Beautiful Monster 2(56)

 
This was going to be an awkward encounter, but I needed to know.
 
There was no answer at the door and I leaned in, peeping through the peephole, but the distorted view showed an empty room.
 
“Amy? Amy?” I called through the door, rapping again and hoping she was just hiding inside.
 
It was probably about the third call, my voice a little louder than I meant it to be, when a door opened down the hallway and Sarah and Amy came out of Sarah’s dorm room.
 
“What the hell are you doing?” Amy asked, her arms crossed.
 
“Amy!” I headed towards her, lurching a little and she ducked away to avoid contact.
 
“Are you drunk?” she asked, with distaste. “That’s real responsible, Liam.”
 
“Liam, you shouldn’t be here,” Sarah said, clearly a bit annoyed as well.
 
But I focused on Amy, moving forward and trying to get my nose close enough to her neck. I was half in transformation, and I knew I shouldn’t be out, but it allowed me to get a whiff of her life force.
 
The familiar smell drifted into my nostrils. Connor was right. She smelled like death. My Amy was dying, far too soon.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Chapter 17: Amy
 
 
 
At first, I just thought they were scrapes, cuts, bruises. Every theater actor has them, because it isn’t exactly a glamorous life. I had gotten a few in the summertime, during Gatsby, and now that I had been working on Ranger for a few weeks, with Drago’s ridiculously hard but supposedly safe stunts, there were more of them. I had ignored them for a while, assuming it was nothing.
 
I had also gotten sick a few times during the summer, horrible coughs and colds that I just couldn’t shake. I had even cancelled a visit home with Liam because I felt like crap for a week. But everyone gets sick, especially when they are working a hard schedule and traveling. So I ignored it.
 
But one morning, I woke up at dawn, coughing. I looked at the clock, hating my life at that moment. It was 5 am and I was still exhausted, despite having gone to bed at nearly 9 pm. In the dawn light, my arm was practically shining like a halo and the wound was shiny and purple, and a bit wet.
 
Lesions.
 
Realistically, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was approaching twenty and had HIV since birth. I was what was known as a long term non-regressor, the disease was lying dormant for years. I took my medication daily, and I never skipped a dose. I guess, somewhere in my head, I thought that it would never show up. But here it was. And lesions were not the first sign, which meant I had been stupidly ignoring other signs for a while.#p#分页标题#e#
 
I closed my eyes, trying not to let a million doomsday thoughts enter my head. This wasn’t the end. Times were different and modern science was progressing rapidly, and AIDS was no longer a death sentence.
 
But I couldn’t help but think of Porsche’s lifeless body; of my mother’s grave. AIDS was a death sentence for them, and one day, it would be for me, unless a vampire got me first.
 
Sitting up, I rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up. With trembling hands, I reached for my cell phone. My father would just be up, getting ready for work.
 
“Daddy?” I said, when he picked up the phone.
 
“Amy, what’s wrong?”
 
“Daddy, can you make an appointment for me with Doctor Martin?”
 
“Why?” I could hear the alarm in his voice, but I wasn’t going to hide anything from him. He would find out soon enough.
 
“I have lesions on my arms.”
 
Silence came through the other end of the phone, so long that I was worried that he had hung up.
 
“Dad?”
 
“I’m here, Amy. I’ll do it right away.”
 
“The sooner the better. You don’t have to come if you have to work…”
 
“I’ll get you an appointment and call you back. I’ll be there with you, honey.”
 
“Thank you.” I hung up the phone and drew my knees up to my chest, trying not to cry. Had this been a few weeks ago, I would have called Liam and he would have rushed right over, vampire or not. But now, calling Liam would just seem weird.
 
And so the only person I called was the production office of Ranger to call in sick. I then left a message with the dorm mother, calling in sick. That was official policy, but when I had been sick before, I had always just told Liam, and that was it.
 
My father called back just after six, which was when Dr. Martin’s office had opened.
 
“You have an appointment at 8 am. I’ll pick you up at 7:30. And Amy?”