Both things are true (Part 1): Gary.

Gary. New Vampire

Gary

Gary became a vampire at thirty-four, which he considered bad timing, mostly because he’d just renewed his gym membership.

The transformation happened on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate. Nothing good has ever happened on a Tuesday.

His sire , a seven-hundred-year-old Romanian named Vlad, who insisted that wasn’t a joke ,bit Gary in a Walgreens parking lot while Gary was returning a humidifier. Vlad apparently had a quota to meet. He didn’t explain this until after.

“You could have asked,” Gary said, pressing his neck.

“Would you have said yes?”

Gary thought about it. “Probably not.”

“Then we saved time.”

Gary’s childhood, for the record, had been difficult in a very specific way: his mother was a perfectly nice woman who nonetheless served dinner at 4:45 PM every single day. Not five. Not four-thirty. Four forty-five, like a person with a deeply personal grudge against every other time slot.

This had no bearing on becoming a vampire. But it did mean Gary had spent thirty-four years eating before he was hungry and waking up before he wanted to, so when he finally became a creature of the night, he found it genuinely restful.

“I’ve never felt so aligned with a schedule,” he told Vlad.

Vlad stared at him. “Most fledglings weep for three days.”

“I slept until 9 PM and had the whole night ahead of me. I almost cried from relief.”

The real problems came later.

Turns out Gary was mildly allergic to bats. Not deathly so — just enough that being near them made his eyes water and his nose run, which, when you’re supposed to be terrifying someone in a dark alley, significantly undercuts the atmosphere.

He also had a lisp. Had always had one, barely noticeable in normal conversation, but the fangs made it much worse.

“I am a creatthure of eternal night,” he practiced in the mirror that no longer showed his reflection. He had to take this on faith.

He considered therapy. His therapist, a kind woman named Dr. Okafor, took the vampire thing in stride and said his real issue was catastrophizing.

“You’ve turned an objectively unusual situation into evidence that you’re fundamentally cursed,” she said.

“I hiths when I talk,” Gary said.

“Yes,” said Dr. Okafor. “Let’s work on self-compassion.”

He never did get a refund on the gym membership. Technically he could go ,vampires are strong, fast, supernaturally fit. But showing up at 11 PM, pale as printer paper, asking which machines worked the lats, kept leading to incidents.

“You could compel them to forget,” Vlad suggested.

“That feels like a lot of effort for a lat pulldown.”

“You are the strangest thing I have made in four centuries,” Vlad said, and Gary chose to take that as a compliment.

He mostly did, these days.

The Blood Thing

The other issue ,and Gary acknowledged this was perhaps the central issue, the load-bearing issue, the issue an outside observer might have led with — was that Gary found drinking blood deeply uncomfortable as a social situation.

Not morally. He’d worked through the ethics with Dr. Okafor over several sessions and they’d landed somewhere nuanced. No, the problem was more specific: Gary had been raised by a woman who made him write thank-you notes for everything, and he could not shake the compulsion.

His first victim ,Vlad hated that word, preferred donor, Gary found this optimistic ,was a jogger named Mike. Gary had done the whole thing, the swoop, the dark alley, the cape (Vlad had insisted on the cape, Gary had pushed back, Vlad had won). Mike had been too stunned to resist. Gary had fed. Mike stumbled away, compelled to forget.

Gary went home and addressed an envelope.

Dear Mike, Thank you so much for your contribution. It was very generous and I hope you have a full recovery. Best, Gary.

He didn’t send it, obviously. He didn’t have Mike’s address. But the writing of it helped.

Vlad found the stack of unsent thank-you notes on Gary’s kitchen counter three months later and sat down on the floor.

“Are you okay?” Gary asked.

Vlad pointed at the notes.

“It’s just how I was raised.”

“I have met Genghis Khan,” Vlad said, quietly. “I have met the Black Death. I have never—” He stopped. Started again. “There is a note here that says P.S. I hope your neck feels better soon.”

“That one’s for Linda. She seemed like she was having a hard week.”

Vlad put his face in his hands.

The Support Group

It was Dr. Okafor who suggested the support group, on the grounds that Gary needed community. Gary pointed out that his community was technically an apex predator who’d been alive since the Byzantine Empire. Dr. Okafor said that was not the same thing as support.

The group met in a church basement on Thursdays, which Gary thought showed either a great sense of irony or a complete lack of organizational awareness. He was the only vampire. There were two werewolves, a woman who was technically a banshee but preferred the term grief-adjacent, a man named Todd who had been cursed by a witch and couldn’t stop narrating his own actions in third person, and a ghost named Patrice who attended mostly out of loneliness and couldn’t interact with anything physical but appreciated being included.

“Todd pours himself a coffee,” Todd said, pouring himself a coffee. “Todd wonders if the new guy is a vampire.”

“I am,” Gary said.

“Todd is unsettled but tries not to show it. Todd is showing it.”

Gary liked Todd immediately.

The banshee ,her name was Rhonda. The most well-adjusted person in the room. She’d screamed at eleven funerals this year, yes, but she’d also started a small Etsy shop selling artisanal candles, and she seemed genuinely at peace.

“The screaming is just part of who I am,” Rhonda said. “Once I stopped fighting it, everything got easier.”

“Do you write thank-you notes?” Gary asked.

Rhonda stared at him.

“After the funerals. To the families.”

A long pause.

“I’m going to start doing that,” Rhonda said softly. “That’s actually really beautiful.”

“Todd thinks this group is getting weird,” Todd said. “Todd also thinks it was already weird. Todd is contradicting himself.”

Patrice the ghost flickered approvingly from the corner.

Four Forty-Five

The thing about Gary’s mother and he thought about her often, now that he had an eternity to fill ,was that she hadn’t been cruel. She hadn’t even been unreasonable, by the standards of the household in which she’d been raised. She’d fed him dinner at 4:45 because her mother had fed her dinner at 4:45, presumably because her mother had fed her dinner at 4:45, and at some point deep in Gary’s ancestry there was a single woman who simply preferred an early meal and had accidentally built a dynasty of it.

This was the kind of thing Gary thought about now, stretched across his couch at 3 AM with nothing but time.

Most of what people called a bad childhood, he’d realized, wasn’t malice. It was just people passing on the specific shape of their own confusion ,handing it down like a piece of furniture nobody had chosen but nobody knew how to throw away.

He mentioned this to Dr. Okafor.

“That’s real growth, Gary,” she said.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

“You’ve been a vampire for eight months.”

“I’ve always been a slow processor,” Gary said. “I’m making up for it.”

He still hadn’t figured out the bat allergy.

Vlad had tried seven different remedies from across seven centuries of vampire lore. None of them worked. Gary now carried a travel pack of tissues in his cape pocket, which Vlad had registered as a personal affront.

“You are an immortal predator,” Vlad said.

“And my eyes are watering,” Gary said, blowing his nose. “Both things are true.”

He was, on the whole, doing okay.

The gym membership had lapsed. The thank-you notes kept accumulating in a shoebox under his coffin. Every Thursday he sat in a church basement with a werewolf, a banshee, a man narrating himself, and a ghost who couldn’t hold a coffee cup but kept trying.

Dr. Okafor said he was making progress.

Gary thought she might be right.

He just wished someone had warned him about the Tuesdays. There had been so many Tuesdays since the parking lot, and every single one of them had found a new way to be exactly as bad as the last.

That, more than anything, felt like the true curse of immortality.