Max raises his hammer and his screwdriver and crosses them. When Momma glares at him, he drops them to the floor: clunk, clunk.

I put my hand to my throat. “Momma, gee, you’ll never get any grandkids that way.”

Then Poppa pipes up, which is amazing, since he never interrupts when Momma’s Decided and Made Up Her Mind About What Is Best. Now he says, “Wait a minute, Honey Love”-a name he calls Momma when he’s trying to wheedle something out of her-“sometimes it’s useful for our kind to be cared for by mortals, like that nice Mr. Renfield we met-”

And Momma rears up, eyes blazing, fangs gleaming, and she says, “No daughter of mine is going to eat bugs!!”

“That may not be necessary, Honey Love-”

She nods to Max. “Now he can eat all the bugs he wants, but not Marsha Leibowitz.”

So the family conference ends and I get to stay among the living, and so does Max, although Momma puts the whammy on him and before long he does eat bugs, insisting that they’re organic and all-natural and taste like roasted peanuts, rather than simply disgusting. I can’t imagine what I ever saw in him.

But he is really helpful around the house, once you get used to his gibbering, drooling, and constantly looking around for insectile snacks. The place seems to be overrun with bugs now and Momma will not allow me to call an exterminator. So, bugs and all, Max and I have to break up the basement floor with jackhammers-and I will kill anybody who asks if it ruined my nails-and dig a pit for the two coffins to rest side by side in their “native” New Jersey earth (with all the Transylvanian earth I could vacuum off the carpet thrown in for good measure), and, by day, that’s where my parents sleep.

Yes, I know that vampires are evil and totally given over to Satan and a menace to be destroyed, yadda yadda yadda, but she’s still my mother, and if you know my mother, you don’t worry about such things as going to Hell. Hell on Earth is having to listen to her kvetching, which she can keep up until Hell freezes over unless she gets her own way.

Poppa has Max fix up a flat-screen TV on the inside of his coffin lid and hook up the VCR to it so he can watch tapes during the daytime.

I never return to Bryn Mawr, but after some whining I get to transfer to Columbia, which is in Manhattan, to which I commute as a day student. But I’m under strict instructions to get home every evening by dusk, so I can help her and Poppa out of their coffins and “see them off” for their “evening rounds,” as Momma calls it. “Terrorizing the countryside” is what Poppa calls it, as he swirls out the door in that ridiculous outfit with the cape. If he doesn’t turn into a bat and fly away, he’d like me and Max to think he does. I’m past caring.

Can you imagine what this does to my social life? Max has moved in. I can watch him eat bugs, or watch TV, or do my homework. I become very studious. I get straight A’s. But believe me, romance is not on the roster.

The scary part of all this is that sometimes I am not sure I really am living with my parents anymore, or with two all-devouring things, who will gobble up even me at the end. When your parents are undead, you can never be certain they love you. It causes anxiety, believe me.

Then there is the one time I dare to bring over my best friend Sylvie for a night of shared homework and girl talk-and miraculously she is willing to put up with the bugs and the stench of the place. Did I tell you that vampire lairs smell bad? I could go on and on… I even convince her that Max is a retarded cousin the two of us should lock in the basement (we do, and he sits down there contentedly chomping on bugs). Things are going swimmingly, and I feel almost normal for once, when suddenly I’m not sure what is happening, and there is a mist sliding under the bedroom door, and that mist has red eyes in it and looks a bit like my mother. It might be a dream. I am not sure. I can’t move. I want to call out, but I can’t, and when I really do wake up, there is Sylvie on the bed next to me, pale as the other white meat with two holes in the side of her neck and her eyes crossed and rolled up.

Oy vey. So Max and I have to carry Sylvie out into a deserted lot and bury her in a cardboard box, which is very dangerous because the police might see us, but Momma likes her privacy and won’t share the basement (which she now calls “the crypt”) with just anybody. And most nights afterwards Sylvie comes floating to my second-floor bedroom window, tapping on the glass, asking to be let in, and before long she’s as much a nuisance as Max.

But I feel sorry for her and maybe I am even afraid of her. It is not her fault, what happened. But she also has that hungry, hungry, empty look in her eyes, and sometimes I am not sure if it’s even Sylvie, just those eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth that talks like my best friend.

Everybody has their breaking point, and I have mine. I think I’m already past it. But what can I do? I am not made of glass, that I can literally break.

I get on the Internet. I go to lots of chat rooms. I become something of a celebrity, but everybody thinks I am making this up. People don’t take me seriously. They tell me how much they like my stories. The editor of Weird Tales asks me to send him something. I also get people writing to know what flavor of bugs I like, and am I really a hunchback, because hunchbacks are supposed to be the servants of vampires-and I write back, No, that’s mad scientists, you dork! because this is my mother you are talking about-and I get some very odd spam, a lot of it from a dead African oil minister turned zombie who wants to get together with me to share the $30 million he intends to smuggle out of his country in a coffin.

And then at last there is a message that merely says: I think I can help you.-Heinrich.

Heinrich?

Is your last name Van Helsing by any chance? I want to know.

No, it is Schroeder.

What do you want? I type.

I want to meet you, he types back.

Now this is so mysterious, and everything your mother ever warned you about when messing on the Internet, but when you have a mother like mine, maybe you take her warnings with a grain of… garlic? (And that’s another thing-ever since the Big Change, there is no pizza allowed in our house, but I am babbling…)

I am thrilled. Also desperate. I am almost ready to fling myself into the arms of the zombie African oil minister, or certainly a mad scientist’s hunchbacked assistant as long as his breath smells like garlic, and in such a deranged state of mind I tell my new friend Heinrich Schroeder that I would like to meet him.

So we make arrangements to get together.

At night.

Alone.

In a lonely graveyard near Hoboken.

This breaks so many rules that it just adds to the thrill. So I stay late after school. I eat a light supper at a Pizza Hut, and then wait some more, until it is dark. Yes, I know Momma will be mad, but I don’t care; I’m that desperate. In any case, I know she can take care of herself, and that idiot-retard Max will be able stop eating bugs long enough to cope with any vampire-hunters who might want to sprinkle holy water into the basement or whatever else they might do.

It’ll be okay. I tell myself that over and over as I get off the PATH train in Hoboken and walk down a dark street between dingy buildings, until I come to another street, which is even darker and dingier, and my footsteps are going faster, faster, tap-tap, tap-tap, like in the movies when the girl is about to get jumped, only I don’t get jumped, and eventually I climb through a broken fence and into an old, deserted graveyard. There are such places in the New York area. Not everything is modern and built-up. Probably nobody has been buried here for a hundred years, and if anyone or anything climbs up out of a grave to get me, I’ll just tell him or it who my parents are.