My stomach churned restlessly.

“I don’t know what exactly she did, but it was insane how immense the pain was. It went through my entire body, and—I can’t even begin to describe it to you. I felt like I was going out of my mind. I couldn’t even hear myself screaming.

“Everything that took place after that is just a huge blur in my memories, to be honest. I woke up in a hospital bed. My father and a couple of detectives were already there, asking me to recount what had happened for them.

“The pain was mostly gone, but I could still feel the echoes of it all everywhere. Everything felt unreal, even the bed I was lying on.

“I couldn’t speak—my mind was a total mess, so there was no way I could’ve answered their questions properly anyway. My father got them to leave since it was already late at night, and I wasn’t very receptive. After they were gone, he tried to ask me the same questions. He thought I just didn’t want to answer in front of the detectives, but it wasn’t like that. I couldn’t even find the words to say. He started recounting what he was told when he made it to the hospital, probably thinking it would get me to talk.

“Apparently, the school caretaker happened to be nearby and heard me screaming. He came bursting in through the doors just in time to see a girl make a big leap up to an open window and escape through it. He found me lying there, screaming my head off and completely unresponsive to anything that he said, so he called an ambulance and went to search the school grounds for the girl. She was nowhere to be found.

“When they got me to the hospital, they checked me over and declared that I was physically fine although obviously in shock. There were two punctures in my neck, but they weren’t bleeding. My behavior didn’t make sense for someone who didn’t appear hurt, which was probably why the detectives stayed to ask questions.

“My father asked about the girl from the caretaker’s account, and then he asked me about my neck.” Nolan placed his hand over the left side of his neck. “I don’t know why I didn’t sustain any serious injuries—the pain at the moment of the bite was excruciating. Ultimately, he couldn’t get anything out of me and gave up for the night. The hospital let him fill out the discharge papers and take me home.

“The next morning, I woke up when the sun rose enough to pour light into my room—it was way too bright. It hadn’t touched me yet, but there was something about the sunlight streaming in from the window that filled me with unease. Before I knew it, I had run to the other side of the room. That was when I knew that something was very wrong with me. I couldn’t even force myself to get up and draw the curtains.

“My father came into the room to see me huddled in a corner of the room, staring at the window. I begged him to draw the curtains for me, and it took him a while to do it because he was so confused. I couldn’t give him a coherent reason, either; I was a complete mess.

“I went down for breakfast and finished all of it before my stomach started protesting. I made it into the bathroom just in time to hurl into the toilet. Obviously, my father asked again what exactly was going on, but I was too frightened to say anything. By then, I kind of already guessed that my body was changing, but I couldn’t be sure yet—all that had happened was me vomiting after breakfast. There’s no easy way to tell someone that you’re probably a vampire now, especially if you can hardly believe it yourself.

“I was hungry, though. I just couldn’t bring myself to touch any of the food on that table again. I skipped lunch after that, and I would’ve skipped dinner too if my father hadn’t forced me to try to eat something. I sat at the table, but I couldn’t eat anything. I already knew that I would puke if I tried again. Then I realized that my father smelled kind of different. He smelled like he usually did, but underneath that scent was another kind of smell that reminded me of food.”

The frown on Nolan’s face deepened. He looked distinctly like he was going to be sick. Upon catching my concerned gaze, he managed a weak smile at me.

“I was hit with a desire to attack my father to sate my hunger, which came with an equally overwhelming sense of disgust at what I wanted. It was terrifying when my fangs just sort of … slid out on their own without me actively doing something. I had to force myself not to budge, in case I lost control of myself, and then I ended up vomiting on the floor anyway.

“He demanded to know what was going on, and I saw no point in trying to hide it any longer. I told him the bare bones of the matter—my friend bit me, claiming she’d turn me into a vampire, and now I was likely becoming one.

“He didn’t want to believe me, that much I could tell. He told me to stop trying to be funny and to tell him the truth. I opened my mouth wide at him, and that shut him up.

“I didn’t—I don’t—joke around him or play pranks or anything like that. I don’t even talk much to him, so he had to have known that I wasn’t kidding, especially after I showed him my fangs. I half-expected him to run away screaming, because that was what I wanted to do when Eri first revealed hers, and also because I would’ve run away from myself if I were him.

“He looked shaken, but he just sat back down on the chair and asked me some more questions. He wanted more details about Eri, so I gave him her full name and the classes we shared. Then I confessed that I was scared of the sunlight this morning. I didn’t know what would happen if I stepped out of the house into it, so I didn’t want to do it.

“He’d originally planned to have me go back to school the next day if I recovered well enough, but now that seemed impossible. I admitted that I was starving, but the thought of eating regular food made me lose my appetite. I wasn’t willing to try again. Fortunately, he didn’t force me.

“The next day, I forced myself to go near my bedroom window. I had to know if something bad would actually happen, that it wasn’t all in my head. I pulled back the curtain to put my hand into the ray of light. My hand started to burn instantly—smoke was rising up from it. It stopped once I withdrew my hand, but I could see the huge blisters that had formed on the back of my hand. You want to know what the weirdest part was? My blisters seemed to shrink in real time before my eyes.

“Within several minutes—maybe ten—my hand was back in its original state. I ran to show my father and exposed myself to a bit of light to prove my case. He had no choice but to believe me after that. That night, he came back with a live rabbit to see if I could eat that. My compulsion to immediately snatch it from him was so strong, it overrode the revulsion I felt towards myself for the desire. Before I fully realized what I was doing, I had already killed it and was drinking from it right in front of him.

“He said nothing and took the carcass after to dispose of it. I think he was just relieved that I didn’t have to drink human blood.

“When the detectives came around the house again, in order to account for my traumatized behavior, my father told them that I’d been ambushed by a friend in school who was trying to injure me.

“They tried to get more information from the school, which was trying to keep it on the low since the incident made it into the local news. It was just a small article, but I guess they didn’t want to take any chances on it blowing up. The house at her address was uninhabited and up for sale when the detectives visited it. I’d never gone to her house, so I have no idea if she’d ever actually lived there. Eri had already withdrawn from school, too. According to them, she hadn’t shown up since the day after the incident. All the tracks led to a dead end.

“Having heard the caretaker’s story, the school authorities just chalked it up to a student—who had already withdrawn at this time—having delusions of being a vampire and dressing up accordingly with fake fangs. That conveniently rationalized the strange puncture marks on my neck.

“My father couldn’t do much about it either, at least without revealing what exactly Eri had done to me. After all, I appeared overall unharmed, at least physically. My behavior was probably a huge overreaction to them.

“As it turned out, I couldn’t go to school during the day, and my mind wasn’t in a functional enough state to pay attention even if I did, anyway, so my father had to take me with him when he returned to Fairwood. I couldn’t leave everything behind me fast enough.

“Suddenly turning into a monster overnight wasn’t something I handled well.”

I didn’t think anyone would be able to handle that well.

“I liked being under the sun, but now I experienced inexplicable lethargy when it was light out, and only felt awake enough after dusk. My brain spent every waking second reliving all the things that Eri had said right before biting me and all the memories we shared that led up until that moment. All my previous worries about life didn’t matter now because I didn’t know if I even had a life ahead of me anymore.

“For the first couple of months, he had a therapist visit me in the evenings since I couldn’t leave the apartment. I could see that the therapist was trying his best to make me comfortable and reassure me that anything that I shared with him would be confidential, but my main problem was the one thing I couldn’t tell anyone. I also just … didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything anymore. I was tired of everyone and everything.

“I think my father also knew that I couldn’t tell the therapist about Eri and what she’d done to me—I was struggling to cope with the realization of what I’d become. I’d probably get taken away to be examined and experimented if anyone ever found out. I doubt he got me therapy for anything beyond learning some coping mechanisms.

“As the sessions went on, I ended up blaming my poor relationship with my mother for all my issues because it was easier that way. It kept him from probing further since there was an easy answer right in front of him and he thought that I was actually trying.

“During that time, I basically stayed in bed all day. Getting up to shower felt like a monumental challenge. I had virtually zero appetite, so I ate only when I was absolutely starving and on the brink of losing control over myself. Even my father saw that I was barely holding it together. He didn’t breach the topic of returning to school until much later on. He just let me mope.

“Moving here made things convenient though, thanks to the nearby forest—I could come here by myself to get food without being noticed. I didn’t have to rely on my father for that anymore. To be honest, I think he was glad for that too. Before I officially transferred to Fairwood as a student, I was staying at that apartment building near the school.”

Right, the one which most of our faculty staff stayed in.

For some strange reason, I always kept forgetting that our teachers had to live somewhere. It always felt like they just appeared in school and imagining them in any sort of context outside of school was almost weird.

“I only came here late at night, which also worked out for my father, because he couldn’t risk other people finding out about me. It took me a couple of months to slowly come to terms that this was my reality now, to stop having a meltdown every few hours, but I gradually got a little better.

“My therapist suggested to my father that he could try easing me back into my studies, ideally with a private tutor so that I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by going back to school right away. I was in no condition to return to regular classes, anyway. So I started studying at home, and I found that I could actually push most of my thoughts to the back of my mind for as long as my brain was working on something else. Then I really threw myself into my homework assignments and studied pretty much all night long.

“I found Blue here, lying on the ground injured, a few months after that. Most of the smaller animals have figured out that I’m a predator to them, and they’re usually gone the second I come remotely close to them, but he couldn’t flee because he was hurt. I felt bad for him, so I took him back with me and nursed him back to health.

“Blue really helped me out. He was a bird, so he would never betray me, at least not in the sense that other humans could. He made me feel like I wasn’t completely alone. I’m really thankful that I came across him that night.”

“I’m thankful for him, too,” I said, fighting back the tears that had formed in my eyes.

I couldn’t stand the thought of Nolan feeling like he had nobody. I had no idea that Blue had been his only companion during a time that he really needed one.