“I don’t think someone who recently crawled from the grave should be throwing around labels like ‘monster,’” he said, making sarcastic little air-quotes fingers.

“It wasn’t a grave.” I sniffed. “It was a comfy four-poster.”

When we were kids, Mama used to ask, “If Zeb wanted to jump off the roof, would you do it, too?” And as it turned out, the answer was yes.

Before you start to judge, I had my reasons, including wanting to keep the one living person who knew about my new after-lifestyle happy. But I also wanted to see what I could do. Despite the assumption that all tall people are great at basketball, volleyball, and other net-related sports, I’ve never been a particularly athletic person. (See previous episode involving me falling facedown in a ditch.) So, testing my newfound ability to leap cow pastures in a single bound was intriguing. But I did feign reluctance right up until the point where I jumped off the second story of my house. Nothing happened. OK, I got a massive headache. But that was it.

The previous generations who had owned River Oaks refused to sell the now unused farmland surrounding the house, so my nearest neighbor was about five miles down the road and not likely to hear suspicious noises. This turned out to be a fortunate decision, as Zeb screamed like a girl when I hit the lawn headfirst.

As pretentious as it is to live in a house with its own name, River Oaks is just an old family home. Two stories, built in the semi-Colonial style out of gray fieldstone. It’s more of an English country cottage than Tara, though a traditional Southern wraparound porch was added sometime in the early 1900s. There’s a library, a formal dining room, a formal parlor, a living room, a pantry big enough to store winter rations for a family of ten, and a solarium, which is a fancy way of saying sun porch. We do love our porches in the South.

Jettie inherited the house sometime in the late 1960s from her father, Harold Early, whom she cared for in his old age. This did not sit well with Grandma Ruth, who had already packed up her house after Great-grandpa’s funeral in anticipation of moving in.

Beyond steam-cleaning out the old-man smell, Jettie supervised most of the electrical and plumbing modernizations to the house. While Harold preferred the soft glow of a hurricane lamp, Aunt Jettie was a stickler about having access to an automatic dishwasher and a long hot bath. She also repainted and refinished almost every surface in the house, so now it felt like an actual home. But her real legacy was in the garden. Jettie planted seemingly random splashes of pansies, heavily perfumed roses, fat and sassy sunflowers, whatever struck her fancy. If you stared at the blooms long enough, you could almost make sense of it. But as soon as you started grasping the pattern, it slipped out of focus. And because many of the plants were low-maintenance, even my special plant-murdering powers hadn’t killed them. Yet.

While the Half-Moon Hollow Historical Society was willing to forgive Aunt Jettie for plumbing updates and paint, she scandalized the lot of them when she took River Oaks off the town’s spring tour of Civil War homes. An annual tradition, the tour features little old ladies in hoop skirts leading bored high-school students and overenthusiastic Civil War buffs around the five known authentic antebellum homes in the Hollow.

The historical society isn’t so much a club as a hereditary social mafia. There are only fifty active memberships, which are passed down from mother to daughter among the older families in Half-Moon Hollow. When my great-grandmother Lillie Pearl died in 1965, it fell to either Jettie or my grandmother to take the Early family slot. Guess which one took the bait? Grandma Ruthie was right at the front of the hoop-skirt pack, but she had no real control over the house. As soon as River Oaks was in Jettie’s name, she told those “corset-wearing imbeciles” to take their tour and shove it.

Considering the community’s reaction, you would have thought Jettie had declared kittens the other white meat. Her rusted rural-route mailbox was flooded with hate letters. There were editorials in the Half-Moon Herald imploring Jettie to reconsider. Her coupons were refused at the Piggly Wiggly. It was the final nail in the coffin of Grandma Ruthie and Aunt Jettie’s relationship and the chief reason Jettie left the farmland, the house, and its contents to me when she died.

As much as it upset certain members of my family, owning River Oaks allowed me to move out of the Garden View Apartments. There was neither a garden nor a view. I had both at River Oaks. In fact, Jettie’s rose garden was what broke my fall from the second story during our “What Can Kill Jane?” series of experiments. In retrospect, the roof jump should have been planned more carefully. Seeing my head bent at a 157-degree angle seemed to upset Zeb.

“Uggghhhh, stop with the caterwauling,” I groaned as Zeb rushed over. I sat up gingerly, waiting for the gashes and bruises on my forehead to disappear. I rolled my neck, popping the vertebrae back into place. That was the dumbest experiment so far. We tossed a toaster in the bathtub with me. It tickled. Zeb hit me with his car. I left a two-foot dent in the grille. Zeb wanted me to eat Pop Rocks and drink a Coke. But considering the pot-pie episode, I declined, and he suggested the roof jump.

Fitz thought me lying on the grass, groaning, was part of a fun game and ran over to lick my rapidly healing face. Zeb batted the canine tongue bath out of the way and shook me.

“Are you OK? How many fingers?”

“Too many.” I squinted.

“What day is it?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I find that both sad and liberating.”

“What’s the dot on an ‘i’ called?”

“A tittle,” I said.

“Dude, how do you know that stuff?”

I shook my abused noggin. “I’ve read books, several of them. So, to sum up, me jumping off the roof—not your best idea.”

“Yeah.” Zeb made a noncommittal face. “But you survived, and it looked really cool…Hey, let’s get the chainsaw.”

“Children, this is becoming disturbing,” Jettie said, materializing on the porch.

“It’s OK,” I told her. “We’re just trying out all of my new tricks.”

“Yeah, I know. Are you sure you’re OK?” Zeb asked.

“Um, yeah, I was talking to—” I gestured to the porch. I sighed, rubbing my palms over my newly repaired forehead. “Zeb, I was just talking to my Aunt Jettie.”

“Of course you were.” Zeb laughed. Clearly, he thought the head wound had knocked something loose. “It’s only natural. Of course, you’re completely nuts, but that’s natural, too.”

“I’m nuts because I talk to ghosts?”

“Because I’ve met your mama.” He grinned.

“I’m serious, Zeb, my Aunt Jettie is standing right there on the porch. She’s wearing her favorite UK T-shirt and rolling her eyes at our stupid attempts to kill me. Aunt Jettie, could you move the rocking chair or give Zeb goosebumps or something?”

“He’s not going to be able to see me or hear me,” Jettie said.

“Be creative.”

Zeb’s eyes darted around as if I’d told him there was a spider in his hair. “Jane, this is kind of creepy.”

“Oh, come on, vampires you can handle but not septuagenarian phantoms?” I sneered. “No offense, Aunt Jettie.”

“None taken,” Aunt Jettie said as she made her way over to Zeb’s car. She motioned for me to bring Zeb closer.

In the dust coating the dented red paint, she wrote “Hi Zeb” with her fingertip. Zeb gasped. “What the—” He watched as the words “WASH ME” formed under her greeting.

“Oh, very funny!” Zeb grumbled. Jettie cackled.

“She’s laughing at you,” I told him. “At least you can’t hear it.”

6

New vampires are discouraged from trying to return to their normal human routines. Especially if those routines include tanning or working as a fireman. Your day will not end well.

—From The Guide for the Newly Undead

Unless wrapped up in a good book, I was usually in bed at ten-thirty. I know, even I have a hard time separating my life from Paris Hilton’s.

So, imagine my shock after a very busy vampire day when I was still raring to go at two A.M. and bored out of my ever-loving skull. I hadn’t been unemployed since I started working at the Dairy Freeze when I was sixteen.

I’d always seen my week as a long hallway, a door opening on every new day. Doors leading to work, doctor’s appointments, housework, errands. Now that hallway seemed empty and dark. And since I would probably never die, it was stretching out forever.

In a rather manic effort to prove that I could entertain myself through eternity, I filled that first night by reorganizing the books in my collection, beating Zeb in three Scrabble games, bleaching every surface in my home, and rearranging my furniture. (Moving a couch is much easier when you can lift it with one arm.)

I spent about an hour carefully painting my toenails a glossy candy-apple red. I kept my fingernails short and naked for typing and shelving, but my toes were treated to an ever-changing rainbow of polishes. A woman puts on a new dress, eyeliner, lip gloss to please others. A woman paints her toes to please herself. And if there was one thing I was familiar with, it was pleasing…There’s no way to finish that sentence without embarrassing myself.

Zeb went home at around one A.M., when he nodded off and I threatened to paint his toes, too. He hates it when I do that. He reminded me that he still had to work in the morning but immediately realized that was a pretty insensitive thing to say. Zeb was a kindergarten teacher—a good one. I always thought it was because he was the same emotional age as his students. Plus, he had always loved working with construction paper and paste.

“Janie, you’ve got to find a job,” he told me as he hovered near the door. I think he was afraid to leave me unchaperoned. “Or one of us is going to go crazy. And it probably won’t be you.”

“I know,” I groaned. “I’ll have to find something before my savings and the good graces of Visa run out. But there are some financial advantages to all this. I don’t need to pay health or life insurance anymore. My grocery bills and medical expenses are practically nothing, even though my monthly sunscreen budget has increased astronomically.” Zeb did not seem convinced. “I’m trying, Zeb, really. I’ve looked in the want ads, online, and there’s nothing around here for me. Everything that I’m qualified for with night hours involves a paper hat or pasties.”

“And technically, you’re not qualified for the jobs with pasties, either,” Zeb said, dodging when I reached out to smack him.

After Zeb went home, the remaining sensible-librarian portion of my brain told me to put on some PJs, hide under the covers, and read the Guide for the Newly Undead. But the idea seemed so confining. Surely my night life wasn’t supposed to get more boring after becoming a vampire. I knew I would just sit there twitching, unable to concentrate. I didn’t want to stay home, but I didn’t know where I could go. I wasn’t comfortable going to any of the known vamp clubs and bars in our end of the state. I wouldn’t have been able to make it home by sunrise, anyway. And besides Gabriel and Missy, I didn’t know any vampires. Knowing my luck, I’d offend someone with some archaic undead etiquette issue and end up staked.

So I did what any other rational person does at two A.M. I went to Wal-Mart. If nothing else, I wanted to check out the “special dietary needs” aisle, which translates into vampire products.

There are three things vampires need to know about grocery shopping just after they’re turned. One, the smell of freshly cut meat is far more appealing. Two, the ice cream aisle is not fun anymore. And the cheesy glow of fluorescent lights is even more unbearable with super senses.

Even at this hour, I was nervous to be venturing out into public for the first time as a vampire. Despite living there for most of my life, I’d never felt I was part of the Hollow. I was accepted, but I didn’t belong. I loved the people there, but I knew I wasn’t like them. From high school on, I knew I’d never be happy following in my mama’s footsteps, marrying some nice boy she picked for me, hauling our kids to basketball practice after school and church every Sunday, making Velveeta-based casseroles for pot-luck barbecues with his fishing buddies. I was different. Not better, just different. I read books that didn’t have Danielle Steele’s airbrushed face smiling out from the back cover. I didn’t consider Panda Express to be exotic cuisine. I honestly did not care whether the Half-Moon Howlers made it to the regional championships.