"A vampire tries to reunite with her family in the suburbs."

Little Dougie Parks slit his wrists with an exacto knife that he used to build model airplanes. When he came home from the hospital, his mom gave him a Playstation 2. You know, to keep him busy while he was "recovering."

The day before she took her ACT's- well, she was supposed to anyway- Carla Phoebick took twelve vicodin, washed it down with a bottle of Maker's Mark and chased that with one of those baby-blue, plastic compacts of birth control pills. The whole thing. Who knows why? Anyway, after she got her stomach pumped and after the charcoal stains around her mouth finally washed off, well, her uncle pulled a few strings and she got in to Carleton after all. She didn't even have to take the test.

Then, and this is the real kicker, my brother Paul, all he had to do was mention to Doctor Webb that he was planning to park his new Corolla in the garage with the door closed and he got to skip his second semester and live at home, rent free for the whole ten weeks. It was like a total vacation. He just bombed around the house all Winter watching Law and Order re-runs and made sure to look extra mopey whenever mom was around.

My mistake, I guess, was where Little Dougie, Carla, and Pauly failed, I succeeded. So, yeah. I didn't get a Playstation or a free pass or a hot meal every night in bed. I didn't even get a funeral, really. Not with the casket and flowers and all that. Because they never found my body, all I got was a crappy memorial service. I figured they'd at least put up one of those oversized portraits with a silk ribbon across the front, but I peeped out the church after everyone left and nothing. Grandma Barrett, that's mom's mom, she put a locket on my grave marker, but it left a toxic, green stain all over my middle name.

And if that wasn't a bad enough, guess who's living at home again, rent-free with all the leftover turkey sandwiches he can eat? Poor, distraught boy lost his little sister. Christ. I've got half a mind to rip his throat out. I bet I could still taste mom's chicken kiev flowing through his cry-baby veins.

The big joke about the Chasers is, they always ask what death feels like. And the big joke between us is to say, "Come a little closer, sweetheart and I'll show you." It's the boys more than the girls who ask. Boys always want to know. If I was real honest, I'd say that dying is like waking up on a Saturday morning and just watching the same channel on tv straight through Sunday night. But the Chasers, they want romance and mystery, so you tell em it's cold at first, then you get real warm and your nipples get hard and tingly. You tell em it's scary, but then it's like the best sex you ever had. You tell em every time you feed- they like it when you call it "feeding"- when you feed, it's that same feeling again. Like the best sex you ever had.

The only rule with Chasers is that you don't turn em. Just like you don't let a groupie sing back-up or call some shirtless drunk out to pitch the ninth inning. It's just not done. You do that and all the mystery is gone. The other Chasers, they get a good look at how it really is and all that fantasy fades away. It won't live up to how they pictured it in their heads. It can't. It's just death. Boring, stupid death.

My problem with all this is, the Chasers are pathetic. They're like Little Dougie and Carla and even my big bro. Forever chasing after that elusive unknown, but too shit-scared to go all the way. But the ones like me, they can be worse. They really play in to that elitist sort of thing. Without the Chasers following em around, they'd just be a bunch of cold, dead bodies. So they feed off that superiority thing as much as the blood and all that.

For me, even in death I don't fit in. It's still all a bunch of follow the leader bullshit. I just want to go home.

I should clear up, before you get all, "Careful what you wish for," that I never asked for this. That's the same mentality that makes guys think a girl is begging for it just because she looks good in a spaghetti-string tank top. It'd be a funny story if it weren't true.

Funny because the thing with the big feeds is that it's more like a dance than anything else. Like a big dance, but no one brought a date, so everyone's dancing with each other. We can't die anymore than dead, so sometimes things get crazy and everyone goes home with a few bite marks here and there. No big deal, unless you're not one of em and you get caught in the middle of their big, bloody dance-orgy. Funny because I've always been pretty fair-skinned and even though I was sick as hell, I'm a sucker for Jill's big, doe eyes and went out all cold and clammy anyway. Funny because it's the same mentality that makes guys think a girl is begging for it in a spaghetti-string top, but there I was, pale as a ghost, shivering cold, and sweating. I fit right in.

The other thing they all ask is what's it like to feed for the first time. You tell them it's spiritual. You tell em your heart jumps when the blood begins to pump through it again. You push your hair over your ear, bite your lip, and you say, "It's so..." and you just let it hang in the air like that. You say it all to keep the fantasy alive. Maybe as much for yourself as for them. Maybe every time you say this, you're tricking yourself just enough to keep going. Really, though, you can't even remember. Do you remember your first taste of stewed carrots?

It's only been six months, but already I'm sick of all this. Sick of the Chasers and all the false mystery, sick of all of us feeders and our stupid inside jokes. I'm sick of playing monster. I'm going home.

I hopped a bus from the city on a Saturday morning. If dying is spending all weekend on the couch watching an endless stream of infomercials and fishing shows, this bus ride is like being reborn. I'm watching office buildings pass like birch trees, the sunlight strobe-lighting between them, stinging my eyes and I'm feeling nauseous. The crosswalks, taxis and billboards thin as the bus carries me away from the city and on to the four lanes back home.

In the seat across from mine there's some kid staring at me. I can tell he's tall even beneath the hooded sweatshirt, slouched shoulders, and scruffy whiskers. His drowsy, upside-down smile eyes are fixed on my mouth. I can tell because he doesn't blink until I bite my lip like I'm about to deliver my line.

"It's just so..."

That's when he pulls the headphones away from his ears, leans over kind of slow and he asks me, "What's it like? You know, being dead."

The sun is strobe-lighting again, only now it's flickering between power lines, water towers, ten-acre reserves stocked with Balsam Fir and Norway Pine.

At the next stop, the kid stands and says to me, "Another time then," and he plugs his head back in as he shuffles to the door.

Another 12 blocks and we're passing Little Dougie's old neighborhood. The next right turn leads to the pharmacy where Carla Phoebick picked up her mother's prescription. I know the next stop is a three-minute walk from the garage door that my poor, big brother mentioned he might leave closed.

The brakes make that sci-fi movie door opening sound and my stomach really drops for sure. An old woman holding a glass dish covered in tin-foil, she leans forward and pats me on the shoulder with a shriveled-up hand that looks deader than mine ever will. She says, "Go on, dear."

Outside the bus, I feel the sun on my cheeks and nose, on the outside of my eyelids, for the first time in weeks. The Chasers would always ask, "Don't you ever miss the sun?" To keep the fantasy alive, romantic, we're supposed to say, "In death, the moon is warmer, brighter than the sun ever was." To ruin it all, you could tell the truth. You could say how, for us, the sun isn't really all that dangerous. It's like when you were a kid and to get to the car on a winter morning you'd have to walk through a cloud of exhaust, so you'd hold your breath and puff out your cheeks real big and run through it real quick with your eyes closed.

This morning, I'm standing in my parents' driveway with my eyes open, staring in to the sun. I'm not holding my breath. My cheeks aren't puffed out. I'm breathing exhaust, just to see what it tastes like. To see if what Paul mentioned he might do to kill himself, I could do to live again.

I'm so caught up in all this living and dying and being reborn that I don't hear the garage door open. I don't see my dad in his cut-off sweatpants, old high-top Reeboks, and "Watts Up?" t-shirt that he won at his Bodin's Electric company picnic two summers ago. I don't notice him faint and trip over the lawn mower either.

Paul sits with his elbows on the table, sculpting a mound of rice in to a perfect replica of his Corolla. For the first time I can remember, Dad hasn't touched a bite. Mom, she just stares at me, her eyes all full of tears. I don't know if it's because she finally has four plates to fill again or if it's the third glass of wine, but she's strangely giddy.

Poor Paul. He's pissed because that free room and board is as good as gone now. "So, what? You just faked being dead? That sounds pretty shitty to me. Mom?"

Mom, still staring at me through those eyes swimming in tears and Merlot, she says, "Just eat your rice, dear. Before it gets cold."

It feels so good to finally say something honest about myself, so I tell them everything. I tell them about the feeding orgies and how they're like big dances where no one has dates. I tell them how eating people, well, it's really no worse than killing chickens and I hold up a big fork-full of Mom's chicken kiev for emphasis. For Mom's sake, and Dad's, I tell a little white lie and say how being dead isn't all that bad. It's peaceful, I say. I tell them the truth and say how sorry I am that I took this long to come around.

I notice Paul's mouth spreading in to a sly grin, but just as soon, he works up a pathetic frown and says, "Mom. I can't go back to school like this. Not with a sister who eats people, Mom."

Little Dougie Parks slit his wrists with an exacto knife and got a Playstation. Carla Phoebick emptied a medicine cabinet and got in to college. My stupid, big brother almost could have maybe taken a nap in his car and didn't have to grow up. They chose to flirt with death and got their consolation prizes.

I'm choosing to flirt with life.