Reckless: Shades of a Vampire(7)

“God will tell me who your husband should be,” her father said. “He knows the path you should walk.”

Since the first Monday Michael went to work at the Denton farm, he and Emma had stared at one another across the roadway like stargazers looking into the universe for a new planet. In her bed at night, she looked deep into his eyes, imagining he was still there. She knew he was thinking of her, too.

"Michael," Emma whispered as her fingers circled her crotch.

By day, they could not look away, afraid they might miss something that might carry them through the next night.



Emma knew without it being said that her father would never allow Michael to call upon her at the house since Michael’s family did not go to church -- any church. The Mooney’s, including Michael, his mother, his father, and his three younger sisters, were viewed by her father as black sheep of the Sand Mountain community, a tolerable aberration allowed to graze among the good and local since they caused no obvious trouble.

When John and Sara Mooney moved to the area from the state of New York more than a decade before most locals simply referred to them as hippies. And most still did.

The Mooney’s, the hippies, had arrived in the area in a Volkswagen van. They had paid cash for a house and 40 acres that came with a mule, and a plow for the mule to pull. Before they had fully unloaded the van they had plowed a field, planted a garden, and started calling themselves residents, and writers. Most everybody liked them all right, as much as they knew them. They just didn’t understand who the Mooney’s were or what they were beyond the broad assessment – hippies.

Michael’s mother wore long hair she kept tied in a ponytail that landed halfway down her back, and dresses once colored bright that had long since faded that landed halfway down her thighs. Rumor among the women was that Sara didn’t shave under her armpit.

But nobody really seemed to that know for sure. Sara Mooney volunteered three days a week in the public library restocking books, and she tutored students who needed help in reading and writing at her children’s school.

Michael’s father wore sandals that strapped around his ankles and had facial hair that looked like he trimmed it with a well-used butter knife. Michael’s father was known to walk the land of the region far and wide, the hills in particular, recording data about trees, wildflowers and wildlife encountered.

Rumor among the men was that John Mooney, eight years older than has wife, was married before, but nobody seemed to know for sure. Mooney led a Boy Scout troop in the area that was started with a few, but had dwindled to just one by the time Michael earned his Eagle Scout badge.

Michael’s sisters were honor roll students who thrived in art classes. They had shoulder-length, sandy brown hair they pulled back into a ponytail, bluish-green eyes, and long, slender noses that tapered at the end to meet broad, bright smiles. The girls ran together as if they were best friends from the same grade in school, and they were, and they did not like talking about Michael’s planned departure for college.

Michael was heading to New York University in the fall. He was just the second student in the history of Ider High School to notch a 36, a perfect score, on the American College Test, and the third to earn a National Merit Semi-Finalist distinction. Academic scholarship offers came from colleges and universities all over the country, and most offered a paid-in-full experience, including housing and books.

But Michael felt NYU would best prepare him for law school. His plan was to work at the Denton farm in the summer, earning enough money to manage the difference between scholarship money and spending money needs at the more expensive school for the first year.

Michael was known as a hard worker in high school, and he had never dated in other than obligatory arrangements for prom and junior senior banquet, and those had not gone so well.

Still, Michael was voted “Cutest” and “Most Likely to Succeed” in the senior class, and the girls giggled when he walked by, noting his olive skin, bluish-green eyes, and wavy brown hair as OMG-worthy.

Standing six-feet tall, he wore Wrangler jeans that snuggled tight to muscular buttocks in the back and made a bold outline of his package in the front and matched well with an assortment of pale, well-worn t-shirts regardless of the season. In winter, he just tossed a jacket on top for good measure.

But the girls did not know what to make of Michael, or so they said to one another in whispers as he passed quietly by, because he did not talk much to them.

They said he was shy, if not socially awkward.

Michael’s excuse to his mother was that he had nothing to say to girls.

“I can’t relate,” he had said.