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Once upon a time there was a little girl who didn't care. She wasn't so little anymore, really -- about fourteen, a freshman in high school. When she was twelve she had cared a lot, but not anymore.
What had happened to change her? It might be good to know, somehow.
She was a lot like a vampire.
Stacey at twelve was smart, sweet, perceptive. She had a few friends and no enemies. She spent her time reading books, babysitting her six and eight year old neighbors (with their mom in the kitchen fixing dinner), writing in her diary, talking on the telephone with her friends. She got all A's and B's on her report card. Her mother worked long hours, and her father was always away on business, so she ate dinner with the family she babysat for more nights than not. Sheri paid her a dollar an hour too, so she had a little pocket money to spend on Laurel Leaf books and CD singles by Jewel or Britney Spears.
Then something had happened, and she turned into the girl who never went home before ten at night, spent her money trying to buy illegal Valium or ephedrine, and needed tutoring in just about every subject she was taking in her first year at the high school.
Over the tutoring Arthur talked to her a little about her life. She told him a little, then a little more in bits and pieces.
Her parents were neglectful, but that wasn't what had changed. Sheri and the boys had moved away, but the change had happened before that, so that couldn't be it. In fact it seemed as if the move had been prompted by the change in Stacey, or at least she liked to claim it had -- the boys had started to protest her presence, even after Sheri had discontinued the babysitting.
He worried about her. She seemed so vacant. Something was gone from inside her, and it had happened just a year ago. It was a mystery, one he felt compelled to solve.
He talked to her mother. Stacey's mother was happy someone was taking an interest, and told him all she could. The divorce, but he didn't think that was it either. Parents got divorced all the time, and it did hurt the children, but this was something different. Stacey never talked about her father much. He'd been there very little even before the divorce, and she never saw him anymore at all.
One day, though, he found the answer he'd been looking for. The knife.
Stacey had come home one day late at night, after dinner with Sheri and her two sons. She heard voices in the kitchen. There was a man in there with her mom. Not her dad, a stranger. He had a gun, and it was aimed at her mother. Stacey was not afraid. At least, not then. She picked up a knife and shoved it as hard as she could into the man with the gun. And he died.
Arthur read the police report from Stacey's school file. Self-defense, an easy ruling. The man she'd killed had two convictions for robbery and was a suspected killer as well. Her mother told the police he'd been threatening to shoot her.
He watched Stacey the next time he was tutoring her. Her mother hadn't been able to hide the fear of her. And Stacey had changed. The act of killing ate her soul from the inside. Not everyone knew about it, but those closest to her did, and they saw her differently -- and she was very different.
One more session. He pulled out a knife and set it on the table between them. The same size and brand, same color handle. She looked at him, for a moment visibly startled, then her face set into her usual sullen lack of expression. "It doesn't have to be like this," he said softly. "You're still alive." Then they did algebra.
Not the next time, but one of the next times, she talked about it a little. It got better, but not very much better. She wasn't completely dead. But she could never go back.
She was a lot like a vampire.