The bright red sign of Plasma4Life greeted me, as well as a rough-looking crowd lined up outside. This was not the lunch hour crowd of charitable office workers who traded a pint for a sticker and a cookie. Anyone lurking outside Plasma4Life at night was scraping bottom and desperate for cash, not unlike myself. “I need to go. Just cancel my subscription.”
“Actually, I can’t find—”
I hung up the phone and held out the chicken. “Anyone want a box of HelloFresh?”
A guy in flannel ignored the box. “How much do I get for plasma again?”
“Two hundred and fifty. But do you want this?” I asked, hefting the box a little higher.
“What is it?”
“The meal on top is cavatappi and dijon chicken. I’m not sure what else is in here. You cook it yourself in twenty minutes or less. At least that’s what it says.”
“I don’t like chicken,” he said flatly. Not even a “No, thank you.”
“Who doesn’t likechicken?” I said a little too loudly.
“If it’s that great, why don’t you keep it?” His voice had an edge I didn’t like.
Why was everything so hard?
“I used to love chicken!” I shot back, on the verge of yelling. Chicken soup on a cold evening had been one of my favorites when I was alive. I’m sure dijon chicken was nice, too. “These recipes really make cooking simple!” I said, definitely yelling.
I stopped myself from getting up in his face while a whole line of donors stared back. “I’m going to leave this here. Someone, please take this chicken off my hands.” More calmly, I set the box down. A few people shuffled forward, perhaps more interested now that the loud woman was leaving.
“Tiffany, you’re late!” Lance barked just as the front doorbell to Plasma4Life chimed.
I fumbled for the fake doctor’s note excusing me from work. “Here you go.”
Lance squinted at the single sheet of paper. “Por-phy-ria?” he said, sounding the word out slowly. It was a pretty good forgery, if I do say so myself.
“It’s an allergy to sunlight. I just burst into fl—” I caught myself. “Uh, I mean blisters. I burst into blisters when I’m in the sun.”
“Fine, whatever,” Lance said.
I hurried to my seat at the reception desk, and soon I was shuffling paperwork to look busy and chugging B positive from my motivational water bottle. I was already down to theYou can do it! line. Lance just thought I was really, really into beet smoothies.
With my work hours sorted out, I was feeling optimistic. Things were looking up for me. I wasn’t such a disaster after all. Take that, Vlad.
An hour later I was at my desk, contemplating what nail polish complemented the endlessness of existence—was black too obvious?—when the door chimed. I jolted out of my coma and knocked my drink over, Jackson Pollocking blood all over my crisp white shirt and the desk.
“Shit!” I dabbed at it with a tissue and looked up at the guy who’d come in. I tried to smile as if I weren’t drenched in blood. “Welcome to Plasma4Life!”
The man wasn’t your typical late-night donor. He seemed calm, not like he was five hundred dollars short on cash for his bookie. Something was off. Healthy, well-adjusted people didn’t donate plasma at midnight.
Instead of immediately asking how much he was going to get—another red flag—he locked eyes with me. “Tiffany Amanda Blair?”
Oh, fuck. My stomach dropped to the floor.
As a vampire, I need a fresh ID now and then. I bought my latest from a woman who sold fake IDs out of her kitchen. This is a part of the vampire life HBO hasn’t addressed yet. If you want to live anything close to a normal life, you need a name and Social Security number, and you need a new one every few decades before your identity ages too far past your immortal good looks.
This time around, I was lucky enough to score a real ID from someone named Tiffany—almost the same as my actual name, Tiffenie.
You’re probably wondering,aren’t you from the Middle Ages or something?A) of all, that’s rude, and B) of all, learn your history. Variations of the name Tiffenie were historically bestowed upon girls born around the Epiphany, like myself—that’s right, I’m a Capricorn. The name was only recently ruined by the likes of Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and every other elder millennial woman I’d met in LA.
A name like Brittany or Candy would’ve fit like a cheap Halloween costume, impersonal and a little slutty. But Tiffany with a -ywas so close to who I really am—or who I was. Close enough that it could almost make me forget the Tiffenie I’d been. It’s not like I’ve been scrapbooking all these years.
Whoever Tiffany with a -yhad been, her life hadn’t been good. Normal people with happy lives don’t sell their identities and go into hiding. If someone was looking for Tiffany Amanda Blair, it wasn’t for a good reason.
