The Blood Vivicanti Part 1 Read online

  Sixteen was the year that I started to come out of my shell, which was good. Yet it was also the year that Lowen the Dark Man could more easily hunt after me, which was not so good at all.

  Life is rife with irony.

  In school, I decided to take an elective called INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC. It was either that or pottery. Music seemed a lot less messy.

  My music teacher was called Mrs. Goodwitch. She would play keys on the piano and show us the notes on the scale.

  In a day I learned that music is well organized. Most scales have eight notes. One scale has twelve.

  Creating a melody involves placing notes in a logical sequence that a listener would naturally enjoy. Creating harmony involves grouping notes together so that their sound waves break against one another as beautifully as waves crash on the shore of the sea.

  Each note has a frequency vibration. You humans hear few frequencies. We Blood Vivicanti hear many.

  My hearing is fantastic now! From a mile away, the sound of grass growing is like the sound of the tide rolling in. The sound of falling dust is like the gentle crush of snowfall. Many ignored facets of life soothe me and lull me to sleep, especially when nightmares of the Dark Man return to haunt me.

  It was exciting to discover that the whole cosmos is musical and rhythmic. And it was even more exciting to adapt my whole world to the melodic pulse of the expanding heavens.

  My mind associated the sound of a note with its image on the page. In a day I could see a written note while my photographic memory could easily recall the tone of its pitch.

  In a day, music became my second language.

  Rhythm bothered me at first, however. Memorizing notes and pitch was easy. But I had never thought about rhythm before.

  Everything has rhythm. Heartbeats, growing hairs, mourning, moaning. There’s rhythm in my step. Rhythm in my thinking. Rhythm in your breathing. Everything has the potential to be mathematically broken down. That’s rhythm.

  You and I can be rhythmic, especially when I pierce your neck with the tip of my tongue, drink your blood, eat your Blood Memories, and fill you with my venom.

  Yes, the Blood Vivicanti are as venomous as king cobras, though not as poisonous. Our venom is this world’s greatest aphrodisiac.

  On other worlds, not so much.

  Freshman year, I had no idea how valuable learning music would be. It came in pretty handy when I saved earth from a hostile invasion force from the planet Khariton.

  They had come looking for Lowen the Dark Man.

  Their musical war machines blasted through earth’s defenses with all the grace of Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

  My high school music teacher was the first to suspect that I had a gift.

  One day, Mrs. Goodwitch happened to be walking by my desk while I happened to be reading and memorizing the notes to a melody. I hadn’t realized I was humming.

  Mrs. Goodwitch heard me, she stopped teaching, and she knelt beside me to listen.

  The whole class turned to look at me, too. I loathed that kind of attention. Still do.

  Mrs. Goodwitch told me to sing again, but I shook my head, too nervous to speak, let alone sing in public.

  I was asked to stay after class.

  Once all my leering peers had left the room, Mrs. Goodwitch gave me new sheet music. She wanted me to sing the melody.

  I glanced at the sheet once and memorized every note. I didn’t need to take the music, but I did it anyway, trying to act like a normal girl.

  She sat at the piano, read her sheet music, and played the notes.

  This song was complex – beautiful too – the rhythm was confusing, though. But the more I sat inside my photographic memory of the musical notes, and the more I thought about the overall structure of the composition, the less difficult it was and the more it made sense.

  It was the same way when I reread The Brothers Karamazov the year before, only that time in the original Russian.

  Today, my Blood Memories in tandem with my photographic memory have helped me speak almost every language in the world, from music to Russian, from Klingon to JavaScript.

  I didn’t need the piano’s help to sing the melody. Mrs. Goodwitch realized this when she made several mistakes and I didn’t.

  She stopped playing and listened to me sing until I finished.

  Then she sat still for a long time. Tears welled in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She just stared through me, her eyes glazing over. It looked like she was trying to remember something she’d forgotten.

  Sometimes I wonder what that’s like.

  She didn’t ask me to stay after school again. I thought I’d done something wrong.

  A week later, she knocked on the door to my house. She explained to my mom and dad who she was and why she had come for a visit.

  “Your daughter has perfect pitch.”

  My parents talked about what that might mean for their future. Then they talked about my future. They worried about my future.

  Mrs. Goodwitch gave them information about an Academy in Southern California for gifted students.

  “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a child with your daughter’s talent. She can sight sing and memorize notes effortlessly, but she needs better training.”

  For my parents, being artistic was not useful to society. They were like most non-artistic people. They wanted me to do something practical, like be a doctor or a lawyer. They thought that science and math and law were the bricks of society. They did not understand that the arts were the mortar holding together such brittle bricks.

  My parents thanked Mrs. Goodwitch for coming over and they kindly asked her to leave.

  She showed them pamphlets from the school she’d mentioned. The header on the pamphlets read: IDYLLVILLE ACADEMY OF THE ARTS.

  Mrs. Goodwitch then explained to them words that they could grasp – facts, numbers, and success stories.

  “The success rate of graduates from this high school is one of the highest in the nation. Over 90% go on to higher education. More than 70% of those have profitable careers as professional musicians. The rest usually become well-qualified teachers.”

  My parents thought that a teacher was a good job. They felt assured about my future.

  They took me to Idyllville Academy of the Arts.

  I had to audition. A small group of faculty members watched me sing. They heard my voice. They said that I would have been a wonderful candidate if I had applied as a freshman. The Academy required students to have much more musical experience. I’d only had one intro music class. But they let me take an admissions test for latecomers.

  I scored in the 99th percentile.

  Classes would begin in the Fall.

  The summer before my senior year was a time of packing and saying goodbye.

  There wasn’t much to pack. I donated my books to libraries. I knew all their pages by heart and mind. They had been in my room for show, to keep up the appearance that I was not different.

  I said goodbye to two people.

  There was little drama. It brought less trauma.

  The drama and trauma of hellos was altogether new.

  The Academy was in Idyllville, a village in the San Jacinto Mountains, population 230. Idyllville Academy of the Arts would be my new stomping ground. True talents rocketed from there to Julliard and Manhattan and similar prestigious conservatories.

  I’d always wanted to rocket somewhere, and I’d hoped it would have been to the nearest habitable planet – habitability being an option, of course.

  Attending Idyllville Academy of the Arts wasn’t merely coming to a new school for me. It was like coming home.

  It still is home to me.

  Last night, for instance, a student group performed at Hatter’s Cafe, right down the road from the Academy. They played the jazz music of John Coltrane with the finesse of professionals. The students were freshman. I sat and watched them in utter amazement. So young, yet so talented.

&nb
sp; Later I pierced their necks with the tip of my tongue, drank their blood, and ate their Blood Memories.

  This morning I woke up and went straight to the piano to play Epistropy by Thelonious Monk. I not only knew every note, but I could also play the music as though I’d played jazz piano for years.

  Let me say it again: Attending Idyllville Academy of the Arts was stepping foot inside the mothership.

  How could I play music so well after drinking their blood?

  The Blood Memories inside your blood are treasure troves of your talents – the thing you wish to express to the world. So when I drink your blood, I not only eat your Blood Memories, but I also chew on, swallow down, and digest the very best qualities that make you so special and spectacular.

  Being a Blood Vivicanti is pretty awesome.

  Speaking of motherships – although I didn’t know it at the time, it is an interesting coincidence that Wyn, the scientist who made the Blood Vivicanti, happened to have a mansion in Idyllville, too, wherein he also happened to be hiding an alien from the planet Khariton along with his spaceship.

  Small world, literally, in comparison to Khariton, so I’m told.

  When I moved to Idyllville, I brought with me only two luggage bags. But I feared I had too much baggage.

  My new classmates were unlike any people I’d ever met. They’d come from all over the country, and some from foreign countries. We lived together in dorms. I’d been drowning my whole life. Breathing dormitory freedom was a little suffocating. Now I truly felt like a fish.

  In hindsight, I wasn’t flopping about for air. I wasn’t even a beached whale. I was a turtle. My home was on my back.

  I fit right in.

  The Academy was also for students of creative writing, dance, theater, moving pictures, fashion, and design.

  The Academy offered good courses, yes. But its teachers also provided students with lessons that I never knew were possible.

  INTRO TO DANCE could have been titled INTRO TO SELF-CONFIDENCE.

  DRAMATIC TECHNIQUES could have been titled TECHNIQUES FOR SELF-EMPOWERMENT.

  FLASH FICTION, MODERN ARCHI-TECTURE, GEORGES MÉLIÈS – each class could have been a course on maturing in self-awareness.

  My old high school never taught that. Does any?

  Then there were my music classes.

  Studying music meant that you also had to study performance.

  Voice lessons meant standing on stage to show the world who you had become and how you loved your self.

  Call it: SELF-ACTUALIZATION 101.

  Needs met.

  My new classmates were nothing like my old. They had an insight into their skills-set. They knew what they wanted to do in life because they had known who they wanted to be since they knew who they were. And they knew who they were because those who formed them trusted them enough to think for themselves.

  Was my new situation perfect?

  Utopia’s vantage point lacks sight of greener grass – so, no, Idyllville wasn’t perfect. But it was perfect for me at that time of life.

  Of course there were jerks at the Academy. But they were a different breed of jerk.

  At my old high school, jerks attacked you because they thought you were different.

  At the Academy, jerks attacked you because they thought you weren’t skilled enough. The Academy prepared you for the world – and it was an arts school to boot!

  Go figure that one.

  Those first weeks of school were surprising. I actually had fun.

  I read and instantly memorized all my schoolbooks. I even read the books for the other classes.

  And my classes were difficult, too, which caught me totally unprepared.

  Teachers would not let me sit in the back of class without speaking. They wanted every student to participate. They would ask a question and then they’d pick the student not raising their hand.

  During my first week at the Academy, I answered more questions from more teachers than I ever did during my first three years of high school.

  Performance was like giving birth. It was painful enough for some to take drugs. Usually it was pretty messy. There was a lot of screaming, a lot of encouraging, and a lot of positive pushing. It brought from me a whole new life.

  Do I know what giving birth is like?

  Only in my Blood Memories. I have drunk the blood of a legion of mothers. I have eaten their memories. I can recall giving birth to as many children as there are stars in the sky.

  In a way I pity Eve and Sarah and all matriarchs.

  My vocal teacher was Ms. Wigg, an older woman with large glasses and a short black bob, who stood a little shorter than me.

  She called her students in turn to the front of the class. She handed each one different sheet music. None had seen their music before. The purpose was to test our sight-singing skills. We had to perform before our peers.

  Ms. Wigg called me up. Somehow I’d managed to go seventeen years without standing before my classmates. The first time is always the worst – but sometimes the worst is not all that bad.

  She gave me the sheet music for Ruhe Sanft, an aria from Mozart’s unfinished opera, Zaide. No, I’d never seen it before. To sing it I had to recall the pitch of each note in relation to its notation on the page.

  I tried to sing the song. But I was very nervous. My voice was almost a whisper. Ms. Wigg stopped me a few measures in. She could see my apprehension. Her smile showed that she empathized. She told me to close my eyes and to picture myself all alone.

  I did. It helped.

  A few moments passed. Ms. Wigg could tell when I’d calmed. Then she told me I could open my eyes. She encouraged me to sing once more. I’d already seen all the notes on the page. I knew the music by heart now. Only now I kept my eyes closed. It felt better. Thus did I sing the whole aria, beginning to end, without ever looking at the music, full voice, with as much feeling as I could pour into it.

  I finished.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  I opened my eyes.

  My classmates were staring at me. I prepared myself to feel misunderstood again.

  But the Academy surprised me once more, and not for the last time. My classmates had not applauded for any other student. And they didn’t have to applaud for my performance either, yet they did anyway. My singing had been that good.

  It was a good day.

  It was a good school.

  Soon after that, other students began introducing themselves to me. They asked me my name.

  How had I gone seventeen years without my peers ever asking me my name?

  How had I gone seventeen years without meeting any friends?

  Before then life was the way it was – being misunderstood – being excluded – being isolated – being alone – living lonesome – so how could I have imagined that life could get any better? There was nothing to compare it with.

  You see, I’d had to move away from my family, I’d had to get some distance from that old life, I’d had to burst beyond the eggshell of childhood so that I could look back at it and say to myself: What a mess!

  MISSING signs were hung up around school. On them was the face of a boy.

  He went missing before the first day. His photograph took my breath away. He had shaggy blond hair, sculpted features, strong chin, high cheekbones, broad mouth, full lips, freckles.

  Theo. The boy’s name was Theo, I saw.

  Some people had stopped looking for him after a month. Some had begun to mourn. A few were beginning to assume he was dead.

  They could have never guessed that he had become a Blood Vivicanti.

  I would’ve never guessed how delicious his blood would taste streaming down my throat.

  Peers at the Academy wanted to be my friend.

  I was shocked.

  They invited me for coffee at Cool Beans Coffee Shop. The place was packed with tourists from San Diego, Costa Mesa, and Los Angeles. I was going to order Earl Gray tea. Everyone else was having lattes
and cappuccinos and other kinds of creamy coffees with mountains of foam. A French woman was the barista. She called them, “Café Fluffy.”

  I ordered a coffee. Black. I prefer fewer choices.

  My group sat at a round table. It made me imagine King Arthur and his knights. Our group lacked typical Alphas. We were composed of the talented few and the more talented fewer. We were friends who had a future on stage, or a future before a classroom. We talked, we laughed. I listened mostly.

  Sometimes someone asked me for my opinion. My responses were usually monosyllabic – “I like it,” or “That sounds right.” I was too timid to trust them with the truth. Meanwhile a library of answers were gathering dust in my mind.

  My peers walked around the halls with confidence. Shoulders back, heads up.

  I’d always slouched and I’d never noticed it before. I’d also walked with my feet apart, the way men walk. The girls I knew walked one foot before the other – it was sexy – I’d never thought a girl was sexy before – I wanted to be like them – I wanted to be liked by them.

  I’d never wanted to be sexy before either.

  A boy asked me out to dinner at Hatter’s Cafe one evening. He was no Theo, he wasn’t sexy either, but he was cute. He had meatballs and spaghetti. I didn’t know what to have. He ordered for me.