Chapter 9–The Past (Part 1)

“Good night, Bree, ‘night Chris.”

“Don’t you mean good morning? It’s already twelve-thirty,” Bree reminded Rachel.

“My sister told me that it’s only morning if you go to sleep then wake up after midnight, or if you stay up all night and the sun is physically rising over the horizon. Since neither of those things has happened, I say to you ‘good night.’ And beside the point, don’t you have an eleven o’clock curfew?”

“My mom thinks that I’m staying at Melissa’s house, and since her mom is at work until one, she won’t be able to tell my mom that I’m not there yet. It’s a perfect plan.”

“Yeah. Foolproof.” ‘Until Melissa’s brother answers the phone.’ “I hope you get away with it, and I will see you guys at training on Thursday. I have school on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and I still haven’t finished my homework yet, so I won’t be able to make practice those nights.”

“Alright. But get some sleep tonight. You were slowing down a bit at practice today, even if it did make it easier to fight you. ‘Night Ray.”

Rachel wandered down small alleyways on her way to her home, thinking about Andrew and his murder of an innocent man. Mrs. Baker, or so she claimed to be, had been at the Magic Box a week before claiming that a vampire invaded her home somehow and killed a man that she didn’t seem sorry to lose. It was all very strange, and the more she thought about it, the more strange it seemed. She tried thinking about Andrew and any of his possible motives–from the plausible to the downright insane. He could be just killing for the sake of killing, which seemed to be the Andrew that was prevalent at the time, or he could have a rare mutation in his vampiric genes that allowed him to walk into a human’s home uninvited. Again, she was thinking along the lines of insanity, but she was willing to think of anything that might explain what he was doing and why. Then she started thinking about when he was nothing but human. A wonderful, funny, adorable human. She forced herself to stop thinking of him that way. The more she thought of him as innocent, the harder it would be to kill him when the time came for the final battle.

At long last, Rachel arrived at her home to sense an unwanted visitor. Luckily for her, Andrew was long gone, but his scent was still on a piece of folded paper left on her porch.

‘So it’s going to be one of those nights with the death threats, huh?’

Rachel walked up the two steps of her porch, picked up the letter, and opened and shut her door before turning her attention to the piece of paper in her hands.

“My love,” Andrew began. “Since you never sent any notice that you received my last note, I’ll assume that you are trying to ignore me. Don’t think that I am lazy enough to accept that and let it go–no, I’ll get you to talk to me sooner or later. And tell your ‘John’ that you are seeing someone. You are still mine, after all. If I hadn’t saved you from mortality, you would succumb to the same death that he will have to face someday. Send my regards to Mrs. Baker.

-Andrew”

“Oh, the wonders of Andrew McCallister. Why couldn’t he have just stayed human? He certainly would have had more productive things to do than kill people and torment me. Too bad that the past must stay in the past.”

Rachel threw the second letter in the trash along with the first and wrote a letter to Andrew herself, trying to get him to understand the impossibility of the two of them ever getting along again.

‘He’ll probably not even absorb the parts that aren’t becoming to him, but I have to try something.’

Rachel knew that if she didn’t do anything about Andrew, he would eventually start killing off people she cared for–Alex, Melissa and John had no way of protecting themselves, and she was sure that she told Andrew something about Bree’s and Chris’ weaknesses in the fighting ring. ‘Dammit, why can’t he just accept that I hate him and have that be the end of it?’

‘Because that would be too easy. Duh.’ Her rational side entered the argument at that point.

‘Who cares?! I want him gone, and there is no real way for him to stay gone if he keeps sending me these damned notes!’

‘And that’s what he wants. He wants you to keep thinking about him until you become obsessed and either lose your soul purposely or kill him. Though neither one would make both of you happy.’

Rachel sat down and realized just how much her mind needed a break from the world. She had been up for four nights straight–a trifling amount of sleep loss compared to what a human’s mind would go through with only two nights of sleep lost. But still, even for a vampire, any sleep that a vampire gets during a day helped rest the mind enough for full function and with enough sleep deprivation, a vampire can go insane from the amount of stress that accumulates over a given period of time.

“That’s it, I’m going to bed. I’ll get up early, well, relatively early, and do my homework during the day. I’ll go insane if I do anything else but eat right now.”

After Rachel had watched some television and ate her ‘lunch’ at one thirty, she pulled on her pajamas out of habit and fell into a relaxing and restful sleep. Until she started dreaming.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The first part of her dream was at middle school in her sixth grade homeroom.

“Andrew?”

“Hey! I haven’t seen you since spring break, Rachel. How have you been?”

“Pretty good. Still mad that you killed my balloon at camp, but other than that, I’m good”

Andrew laughed, his hazel eyes closing with his wide smile. “I still claim that that was an accident. You didn’t stop me, so it was part your fault, too. Hey, want to learn a neat trick?”

“Depends on what it is.”

Andrew took his mechanical pencil and took off the top of the pencil where the lead came out. He then bent one side of a staple, put the bent end in the ‘lead chute’ where the lead came out the tip, and pulled on the back end of the pencil, making the staple shoot from the pencil tip across the room.

“What? Where did you learn that from?”

“From Joey. You just have to be careful about it, and no one will know who did it.”

Every day after that, the eleven-year-olds would shoot staples a few times during class, and always where no one was sitting or standing. But one day, Mr. Jessie caught them. He made the two of them write lines as punishment, and Andrew and Rachel had to be satisfied with talking about other less-dangerous things.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Eighth grade graduation was next on her dream stop. Andrew was a few dozen people ahead of Rachel in line to go into the gym for the ceremony, but he still walked back to say good-bye to her.

When he reached Rachel’s place in line, she saw that he had changed his hair for the occasion. Before that day, his bangs were longer and they fell onto his forehead in small, greased clumps, but for graduation, he had cut his hair short and spiked it.

“So, you’re not going to Mansfield High, are you?”

“No. My mom and I are moving to Shale Ridge, but it’s only an hour or two away from here if you want me to visit.”

Brittany Delognes walked up behind Andrew. “Hey Andrew, my parents wanted to meet you before we graduated. Hey Rachel. So, are you coming Andrew?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right there. Bye Rachel. Hope to see you soon.”

“Bye.” And that was the last time Rachel saw him until he visited Shale Ridge to find her in Jinx for the first time.

Beep! Beep! ‘Damn that alarm clock!’

Rachel got up out of bed and walked over to her desk and built-in lamp to start on her homework.