The Pizza-Pyre by Charleigh Brennan

Author:Charleigh Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Balance of Seven
Published: 2021-09-24T00:03:38+00:00

Day 9, Part 2:

Saturday

As I walked with Harriet’s arm twined around mine, I was hit with the thought that this was all so epically unfair. If someone had asked me a couple of weeks ago how I would feel walking arm in arm with Harriet at a convention like this, I would have been over the moon. But now all I could feel was a dark chasm growing in my mind and every single thing I wanted out of my boring, simple life being chucked into that never-ending blackness, with no chance of retrieval.

I had never felt so completely alone. The idea that I had some weird medical issue had been bad, but it was nowhere near as isolating as the thought that I’d probably outlive every person in that cavernous room. They’d be ashes, and I’d still be an eighteen-year-old pizza delivery guy with no future. What kind of future could I have, really? Sure, I could probably go to school, get a degree, and work for a few years. But after that, what? People would start to notice I didn’t age. While they got their first gray hairs, some laugh lines around their eyes, maybe a little arthritis . . . I’d be the same.

I wanted to cry and rage and scream. I wanted to get in my car, drive back to Willow Springs, drive up to that looming mansion on Fairview, and destroy everything. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg them to take it back, to make me normal again. I wanted to ask them why. Why make me one of them when they could have taken someone like Dr. Chen, who was clearly far more interested in vampires than I’d ever been? He would have been happy to be Wolfram von Raven for the rest of his existence.

I just wanted to live a normal life, get married, have a few kids, and grow old. I had no expectations outside that.

Now it was just a pipe dream.

“Josh, what’s Brian doing over there?” Harriet asked.

I looked up and saw him talking with two girls. I sighed. Part of me wanted to say, “Fuck it,” and let Brian get himself kicked out of the convention like he had last time. But even though I felt like my world was ending, I knew that wasn’t the right thing to do.

“Let’s get him before he causes any problems,” I told Harriet.

She let go of my arm and nodded. “Let’s be delicate about it, though. I think it’s better to let him at least try to practice better social skills before we cut him off.”

I shrugged. “He has to learn sometime.”

We approached the booth where he was talking with the girls. One looked a little put off, while the other looked like she was trying to be nice. As we got closer, I started to make out what he was saying over the noise of the crowd.

“Yeah, I used to run track in high school, but I kind of hit a low point and stopped.

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