My Roommate Is a Vampire(55)

Only right now it wasn’t so great. Sam was acting the way he did every time I’d ever confessed a crush to him. And that just wasn’t what was going on here.

Or, even if it was what was going on here, it wasn’t like anything was going to come of it.

I rolled my eyes at Sam, my irritation with him growing, then walked over to Scott, hoping that would be the end of this conversation. Fortunately, Scott was looking at his camera, not at me.

“Could I look through the pictures you took?” I asked, trying to ignore how flustered I was. “I’d like to send my application to the show organizers tonight.”

“Sure,” Scott said. He leaned closer to me so I could see his screen, and then gave me a wide, shit-eating grin. “I won’t even give you grief over how much you’re blushing over your roommate while we do it, either.”



* * *





There was a note from Frederick waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got home that afternoon. My heart skipped a beat, and I felt my lips curve into a smile as I unfolded the now familiar sheet of crisp white stationery.

    Dear Cassie,

What are your favorite foods?

I haven’t asked my personal question yet today, and I would like this to be today’s question.

Yours,

FJF



This one-personal-question-per-day thing was something new we agreed to try after the night we’d stayed up too late watching Buffy. After he said he wanted to know more about me so he could learn about the modern world, we decided one personal question per day would be a good way to accomplish that.

I knew, on some level at least, that the learning more about the modern world bit was just a ruse we were using to get to know each other better as people. But I tried to shut down that line of thinking whenever it cropped up.

I wasn’t quite ready yet to ponder what that meant was happening between us.

With each subsequent question he asked, though, the truth of what we were doing was getting harder to ignore.

    Dear Frederick,

I have a lot of favorite foods! Lasagna, chocolate cake, honey nut cheerios, eggs benedict, and chicken noodle soup are probably the top 5.

Also, this doesn’t answer your question, but guess what? I got a job interview today! There’s probably no chance in the world I’ll get the job but it’s still exciting.

Cassie

Dear Cassie,

Wonderful news about the job interview! Why do you think you would not get the position? If it were up to me, I would hire you in a heartbeat (if you will excuse the figure of speech).

Thank you for answering my question about your favorite foods. That helps my understanding of what humans in their 30s enjoy eating in the early twenty-first century. My question for today has to do with color. Specifically: What is your favorite color?

FJF

Dear Frederick,

That’s very kind of you to say you would hire me in a heartbeat. But you can’t mean that. You don’t even know what the job is! It could be something I have zero qualifications for. In fact, it is.

I have two fave colors: carmine (which is a specific shade of red) and indigo. How about you? Do you have a favorite color?

Cassie

Dear Cassie,

This is probably extremely cliché, but my favorite color is red.

And I meant exactly what I said. I would hire you in a heartbeat. For any job.

I still need to think of a good daily question to ask you, but in the meantime I want to let you know that last night while you slept I visited an all-night cafe with Reginald called “Waffle House.” I think you would be proud of how well I managed to order our food and beverages without either mishap or drawing undue attention to ourselves. I daresay even Reginald was impressed with how fluidly I managed to extract my new credit card from my wallet and pay for everything. (As you may have guessed, impressing Reginald is nearly impossible.)

We did get a few stares from the table of young people adjacent to ours, but I suspect that may have been a side effect of the substances I could smell on them and not due to anything anachronistic Reginald and I were doing. In either case, I am eager to travel to another cafe soon to practice my fledgling skills.

Given that I would not have been able to order that chocolate chip and peanut butter waffle last night without your unending patience with me I wanted to let you know. I couldn’t eat it of course; but it still felt like a small victory.

Yours,

FJF



I picked up the pen that now lived permanently on the kitchen table and pondered what to write in my note back to him.

Sam had just texted me earlier in the day to invite me to a party he and Scott were throwing on Friday evening. Maybe Frederick could come with me. He could practice interfacing with people in public there.

I dashed off a quick note to him before I could talk myself out of it.

    Hey Frederick,

Great job at Waffle House. Yeah, I’m sure those kids were only staring at you because they were high as hell (though I may be projecting a little from my own teenage years).

Unrelated—my friend Sam is having some people over Friday night. Do you want to come with me? It could be another opportunity for you to practice your talking with people skills around someone other than me and Reginald.

cassie



I read over my note, torn between leaving it on the table for Frederick and tearing it into a thousand pieces.