Noor:And we are not vampires
Me:
Me:Do you think Martine or the guys are awake?
They were. I got a little weepy when I read their “We missed you!” texts. I’d missed them, too. Not being able to talk to them had felt like losing a part of myself. Noor and I told them what Madame Dupuy had said about vampires. Nick had the best response: “Just say the word and I’ll bring you ice cream with blood sauce anytime.”
Chapter 16
Seven Weeks Ago
“@Tosh check outside your apartment door,” Nick said on our group thread late Friday night. I slipped out of my room and quietly opened the front door. On the hall floor sat a two-foot-tall Eiffel Tower illuminated with tiny twinkling lights.
“I love it,” I texted when I was in my room again. “It’s perfect! Thank you” I sent a selfie with it and got a cascade of hearts. Martine texted that I was looking more like myself.
Me:I’m feeling a lot better. Maybe I can get out of my room before I turn 30. Still can’t talk, though
Youssef:I thought the transfusion made you weak for a long time
Me:That’s what the doctor said. MmeD thinks it’s weird that I feel so good, but I’ll take it. It’s so nice not to feel flimsy and scared all the time. Dad keeps telling me to get more rest, but I am so sick of resting. I want to get out of this apartment.
Martine:@Noor how do you feel?
Noor:Like I should be out painting
Noor:Like I am in jail
Me:Le Bec should be in jail, not us
Noor:Exactly. Why is a predator walking free while we cannot leave our apartments?
The next day our TikTok feeds were full of pics of “#LibérezNosh” chalked all over Paris. On sidewalks, on doors, on walls. The way they’d smushed “Noor” and “Tosh” together to make “Nosh” made my heart smile. Nick had taken it even farther, stopping random people and photographing them holding a handmade sign with the hashtag on it. A group of giggling kids, an old guy outside a tabac, the fishmonger at the market, bemused German tourists at the Arc de Triomphe, and so many others all held up the sign saying to free us. It was amazing. We felt seen and heard.
I was up texting every night with my friends, including Mina and Lily in a separate thread, and I still had extra energy during the day. I kept asking Madame Dupuy to let me help her with the housework or something, but she insisted I needed to rest. Dad chimed in, supporting her. “Do some grammar exercises if you need a project.” He was the one who needed a project, though. He hadn’t changed out of his elderly U of O tee and basketball shorts in days. His stubble was beyondIt’s the weekend and I’m not shavingbut not all the way toThis is an intentional beard. He looked camping-trip scruffy but not camping-trip happy. He stuck his head into my room constantly to check on me like he thought I might disappear. It was really annoying.
Madame Dupuy did a mirror check every morning, relaxing a bit more each time my reflection looked back at us. My wound, still red and ugly, was healing. Every night as a joke, I’d send my friends a mirror selfie hashtagged #StillNotAVampire. They’d started to reply with their own mirror selfies, making #StillNotAVampire the trendingest tag in our chat. And that gave me something to look forward to when the afternoons dragged. Everyone also posted photos they’d taken while they did the normal things Noor and I still couldn’t do but longed to. Youssef’s pics ran to architectural details, and they were gorgeous—beautifully composed and lit and often in black and white, which made them seem ageless. I found myself returning to them during the day, when my brain was leaking out my ears because too much grammar. I liked how his photos were simple and complicated at the same time, and I thought I could make some interesting prints based onthem. When I posted a pic of my first attempt, Youssef said I’d seen the heart of his photo.
A couple of days later, I was cutting out shapes for another print when Dad checked on me for like the eightieth time that day. “You’re looking a little pale,” he said. “Why don’t you stop for the day, maybe take a nap?”
“I feel fine,” I whispered. My voice was coming back, but thin and raspy and soft and easily extinguished. Still, it was amazing to be able to talk, to not have to spend so much time writing my thoughts only to have them skimmed or ignored.
“Just for thirty minutes,” he insisted. “I don’t like that pallor.”
“Pallor is my resting state.” Because redhead. I managed not to roll my eyes.
“You should be resting your voice, too. Use your whiteboard.”
I did roll my eyes then. “You literally just silenced me.”
He shot me an impatient, exasperated look. “You need rest. You need to let yourself heal. I don’t want your understandable desire to get back to normal affect your recovery. I don’t want you to strain your voice now and risk having problems later. I don’t want you to be so active that you have a relapse. You’re still weak. You’re not back to normal, whatever you think.”
What if this was my normal now? I already knew I wouldn’t look the same. The wound on my neck would leave a “pronounced” scar, the doctor had said, meaning “ugly.” Every time I looked in the mirror, I’d see what Le Bec had done to me. “Dad, please just—” But my voice cut out.
He raised his eyebrows at me. “This is what I was talking about.” Madame Dupuy came in with an afternoon snack. I’d graduated from a smoothies-only diet to boiled mashed food, which for some reason had a weird chemical taste that I wasn’t loving. Dad seemed to think I looked better after I’d eaten, but he still told me to take a nap. He went off to do work stuff, and I turned my attention back to printmaking. The incessant Paris traffic grumble drifted through my window, louder than usual. I was learning a lot from Youssef’s photos, because debate brain wouldn’t just let me focus on the art elements; I also had to ask him what things were called and then research them. Sometimes I fell down a rabbit hole, like with zellige or types of vaulting. I liked having context for his images, and it also helped pass the time. I was drawing a detail of receding horseshoe arches when the page went swimmy and a wave of queasiness washed over me. Maybe Dad had been right about needing to rest. I lay down and closed my eyes, which brought on another wave of nausea. I opened them and stared at the ceiling. Traffic was definitely getting louder. I could pick out the voices of individual vehicles, from the mosquito whine of scooters to the bass thrum of delivery trucks. I noticed nap marks in the ceiling from the paint roller, as well as hairline cracks and little round dimples. Rather than the flat plain I’d thought it was, the ceiling was a landscape full of details I hadn’t seen before. As I was following the meander of a crack, a ribbon of smell slid by my nose, then another, then another, until I was surrounded by a tangle of scents that were so detailed they were almost palpable: food, asphalt, grass, stone, river. Human. I lingered on that one, so intrigued that I got up andleaned out the window, sniffing as currents of scent from the passers below wafted up. Smells, sights, and sounds bombarded me. A babel of conversations came at me from every direction, like my room was full of people talking. I couldn’t tune anything out; I heard every word, saw every detail, inhaled every scent all at once until my head started to ache. I closed the window, which didn’t help as much as it should have, flopped onto my bed, and put a pillow over my head. When I woke up just before dinner, I felt normal.
—
Because I’dslept the afternoon away, I was still wide awake long after our nightly chat had faded as my friends fell asleep one by one. I wasn’t sleepy; I was six-shots-of-espresso awake and vibrating with restless energy. My room felt too small to contain me. I needed to get out of the apartment, even if it was only to go down to the lobby, I felt the familiar flash of frustration with Dad. Why was it impossible for him to see that I just needed a little change of scenery? And then I laughed. I didn’t need him to understand anything. It was the middle of the night. He was asleep; he’d never hear me leave.
