Here’s the brief we gave to each of the writers we invited to contribute to this book:
Give us a YA vampire tale, we said, but make it smart and unusual. It can be funny, or frightening, or folkloric, or romantic; it can be quiet, or explosive, or brutal, or tender; it can even be all of these things at once. Give us a story we can (ahem) get our teeth into.
And don’t be afraid to draw blood.
Things to Know About Being Dead
by GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
As it turns out, if a person dies badly, sometimes the soul can’t escape the body and will have to feed off the living forever.
Of course, I only find this out after Madison Gardner offers me a ride home in her dad’s Beemer after six shots of coconut rum and ends up shoving the car through a tree.
Madison pours herself out of the driver’s side and teeters around on her tacky platforms, mumbling and choking and being as useless as usual. I break my neck and die before the ambulance gets there.
I’m so pissed that she’s okay that it takes me a few minutes to realize I’m not dead anymore.
(Sometimes your priorities aren’t what they should be.)
Things to know about being dead:
1. You have a heartbeat when a paramedic checks for a pulse. Easy to fake. It’s like sit-ups with ventricles.
2. Your grandmother, who has been getting senile, takes one look at you and says, “So, Suyin, you’re dead,” so either something about you looks different or everyone was wrong about the senile thing.
3. Grandmother tells you you’re jiang-shi, and that it’s safe to go to school. “The winter sun shouldn’t worry you,” she says. She doesn’t mention the summer sun.