In Laymon's Terms

I’ve never had that many friends, so when a gorgeous, slinky, full-lipped Goth girl named Raven sat across from me in study hall, I was in shock. She surely hadn’t meant to sit at my table. Nobody ever sat at my table.

But there she was, actually making eye contact. She even spoke. “Hi. You’re the mayor’s kid, right? Rich kid like you, I bet you’ve got your own wheels.”

My heart almost stopped. I could hardly breathe. “Oh, sure!” I wheezed out the lie. “Lots of wheels.” Yeah, Dad was rich—but me? My allowance was beyond pathetic.

She nodded. “Cool. You afraid of vampires?”

“Uhh...what?”

“Vampires? The undead? Do they frighten you?”

I’d never really thought about it before. So I mulled over it for about fifteen seconds and finally said, “Nope. Guess not.”

“Good,” she said, licking her lips. “So you’d be cool with driving me and my friends out in the desert to find the vampire’s cave tomorrow night?”

The thought of being in the dark with Raven was too tempting to pass up, even though the possibility of finding the cave of a mythological being out of literature and cheesy horror movies was beyond ridiculous.

“Yeah, I’m down with that,” I said, trying to sound like some rap star with his name shaved into his hair, but only sounding like a nerdy fat white kid.

So that’s how I ended up being the designated driver for the doom-and-gloom gang. Let me introduce the rest of that downbeat motley crew.

They all were dressed as though they’d been invited to Bela Lugosi’s funeral.

First there was Raven, who looked like a cross between sexy low-budget horror-movie hostess Elvira and Britney Spears—except with real breasts. I never got to feel them, but hey, fake boobs cost big bucks, and Raven wasn’t exactly swimming in cash.

Next there was her best friend and rumored lover, Lady Katrina, who could never have passed through an airport metal detector without setting off the alarm. She had dozens of piercings—in her ears, nose, tongue, belly button and God-only-knows where else.

Then there was Rooster, a big beefy guy with a mohawk, and Shakes, a nerdy-looking chain-smoking girl with stringy red hair who had muscle spasms if she didn’t take her meds. Next in this lineup of the social elite was Bones, a short, lanky guy with a goatee and Buddy-Holly-style glasses who had his nose buried in some Poppy Z. Brite paperback for most of the trip.

Raven said she’d figured out that Dracula’s cave was in our neck of the woods—or rather, desert—after seeing some old drive-in movie from the seventies on cable at three a.m. That tipped me off that perhaps Raven wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, but hey, I wasn’t about to inform her of her grand ignorance. Stupid people don’t want to hear that they’re stupid, just like fat boys like me aren’t crazy about being told that their underpants could be used as a boat cover.

Anyway. The film she mentioned was some el cheapo Western horror pic—B-movie? Try Y or Z—about some cowboy, Buffalo Bill or somebody like that, fighting to save a town from the evil Baron Draconi. Raven informed me that Baron Draconi had been played by horror great Belphagor LeMorte. This may just be my suspicious imagination working overtime, but I’m guessing he was some lame-ass Bela Lugosi wannabe.

Raven said she had a few paperbacks about old movies at her place, and she’d read that the screenwriter, Leon Prentiss, had stumbled across an actual vampire cave in the desert when he and some buds had gone camping—outside of our town—back in the ’60s. So he’d used the cave as the basis for the movie.

So for two fucking hours, I drove around in the desert, looking for a vampire cave and listening to the Goth crew argue about it.

“I’m telling you,” Rooster said, “Baron Draconi was from Transylvania. He never lived in America.”

“But like other Europeans, he left the religious persecution of his own country to come to the land of the free,” Raven stated.

“But they fear crosses—and that’s religious,” Lady Katrina said.

“Yeah, like holy water!” Bones shouted.

“It sounds like a lot of bullshit if you ask me,” Rooster said. I wanted to say that nobody had asked him, but well, I just didn’t want to get involved. Frankly, I wanted to stop the van and tell them all to get the hell out, but I just didn’t have the guts. Plus, I was already really nervous because I’d borrowed the van without asking my folks. Dad was out of town on a business trip (with his secretary, no big surprise there), and Mom was out getting drunk with Lorenzo the gardener (no surprise there either), but still, I didn’t have any parental permission, and that had me a little freaked out. “Please don’t fight,” Shakes said in a creepy, trembling whine. “It’s giving me a sore stomach.”

But nobody listened to Shakes, and the argument went on and on. After a while I stopped paying attention—probably because I had the rearview mirror adjusted so I could look up Raven’s short black-leather skirt to see her panties. Or rather, where her panties would have been if she’d been wearing them.