Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,46

Shadwell showed us a plastic-covered notebook that had the names and addresses of all the community organizations in it. There were the Society for the Preservation of Oak Trees, the Friends of the Gomorrah River, the Association of King Charles Spaniel Fanciers, the John Keats Chapter of the Federation of Romantic Poets, Post 147 of the Massachusetts Colonial Historical Association—it went on for two hundred pages. But only a few were arts groups.

Turk and I made a list of all the ones that sounded even remotely right, and started calling their presidents. Every one of them, from the New Sodom Light Opera Guild to the Daughters of Terpsichore Classical Dance Circle, turned us down.

“How very kind of you to think of us in this way,” the president of the Thalian Confederation for Oral Recitation told me. “We do wish you the best of luck with your project. But it isn’t quite right for us.”

“What a lovely idea,” said the president of the Aeolian Society for the Propagation of Sixteenth-Century Wind Music. “But I doubt that the acoustics of an old mill would favor our efforts.”

And the president of the Friends of Folkloric Musical Performance told Turk, “We couldn’t possibly appear in a venue that was originally a site of labor exploitation.”

The first week of October ticked by. The second. Nobody wanted to be part of the opening.

Turk got busy with her show. She spent all her afternoons out at the mill hanging her work.

“Hell, who cares if they don’t show?” she said. “I’m going to have my art up. That’s what matters.”

I was pretty sure Turk was self-involved enough not to care if anybody else used the center or not. She was probably enjoying the picture of herself as someone too special for New Sodom. I could imagine her standing alone in the gallery on the main floor, just her and her art and her inflatable Scream.

But I did care. In between missing Justin and wishing I were with Ileana, I worried about an opening night where nobody came. I wanted a night where people were falling out the windows because it was so crowded inside, with everybody saying, “How come no one ever did this before?” At the very least, I wanted it to be important enough that Justin and Ileana would know that I had been right.

If I was right.

I kept thinking about an old joke Dad told me he used to see on signs plastered around his college campus: TOMORROW HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST. It looked like we might be on our way to being that joke.

Then I got a clue as to just how very interested some people were.

It was Columbus Day. In Massachusetts, that’s a day off from school. Turk and I were celebrating by trying to catch up on our homework. I read English while she worked through her math, science, and history.

Meanwhile, it was a beautiful day outside. All the leaves were beginning to turn, and some of the trees were like crowns of red and gold already. The air was warm, and bright with that special light that says, “Enjoy this. It won’t last long” and makes everything stand out sharp and clear.

By four o’clock, the shadows were getting thick under the trees in the backyard, and the last hour of daylight was starting to slide toward evening. I had spent hours slogging through a sludge of nineteenth-century poetry, most of it written to girls with names like Annabelle and Maude, poems that seemed as thick on the page as the shadows outside, and not anywhere near as beautiful. And they made me think about Ileana more, which was not the best thing to have happen.

So when Turk stuck her head in my bedroom door and said, “Let’s blow up this place and get out of here,” I was ready, even though I had about a hundred more pages of Annabelles to go.

We got into her car and drove down to the Screaming Bean.

The Screaming Bean was a downtown coffee joint. There was a life-sized version of The Scream, just like Turk’s, on the front door, and across the bottom, in words cut from old magazines, it said, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO COFFEE?!?!?!?!”

“Hey, look. Your friend’s here,” I said.

“The Scream is everywhere,” Turk sighed. “It’s become a cliché. You don’t see inflatable Rothkos, do you?”

Whatever that meant.

Anyway, I pushed open the door and in we went.

Inside, it was a Turk kind of place. Dark walls with