BT Line Bites: You Look Like Trouble #BloodTies#Vampires

Sally Statham took a long drag of her cigarette through puckered orange painted lips. She turned her head to the right and kept one bloodshot eye fixed on me as she exhaled, giving a push from an uplift of her chin. I coughed and tried to blink the burn out of my eyes. I leaned away and took in tiny gasping breaths, just enough to keep me conscious.

“Name?” she growled.

“Elizabeth Aldridge.” I gave her a pleasant smile, tinged with optimism. “Optimistic” that I’d be outta there in a flash. After all, it was the “happy” word of the day.

“ID,” she barked.

I handed her my driver’s license. She gazed at it and hitched an eyebrow that had been drawn on with a brown pencil. I looked like I was on meth. My shoulder-length hair, normally a strawberry blonde, was the color of dishwater. It looked like rats had used it as a nest. My blue eyes were so bloodshot they looked lavender. I’d dragged myself out of bed, hung-over, to make it to the DMV before they closed at four-thirty. 

The party the night before had been epic.

She squinted one eye. “I don’t want trouble,” she said. Her long nails, painted the same color as her lips, flicked a long ash into a half-full tray. The sun hadn’t been kind to her and she had the wrinkles and sunspots to prove it. A bright neon orange tank top glowed against all that bronze, holding her ponderous breasts like a jock support. Her bleached blonde hair was as scraggly as the plants on her desk.

She leaned across the desk and a pair of red cat glasses on a chain of miniature dog bones fell off her ample chest to perch themselves on the desk as if they were giving me a stare down. I smothered a laugh and began furiously chewing my bottom lip.

“You look like trouble.” 

I opened my mouth to respond with an obligatory response to that challenge but snapped it shut. It wasn’t worth taking in more rank air. Instead, I wondered how long it would take before I passed out.

Trouble? OK. I’d had a near miss with the law when I stole my team’s basketball championship trophy on a dare and then another time, weren’t our neighbors oh so excited when they found their mailboxes stuffed full of brownies. No big deal. And as far as anyone knew, I wasn’t the one that’d beat up my stalker. He’d transferred schools shortly after that, too embarrassed to sic the police on me. Even if he had, who would have believed a girl half his size had messed him up? Beyond that, I was a model citizen all the way around. Yep.