Virgin Pie

Again the air crackled and fogged in front of her as she spoke; the dresser mirror became suddenly opaque, etched with a cobweb pattern of frost.

Jasmine pulled her sarong around her shoulders and shivered. "Hey Brit, think the AC is high enough in here? You tryin' to freeze my tits off or what?" she said, bare feet swiveling around in the puddle she'd made, over which a skin of ice had formed. Brittany laughed. Jas laughed too; then her face turned sour. "Gawd Brit, what's with the teeth on you girl? Halloween's not till October. You high or something?!"

"What?" Brittany ran to her bathroom, turned on the light beside her magnified makeup mirror, and stared at her reflection. There were several tiny blackheads on her nose again. Damn that lazy beautician at the mall, she-

"Oh shit!"

As she grimaced at the blackheads she saw them, all four of them: long, sharp, curved inward and tinged with blood. Fangs.

~

"So like, do you go hunting at the full moon and howl and stuff?"

Jasmine was lying on her bed, playing with Ballerina Barbie and inhaling a bag of rippled chips.

"Gimme that," Brittany snapped, swiping the doll from her hand as she walked from the closet to her PC and booted up. She slammed the doll on the desk beside the monitor, where it performed a disjointed pirouette on its plastic pedestal. "Jeezus, Jas, do I look like a fur ball to you? I told you I'm a vampire, not a frickin' werewolf." She entered her password: VAMPINTRAINING and logged on.

"Sorry," Jasmine said, flicking her chip bag onto the floor and wiping her greasy hands on a pillow sham. "I keep forgetting."

"That's O.K."

Actually, Jas had been really cool about it all. She hadn't freaked or anything when she realized the fangs were for real: Jas already believed in aliens (her uncle had been abducted and implanted twice, she claimed) and birth charts and feng shui, so having an un-dead best friend didn't faze her.

Brittany's parents were a different story. They wanted to ?fix' her. They'd known all along what she was-her first set of fangs, she discovered, had been removed by her father, a plastic surgeon, when she was two years old. And the same doctor who supplied her mother with sleeping pills, diet powders and weed had been using fake B-12 shots to suppress her vampirism. All this she'd learned from her mother's sister, Lindie, who secretly despised Brittany's mother and liked to trash her whenever possible, preferably in public and behind her back. It took just a little coaxing and a pint of Tequila to get the goods from her-she even told Brittany the name of the shady adoption agency that her parents had gone through to get her. They'd been all keen about getting an ?exotic' baby, since it was in fashion at the time. So they'd ended up getting a Romany/Irish Gypsy mutt with vampire blood. "But don't sweat it honey," her aunt Lindie had said, "we've all got monsters nesting in the family tree somewhere. Your dad's mother made the Wicked Witch of the West look like a bombshell. Why do you think he got into the slicing and dicing biz?"

Brittany checked her two e-mail accounts, downloaded a couple of MP-3s, and headed for the teen chat rooms. Jas scooted over to the desk and leaned over her shoulder.

"Can I hop on for a sec? Pleeease?"

"Ya sure," Brittany said, relinquishing the mouse and keyboard. She felt bad about snapping at her, and besides, it was easier sometimes to spot the perves if Jas did the chatting.