although that wasn’t much. He was not only leading spying missions daily to try to keep an eye on the Warrens and figure out their plans, he was also leading numerous guard patrols around the farm property day and night.
There was also the matter of keeping an eye on the Warrens whenever any of them went into Sweetwater or other neighboring towns. And when he wasn’t doing all these things, he was thinking about them and making further plans, determined to never let the Warrens surprise us with an attack and hurt anyone on the farm.
Not only were Hayden and I both incredibly busy, we were both very physically taxed, too. My new job maybe shouldn’t have been physically taxing, because I was simply supposed to be coordinating fence-building and defense efforts, but it was anyway because I often couldn’t help myself from joining in the actual construction of the fortifications as well. I certainly didn’t know much about construction of fences, but I soon learned, often digging holes for posts, pouring cement, and helping to install braces that would help fortify the fencing from being overturned.
My new job also required a fair amount of thinking and strategy, requiring me to use my brain in much different ways than I usually did at the creamery. Before overseeing installation of a new length of fencing, I had to first work with Hayden to determine exactly where we wanted the break in the fencing to be, because this would of course determine where the Warrens would enter the farm when they attacked.
However, after a time, I stopped consulting Hayden, confident that I was getting the hang of determining where fence breaks should be myself. This seemed just fine with him and even seemed to be something of a relief to him, because it was just one less thing he had to think about every day.
We’d both been working morning, noon, and night for about two weeks when late one evening in the kitchen, while Hayden and I fed Chrissy, Mark reminded Hayden that he had to “eat,” too.
Looking almost dazed with exhaustion, Hayden looked from Chrissy to Mark. “What?”
Shuffling through a tall stack of legal paperwork across the island, Mark said that he really should have said the word drink. “As in, Hayden, you’re a vampire, and you need to drink so that you don’t become so weakened that you collapse.”
With understanding clear in his expression, Hayden said that he wasn’t anywhere near collapse yet. “You’re right that I do need to drink, though…although instead of a hunting trip up north, I think I’ll stick a little closer to home. I’ll go hunt in the deep forestland east of Sweetwater tomorrow…if I ever get a spare two hours.”
Mark said he’d better make it a priority. “You don’t want to be weak when the Warrens attack.”
Hayden said that that was a good point. “I don’t want to be weak any time before they attack, either. Lately, even some of their scouts have proven to be incredibly strong…and they take all my strength to deal with.”
I’d heard this from other vampires too, that even the vampires that the Warrens were sending to spy for them were incredibly strong. This made people start to wonder just how strong their “A-team” fighters were. I wondered about this, too, and felt troubled by the Warrens’ growing strength and power, but only slightly troubled. This was because I’d heard from Watcher vampires that when it came to strength, Hayden was really coming into his own as a vampire, despite the fact that he was exhausted and hadn’t really been “eating” well as of late.
“He killed two spies yesterday and then singlehandedly took on another not a minute later,” Sam had told me earlier that day. “Then, when he’d killed that one, he took off to chase the fourth one. Sometimes, I think Hayden’s even stronger than he himself realizes.”
I believed this was true, too, and it comforted me to know.
As for Jen, she helped with childcare sometimes, and helped with building fortifications around the farm other times, but she continued to spend most of her time with Bucky and Phyllis in Sweetwater, playing paintball like it was her full-time job or something. I asked her one day if she wasn’t getting a little sick of it, and she said no way.
“See, I’m maybe not super good or talented at a lot of things in life, like reading, or writing, or any of the other dumb stuff they tried to teach me in school. But, paintball…I’m really good at paintball, just like how I’m really good at being a careful driver. Bucky even says that I’m a ‘natural’ at paintball. He says my aim is even ‘deadly,’ and that it’s getting better and better every single day. So, because I’m so good at paintball, it just keeps making me want to practice it more and more. Especially when even all the people at the paintball place are starting to notice how good I am, too.
Like, yesterday, there was this one guy who asked Bucky how long I’ve been playing paintball, and when Bucky told him just this summer, the guy was like, ‘Well, your granddaughter has some serious talent. She could maybe even enter competitions someday.’ And Bucky’s chest, like, swelled out, and I could tell he was super proud of me…which made me super proud of me.”
I smiled, then asked Jen if there was actually such a thing as paintball “competitions.”
She hesitated in responding for a moment, but then said that there sure was. “People can even win medals and stuff. Some people even win medals in the Olympics for paintball.”
I wasn’t sure about that, but paintball was keeping Jen so happily occupied and non-anxious about the impending Warren attack that it definitely got my stamp of approval as being a very positive thing for her.
It was the first day of July when Jen shared another summer accomplishment with me, although this “accomplishment” was a little more dubious than becoming proficient at playing paintball. This “accomplishment” was of the social media variety.
While we ate breakfast at the island, Jen showed me her phone screen and asked me to take a look. I did, and saw a selfie of her and Wanted in the bathtub with their plate of bacon the day of Jen’s crazy morning a few weeks earlier. Wearing her canary-yellow bathing suit, and with a piece of bacon in hand held up to her mouth, Jen was grinning in the picture, and Wanted even appeared to be wearing some sort of happy expression as well, with the sides of his mouth curved upward as if he was smiling. The picture was captioned Bacon in the bathtub? You could, if you weren’t so busy learning how to basic. #Royalty #MyLevel #HumanAndPetBathing #BreakfastInTheTub.
I just looked at the picture for a few moments. “Oh…wow. That’s quite a caption, Jen. Not to mention, well, how did you…how did you spell all these words correctly?”
“Oh, I just asked Carol. She spelled the words out for me, and I typed them all perfectly. I told her I was doing a creative writing exercise, which wasn’t even remotely a lie, was it? I mean, social media stuff is supposed to be creative.”
“Well, your post definitely is creative.”
“Well, thanks, but that’s not even the most important part of it that I want you to see.” Jen paused for a moment, turning the phone screen back toward herself, and then tapped the screen a few times before turning it to face me again. “See what is the most important part? See all the stars, and hearts, and laughing faces my post got? Over two hundred thousand stars so far, over eighty thousand hearts, and over fifty thousand laughing faces. And all those numbers are still just getting bigger and bigger every single hour.
I even got over seventy thousand comments on my picture, too. Most of them even say pretty nice things, too, like that me and Wanted are real trendsetters, and fun, and cool…and all the comments that aren’t so nice are just people who are jealous. I knew going into this that there’d be a lot of those kind of comments. It’s just a jealous kind of world, you know what I mean? Especially for people who are breakfast-in-the-bathtub royalty kind of people.”
Just then, Mel entered the kitchen and Jen quickly pocketed her phone, mumbling something about how Mel would “never understand” about “breakfast-in-the-bathtub royalty kind of people.”
This was probably a good idea that Jen did this, because Mel seemed to be in a bit of a crabby mood, soon complaining that all her patrol work recently had left her no time to paint. “And now I just realized that I missed the deadline to enter a painting in a competition in Ann Arbor. The prize was one year of free tuition at any accredited art school or college in the state, plus the honor of having the painting featured in some prestigious gallery exhibition at a museum in Washington, D.C.”
Glancing up from feeding Chrissy, I told Mel I was sorry she’d missed the deadline, then began to ask if there were any other competitions coming up. However, Jen cut me off, speaking to Mel.
“I’m not sorry you missed the deadline, because I’m still mad you called me an ‘illiterate moron with cotton candy for brains’ last night. I’m actually glad you missed the deadline, even, because you really ticked me off with how rude and just plain mean you were to me. I hope you miss all painting competitions in the whole future of the universe, even.”
A little dubious, I asked Mel if she’d really called Jen what Jen was accusing her of having called her, but Mel didn’t even try to deny it.
“I’ll even say it to her face again, because anyone who can’t read simple instructions clearly written on the back of a bottle of bathroom tile cleaner is an illiterate moron with cotton candy for brains.”
Jen sputtered, clearly outraged. “I thought it was air freshener! I was trying to make the hallway smell better after I accidentally spilled my nail polish remover all over!”
Mel snorted. “Well, you failed.” Coming to stand with a hip against the island, Mel shifted her gaze to me. “She sprayed so much tile cleaner all around the hallway that by the time I got upstairs to take a shower and take a nap before heading back out on patrol last night, I basically had to wade through a thick chemical fog to do it.
The hallway was so slippery with tile cleaner that I almost wiped out, too. All because someone doesn’t even have the ability to read the words ‘Sparkle Fresh tile cleaner’ in big bold blue letters on the front of a can, because someone is a complete illiterate who spends her days playing paintball instead of doing something more productive, like, oh, I don’t know. Maybe learning how to read. Meanwhile, all of us other family members are busting our tails just trying to keep everyone on the farm safe.”
Glaring at Mel, Jen slowly rose from her barstool and spoke in a quiet voice. “I can help keep everyone safe.”
Leaning with her elbows on the island, Mel snorted. “How? By shooting up all the Warrens with paintballs? Sorry, Jen, but here in reality, that just won’t work. One thing that might work against the Warrens, though, is if you move in with them. You could probably annoy them all to death within a week. Which would still be a quicker death than shooting little paintballs at them.”
Jen suddenly began striding out of the kitchen. “I don’t need this.”
Twisting around in her high chair, Chrissy called out to her with cries of “Ah-Zhen!” but Jen didn’t even turn around.
Once she’d disappeared from view down the hallway, I asked Mel if she thought she’d been a little “hard” on Jen. However, I really wanted to say “rude” or “excessively mean.”
Standing up from her lean over the island, Mel just shrugged. “Maybe if she’d ever learn how to act properly, I wouldn’t have to be so hard on her.”
“She’s always going to act a little ‘differently,’ though…and I think you know this. She just has a really unique personality, which is probably never going to change. So, are you just going to spend the rest of your life at odds with her? And keep in mind that since you’re a vampire, the ‘rest of your life’ is eternity…which might be the same for Jen someday, too.”
Mel scoffed. “Oh, God forbid. Jen as a vampire? With her total lack of impulse control? She’d probably have half the citizens of Sweetwater completely drained dry of blood just on her first day.”
With that, Mel breezed out of the kitchen, leaving me to wonder if she and Jen were ever going to find any kind of common ground or peace in their relationship.
However, I soon had bigger problems to deal with once Carol came downstairs to take Chrissy from me.