Chapter 2: The Explanation

Gabe had obviously just misheard Charlie.

He couldn’t have possibly said what he thought he’d said. His friend wasn’t the best at paying attention in school, but he was still smart. He knew vampires didn’t exist. Maybe Gabe’s ears were broken.

“What?” Gabe asked.

“My great-great-grandmother was a vampire.”

Okay, so Gabe’s ears were working. It was Charlie’s brain that was broken.

“Charlie,” Gabe said slowly, “you do know that vampires aren’t real, right?”

Gabe didn’t want to make him upset, but they were in middle school. Kids got beat up for still believing in mermaids and werewolves and such.

Charlie shook his head. “Oh, sweet, naive Gabe. Come here.” Charlie made his way across his room, but Gabe decided not to follow. He had no idea what lurked on his friend’s floor since it was always covered in a layer of dirty clothing. If his room ever looked like that, he would’ve been grounded faster than his papa could shout, “Sin videojuegos!” His dad always spoke in Spanish when he was upset.

He watched as Charlie pulled open his bottom dresser drawer, which was filled with crumpled-up clothing. Charlie threw all the scarves, socks, and pairs of hopefully clean underwear behind him until the drawer was empty.

“Uh, Charlie,” Gabe asked as he tip-toed across the room as though avoiding a group of landmines. “How is an empty drawer going to prove the existence of—Woah!”

Charlie slid his finger along the back of the drawer and popped a false bottom out. Underneath was a pile of spread-out photos, some in black and white, others in color. Charlie scooped the pictures up and carried them to the middle of his room. He kicked the clothing out of the way and made a clear spot on the floor then dumped the photos onto it.

He spread his hands across the photos to scatter them out then said, “See?”

Gabe sat across from him and checked out the images. The black and white ones looked like they were taken a hundred years before. The women were wearing flowing, thick dresses that covered their shins, and the men were all dressed in button-up shirts and ironed pants.

The photos in color were taken over multiple decades. Some were so worn, they had tears and stains. The others looked freshly printed. Gabe loved looking at the photos as he was interested in both history and photography, but he didn’t know how they had anything to do with their conversation.

“I don’t see any sharp teeth or mugs filled with blood. How does a bunch of old photos prove the existence of vampires?” Gabe asked.

Charlie slapped his forehead. “Look at them closely. Doesn’t something seem off?”

Gabe looked over the photos again, but they seemed normal to him. Some of the ones in color resembled photos his papa had shown him from back when he was a young boy.

But then he noticed something strange. The people in the black and white photos were the same people in the colored photos, and they were the same age in all of them. They had the same hair though styled in different ways to reflect the decade they were taken. They even had the same freckles.

But there was a logical, non-magical reason for that, right?

“These are probably edited. My mama and papa have a photo of them that makes it look like they were in the wild west. They got it on their honeymoon to Hawaii.”

Charlie deflated like a balloon. His smile turned to a frown, and he groaned. “Come on, Gabe. I’m telling the truth.”

Gabe wanted to believe, but he couldn’t. Someone in Charlie’s family must've played some rude prank on him, and now he had to clean up the mess.

“I believe,” Gabe started, making Charlie’s smile start to return, “that you believe.” Charlie frowned again.

“Fine, uh…” Charlie wrung his hands as he stared at the photos. “Oh, I got it.” He ran his fingers along the pictures, picking out a few, then laid them in a line.

He pointed to the first photo in the line and said, “Look at this baby. Look at who’s holding it.”

In the black and white photo was a young woman holding a small baby, dressed in a white, flowing dress, in front of a church.

“Now look at this.” Charlie pointed to the next black and white photo. In this one, the same woman was standing next to a five-year-old boy, wearing suspenders. She had her arm wrapped around him in a motherly way.

Gabe looked at the next photo, then the next, then finally the last. In each photo the boy was a few years older. First, he was ten, then a teenager, and finally an adult, but the woman stayed the same. She even looked younger than the boy in the last photo.

Gabe looked back and forth, from the second photo of the five-year-old boy to the last photo of the grown man. They had the same hair, the same mole on their chin, even the same folded left ear. They had to be the same person.

Gabe shook his head and pushed himself away until his back met the bedroom door. It couldn’t be true. There had to be some sort of explanation. Maybe the man in the last photo was the father of the boy in the first photo. But then, why would the father’s photos be in color when the son’s photos were in black and white?

Maybe… maybe his friend was telling the truth?

Gabe shook his head. “No, this isn’t possible. How would that even work? How would drinking other people’s blood keep you from aging? From dying?”

Charlie shrugged. “Magic?”

Gabe’s stomach started to hurt as his chest grew heavy. “Magic is real too?”

What wasn’t real? Next Charlie was going to tell him zombies and Bigfoot exist.

“Obviously. My great-grandpa even taught me a spell. Wanna see it?”

Gabe wanted to go home and curl up in his bed with a fluffy blanket, but he had to see. He needed proof that magic was real. “Okay,” he whispered.

Charlie locked his door. “Don’t want my parents walking in. They hate everything to do with magic.”

That didn’t surprise Gabe. Charlie’s parents hated everything to do with fun. While Gabe’s parents were strict with chores and homework, they also watched movies together, made s’mores, and sometimes even traveled when his mama was feeling good.

Charlie’s parents were the opposite. They let him keep his room a mess and never checked his report cards, but they didn’t do anything together either. Sometimes they would leave for vacations without him, but Charlie never minded since they left him at Gabe’s.

Charlie reached under his bed and pulled out a small, wooden box with a strange carving on the top as though someone had taken a knife and twirled it around, making spirals that resembled flowers.

“Aperta,” Charlie whispered to the box. The carvings lit up, and the box clicked open. Charlie raised his brows at Gabe, but he still wasn’t convinced. There were plenty of voice-activated password locks.

Charlie opened the box. Gabe peaked over his shoulder, not knowing what to expect.

He tilted his head when he noticed the only thing in the box was a pile of small leaves.

“Seriously?” Gabe asked. Charlie ignored him as he took one of the tiny, green leaves and laid it in the palm of his hand, placing the box beside them.

Charlie twirled his pointer finger on top of the leaf while whispering, “Oriri.” The leaf spun on his palm before lifting into the air. It twirled faster and faster until it looked like the blades of a helicopter.

“Woah” was all Gabe could think to say as the leaf turned so fast, it created a small gust of wind. Once it gathered enough speed to barely be seen, Charlie snapped, and the leaf burst into a tiny fireworks show.

Gabe jumped back, his heart racing. He pulled his knees to his chest and rested his nose against them.

This was the craziest thing he’d ever learned, even crazier than learning caterpillars melt in their cocoons to turn into butterflies. Even weirder than learning his best friend only changed his underwear every five days—a fact he often tried to forget.

If magic was real, it meant everything he thought he knew, everything his parents and teachers had taught him about the world, was wrong. That his friend knew more about the world than people who had spent their entire lives studying it. Gabe didn’t know how to process this information. He didn’t know if he even wanted to. If he believed in a world with magic, a world with vampires, that meant he had a new world of things to fear. Would he be able to sleep at night, knowing there are things that go around, drinking people’s blood? That there are things that would hurt others, to keep themselves alive?

“Wait,” Gabe said, remembering how to speak. “If vampires are real, and your grandmother—”

“Great-great-grandmother.”

“Yeah, if your great-great-grandmother was one, does that mean she went around attacking people?”

Charlie shook his head. “No, never. My great-great-grandmother was one of the sweetest people ever. She drank from blood bags. She told me there were good vampires and bad vampires, just like people.”

Yeah, but bad people were a lot easier to stop than bad vampires, who had super strength and speed. Gabe’s head started to hurt as though learning all this new information was causing his brain to expand enough to make his skull crack. He didn’t want to talk about vampires anymore. He wanted to forget about them.

His stomach growled, making him sigh in relief.

“I gotta go. My mama’s making lasagna, and it’s probably almost ready.” He jumped to his feet and turned to open the door, but just as he reached for the handle, Charlie grabbed his arm to stop him.

“Wait, I wanted to ask you something, remember?”

Uh, oh. Gabe did not like the sound of that.

“If this involves becoming vampire hunters, I would like to remind you that we are both less than five feet tall, and I never passed the ten-push-up test in Gym.”

Charlie laughed. “No, that’s dumb and dangerous. No, my plan is way, way cooler.” He clasped his hands together and smiled a mischievous grin. “No, I don’t want to hunt any creatures. I want to become a creature, and I want to know if you do too.”

Gabe had a bad feeling he knew what his friend was saying, but he played dumb.

“What do you mean?”

Charlie took a step closer, placed his hands on Gabe’s shoulders, and said, “I mean, I want to get turned into a vampire, and I want you to join me. Come on, Gabe. Wanna become a vampire?”