A broody suburban girl copes with her recent vampirenization. Or is it vampirening? A bit of humor at the expense of a certain genre.
Excerpt:
Taffney St Cloud was a somewhat fat, dark-haired college student new to the town and new to Sunvalleydale Local Regional College. None of the popular girls liked her and they told their boyfriends that they had better not like her either, so Taffney was very much alone. She had to eat lunch all by herself and everything.
But Taffney had a dark secret she did not share with them, and it was the reason she had moved to a new town and a new school in the first place. Sometime in the recent past, Taffney had undergone... the vampirening.
Her old town had been all mysterious like that - not all bright and shiny and suburban like Sunvalleydale. Folks back in her old town of Ravensberg didn't say much and didn't like to be asked anything, either. Oh sure, the town has prospered once long ago when horehound had been a popular candy and a marketable herbal cure-all when mixed with grain alcohol, but those times had long since passed, and the mill and the factory and the bottling plant had all long since closed down, so people got by as they could, and drove silently past all the old abandoned buildings and never talked much to each other. But Taffney got along there, and in any case there had been only 13 students in her entire graduating high school class, and all of them had been pale and thin and never stirred much and never did much and all went home to odd boring farm chores at the end of the day and so never had much time to get into trouble - well, any interesting trouble worth writing about. They did occasionally fall into wells, get bit by rabid skunks or run off with the occasional vagrant or drifter - but nothing noteworthy in the grander scheme of how folks turn from ciphers into interesting people.
But Taffney had been blessedly exempted from manual labor when her mother won a tidy windfall in the state's scratch-off lotto and quit her job at the beauty parlor and married a man named Rocco who had first pretended to represent a firm that would carefully invest her newfound winnings and protect them from charlatans, but who later turned out to be nothing but a con man himself, but one who fell into the alluring trance of Taffney's mom's blue eyeshadow and hair extensions one moment before succumbing completely to the lure of her newly padded wallet. So he decided to safeguard rather than swindle her, and he helped them all move into a much nicer double-wide than any of them had ever enjoyed before, and they even put up a fancy above ground pool out back.
But this story is about Taffney and her vampirening and her new life in Sunvalleydale, and so we will move on to that with all due haste. Taffney and her mom moved to Sunvalleydale when her mom and Rocco broke up, which is the inevitable outcome of almost any relationship based purely on carnality, Indian casinos, and the mass consumption of the kind of daytime tv shows once can pluck out from the air with a homemade clothes-hanger antenna. And so one night Rocco was chased once and for all out into the great beyond one step ahead of a cast iron frying pan, and Taffney learned that her mother had decided to take her cousin up on her offer to take over an empty chair in a fancy hair salon out West, a part of the country to which the cousin had successfully relocated maybe five years earlier during the course of a fleeting romance that involved her following a travelling circus across the country before filling in for a trapeze artist one night and throwing out her back. And so with a shred of their lotto winnings left Taffney and her mother left gloomy Ravensberg forever and moved to a place where the days were always bright and sunny, and the people tanned and smiling - well, until you turned your back on them, and then their smiles gave way to cattiness and gossip about your tacky clothes or your beat up car or your parent's menial occupation.
