How I Survived My Summer Vacation, Page 3

  “You’re going out tonight?” On the off chance that Buffy had forgotten how much like an accusation a question could be, her father chose to remind her.

  She stood beneath the arch that marked the midpoint between the living room and the hall that bisected the apartment while her father slowly rose from a couch that still smelled of new leather.

  “Why? Were you planning on inviting Wendy to dinner?”

  There was a long, awkward pause.

  “You were planning on inviting Wendy to dinner.”

  “I thought you’d want to meet her.”

  “Maybe you could let me do my own thinking.”

  “Buffy —”

  She looked across the room at a conveniently placed section of wall. “I know. I haven’t changed at all.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Good. Because if I heard much more of it, I’d start to think there was something wrong with the ‘old’ me.” She lifted a hand before he could say another word. “You’ve just started a thing with someone new. Why don’t you spend a quiet, private evening with her, while I catch up on old friends?”

  “Well —”

  “I’ve pretty much got to leave now if I’m going to make it there on time.”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “Mom gave me an allowance for the summer, but thanks.” She slung her bag over her shoulder, turned on well-heeled shoes, and walked out of the living room.

  Hank Summers watched her go. He heard the front door open. It was a lot louder when it closed. He sat in the quiet, empty apartment for a while, and then he reached over the armrest and picked up the phone.

  Hard to believe she had ever felt at home in this city. She had gotten used to Sunnydale, where a walk in the darkness wasn’t an invitation for anything but a handful of vampires and a quick workout. That was the good thing about vampires: It wasn’t illegal to kill them. Technically they were already dead, and legally they didn’t exist. But legally, neither did she.

  Oh, Buffy Summers did, but The Slayer — the role that defined her life in every conceivable way — was material for long psychiatric sessions if she started talking about it seriously. It had been hard not to talk about it.

  Of course, it had been hard not to talk, period, when she had lived in L.A. When she had had normal friends, and a normal life, and her own phone. When she had had crushes on people with heartbeats.

  And maybe she’d have a little bit of that back tonight.

  Amber’s father lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t the best and the brightest L.A. had to offer. Too close to the highway, for one. Not enough lawn, buildings too tall and a little too close together, for two. But this was the right address, if she’d been paying attention. She slid her hand into her bag as she walked up the street to number 67–01. Left it there when she knocked on the door. It swung open.

  “Amber?”

  “Buffy! Eeeuw. You have last year’s hair.” She wrinkled her nose. A nose that was a third the size of her previous one. “But you’ve got this year’s shoes, at least. C’mon in.”

  “This is where your father lives?”

  “Yeah. Dirty little Theirsen secret: Mommy makes all the money. Daddy still wears pants, though.” She ran her hands through this year’s hair, which was short, straight, and a shade of red that you’d only find in an expensive boutique. Only on the East Coast was black or pink an acceptable substitute for things that looked natural. “I’ll tell you,” she added, as she stepped out of the way, “that my father’s ego was pretty fragile about the whole losing-the-job thing, and when they divorced, things got ugly.” She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

  “A long time?”

  “Sure. They’ve been divorced for years. When it mattered — during the school year — I lived with my mother. When it didn’t matter, I lived with my dad. This place,” she added, swinging her arm in a wide arc, “was a big step down, though.” She laughed, the sound pretty forced. “But it was worse when he started desperation dating.”

  “Desperation dating?”

  “Yeah, he’d bring home any old woman who showed the slightest interest in him. It was pathetic.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “No, well. You probably will. Or is your dad a hermit?”

  “He’s . . . he’s just started dating.”

  “Good date? Bad date?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t met her yet.”

  “Well, she must be new, then. I mean, my dad was pretty careful the first couple of times, too. Like, when he cared what I thought. This way. My room — such as it is — is upstairs. I have a car, but I have a few things to get ready before we leave.”

  Buffy followed her friend up the stairs. She had been afraid they would have to do the kiss-the-cheeks thing, and that would have been awkward. She did not want to spend an evening watching someone else’s death with the Master as Greek chorus. “Amber?”

  In the narrow hall, the girl turned. “What?”

  “How did you deal with the whole father thing?”

  “Well, at the beginning, I tried the good-girl approach. I tried to be friendly with all of his girlfriends.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. He had a really ugly depressive streak.”

  “My dad’s always been Mr. Cheerful or Mr. Angry. Not much depression in between.”

  “Well then, he might not be annoying enough.”

  “Enough?”

  “For you to do what I eventually did.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I killed him.”

  Buffy froze in mid-step. “You what?”

  “Well, technically,” Amber said, her voice changing slightly as she looked over her shoulder, “I ate him.”

  Buffy was already on the move when the vampire’s game face took over what had been a very pretty human one.

  Amber . . .

  The hall was really narrow. The walls were really thin. She discovered the truth of both things the hard way. Luckily, being put through wallboard wasn’t a whole lot worse than being put through a window; it just left very little maneuvering room. But it was enough. New vamp. Tougher Slayer. She leapt out of the way and rolled down the stairs, landing on her feet. No contest.

  “What is it with you, anyway?” Amber snarled down the stairs, tensing to follow Buffy’s leap. “You always thought you were something special, but you’re just another nothing. You know what? You’re going to get old. You’re going to get ugly. And you’re going to die.”

  “I’m going to get ugly? Have you looked in a mirror lately? Oh wait,” she added, ducking the fist that put a hole in the small partition between living room — such as it was — and dining room. “You can’t actually see what you look like anymore. No reflections in the mirror. You must be in hell.”

  She rolled with the punch that followed. Threw her bag across the floor, but not before she’d grabbed the stake that was her best defense. How long? How long have you been like this?

  “What’s the matter, Buffy?” Amber put the game face away.

  She really did have this years’ hair, so it wasn’t likely she’d been a vamp for long. Just long enough, Buffy thought bitterly. What was the point of burning down an entire gymnasium and losing all your friends as a result if in the end you didn’t win?

  Amber sensed the momentary hesitation, but then again, she’d always been a predator. She leapt. Grabbed Buffy’s face in her hands.

  Buffy brought her knee up and then doubled over.

  The girl was weeping. Her features were blurred by fear and blood; a slender incision across her forehead was new and wet. Buffy recognized her. Amber. She froze. She did not recognize the back of the creature that held Amber, but she pretty much knew the end of the story.

  Do you want to live, little girl?

  Yes, yes, please — I don’t know what you want. But I’ll do anything — I’ll give you anything I have. Please — don’t hurt me. Don’t hu
rt me.

  Well, the creature said, that’s not really an option. He pulled her head back by her hair — yes, this year’s hair, forever this year’s hair, now — and sank teeth into her pale neck, and she cried piteously while she had any strength at all. Which thankfully wasn’t long.

  “But it was, Slayer,” a very familiar voice said. She looked up. Standing in the shadows, long fingers like branches or bone stripped of flesh tapping out an impatient staccato against black leather, was her death.

  The Master.

  “It was the whole of her life. Or don’t you remember how long dying can be?”

  She cried out at a sudden inexplicable pain.

  “You were right, Master,” she heard a young voice say. “This was pathetically easy.”

  Buffy looked up to see what was no longer — would never be — Amber, leaning over her, her teeth a stretch of white in a wide, wide mouth. And she gave Amber the next best thing to life: real death.

  * * *

  “You’re home early.”

  Buffy slid around the open door and shut it. Her father stood beneath the cut shadows and light of an expensive chandelier, hands in his pocket. He hadn’t changed. He really hadn’t changed.

  “Did you have dinner? If you didn’t —”

  “I ate. Thanks, Dad. No date?”

  “No date.”

  “Sorry.”

  He started to cross the distance between them, and she backed into the door. “Buffy, I think we should talk.”

  “I’d love to talk. Tomorrow. The day after. Whenever. But tonight I . . . I just don’t have anything left to say.”

  “How was your friend?”

  “Not what I expected.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But at your age, people change.”

  Or they stop changing, forever.

  She opened her eyes to the Master. He was standing just out of the sunlight, in the shadows cast by the mixture of sun and a bank of trees. There was sidewalk beneath her feet, and grass between them, but the silence spoke indirectly of isolation; they were alone. She rolled to her feet.

  “Oh, don’t run,” he said quietly.

  “I wasn’t going to run, exactly.” She snapped her wrist and a stake fell into the palm of her hand.

  He rolled his eyes. “Why do you even bother? We both know this isn’t real. It’s what you call dreaming. But I have some control of it.”

  “Then you should really do something about your fashion consultant.”

  “I could,” he said, looking down the length of what passed for his nose, “but fashions are like their creators: mortal. I endure. Do you have any idea how many Slayers there have been since I first woke to the night sky and the power of eternity?”

  “Enough.”

  “Many.”

  “I mean, enough as in enough to kill you.”

  “You think I’m dead? Do you honestly think I’m dead? You died, Slayer, and yet you walk — and you weren’t even the strongest little girl I’ve faced. If you can escape death so easily, when you march toward it day by day, how hard do you think it could be for me?” He walked out of the shadows, and darkness clung to him as if it had a will and a life of its own. “This isn’t real, not yet. But it doesn’t mean we can’t have any fun. . . . Oh, and don’t look around for help. There isn’t any. It’s just you and me — as it always is, in the end. You never meet your death with company.”

  “I’m not dead.”

  “Not yet. But you will be, again. And again. Until your death bores me, which, it may surprise you to know, might take a while.”

  “Buffy?”

  She looked up from whatever it was she’d been trying to feed herself. The sun through the windows was hazy, the sky the pale gray that comes with heat inversion in the summer in L.A. “What?”

  “I thought we could go shopping today.”

  She looked back down at the bowl. Bran flakes had been drowned in skim milk. “You hate shopping, Dad.”

  “I used to hate it when I had to do it all the time. But it’s been a long time since I’ve gone shopping. I almost miss it.”

  A smile worked its way over stiff lips. “Sure. But I have one thing I want to do first.”

  “I have the day off. We can do whatever you want.”

  “It’s not a ‘we’ thing.”

  “Oh.” Then, “What is it?”

  “I want to get rid of last year’s hair.”

  Buffy’s grip on her crossbow was so tight it wasn’t clear that she and the weapon were separate entities. She had spent a week trying to vary her sleeping hours to see if she could avoid these nighttime encounters, but without success.

  She had also spent a week and a half trying to avoid touching any other human being. The death of the hairdresser had been brutal, long, and entirely human. The deaths of the women who had fitted her in the shoe store — all three of them — had been pathetic and whimpering.

  The hardest random encounter was with a thief, a small, emaciated child with sun-dark skin and flat, black hair. His death brought her closer to murderous rage than she’d ever been, although he’d been trying to cut open the bottom of her purse with a small knife and she’d caught his wrist in a Slayer grip without thinking. She dropped it as if it burned and he got away with a pocketknife that wouldn’t stop a few months of abuse and a brutal death.

  No more, no more, no more.

  She spent a lot of time in the dark, with the door that had seemed solid her only protection against the death of everyone around her. Her bed had a permanent dimple in the middle that matched her back. Her father had moved the television into her room without saying a word. She had been more grateful than she could say, so she hadn’t said much.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t watching television at the moment. She was dreaming.

  “Why do you do it, I wonder?” the Master said quietly. He rarely raised his voice.

  “I wonder the same thing,” she said, holding her weapon, watching him. “Maybe it’s because you’re big, ugly and evil, not necessarily in that order. You kill things — which isn’t a problem — and people, which is. I kill you.”

  “And why is it your duty, little Slayer? Why is it your burden? The world sacrifices Slayers, you know. Isn’t it tiring to carry the world on your pretty little shoulders day after day?” He smiled, showing fangs. “Why don’t you shrug?”

  She shrugged. But the movement was stiff and hesitant. “There. Didn’t seem to change much.”

  “You have no vision,” he replied. “But you also have no lifespan, so vision would be wasted on you. Do you know what your life expectancy is? Do you know what the average life expectancy of a Slayer is?”

  Buffy shrugged, deflecting the words.

  “Oh well. Shall we start?”

  “Why not? I’m not sure what’s worse — dying, or listening to you talk.”

  He laughed. “Yes you are. But I like your bravado. Your ignorance is less appealing.” He gestured, earth beneath his feet split; she could see flames lap at grass as if they were waves, scorching it as they passed. “They’ll tell you that I left a skeleton because I was ancient. They lie. I left a skeleton because our lives are tied. Neither of us met the fate we deserved.”

  “No, Dad. I don’t want to go to the beach.”

  “Young lady, you’ve been sitting in this house for two weeks in front of that stupid box.”

  Familiar terrain. A mixed blessing.

  “You don’t understand. I really really don’t want to go the beach today.”

  “You don’t understand. You are getting out of the house one way or the other. You can come to the beach, or you can spend the day on the front steps until I get back from the beach to let you in. Understood?”

  “Are we doing this for you or for me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Dad —”

  “Tell me why, Buffy. Tell me why. Talk to me.”

  “I just get caustrophobic —”

  “Is that like claustr
ophobic?”

  “— whatever. I get claustrophobic with all those people around me. And I —”

  “You’re the stand-in-large-crowds and move-around-to-deafening-music girl. You’ve never been claustrophobic in your life. Try again.”

  Because I don’t want to see another large body of water again for the rest of my life. I don’t even want to sit in a bath; I’ll take a shower, thank you. Because I don’t want to go into the water. I don’t want to think about — She swallowed. Looked at her father as if seeing him for the first time — as if not liking what she saw.

  She couldn’t explain why she didn’t want to go into the water, of course. She couldn’t tell him any more than she could tell her mother. But once, just once, it would be nice if he could just trust that she had a reason for behaving the way she did.

  “Dad —”

  “Buffy, just once — just this once — I’d like it if you could trust that I have a reason for what I’m asking.”

  She stopped in mid-motion — and there hadn’t been a whole lot of motion to begin with — and stared across the table at the man she had seen die the single time she’d lowered her guard and actually hugged him since she’d arrived.

  “Could you — could you tell me why?”

  He looked at her and frowned. “Because I’m worried about you. About this sitting around in your room as if your room is the entire world.”

  Buffy stood up. “Dad —”

  “Look, I’m not good with words, Buffy, but I try.” The implication of course being that she didn’t. And he was right. She didn’t. For just a minute she could actually understand how he felt, and she held on to that as if — as if it were a lifeboat and she were on the verge of going under. Water metaphors. Great.

  “Yeah, okay, it’s a great day to go to the beach.”

  That turned out to be a popular sentiment; the Summers showed up at the beach along with the other half of L.A.

  Her father had brought the usual beach things with him, and she absently picked up the cooler and the beach umbrella and strode lightly across the sand while he struggled with the hamper and the camera bag. She didn’t have to worry about keeping a hand free for a weapon because it was broad daylight, and although she was always the Slayer, the slayees were notably absent.