Pages From a Vampire's Journal by Olivia D'Abo Page B

the snow mind ya. Your mailbox was open too. I’m bettin the cursed wind blew it open I would say. Not trying to pry, just thought I’d do my good deed for the day you know? Here.” He gave her a faint grin of innocence.
    He smelled of tree sap and shredded pine. She gently took the letter, making slight contact with his ringed index finger in doing so. “A Celtic ring” she thought. It was a silver ring with some intertwining elephant trunks with celtic-looking runes swirled about it. She loved anything Celtic. It looked like an old Viking ring though he was far too skinny to be of lineage to a Norseman, she thought. She had studied old encyclopedias that had illustrated Viking warriors. They were all titanic in size. Trixie loved to guess people’s age as well. She not only could guess their age within a year, she could do wonders in guessing their weight, what country their family came from, what color hair their mother had. She knew genes and lineages. Her dad was a geneticist for an out-of-town pharmaceutical company called GeneSmith and talked about recessive alleles like they were tomorrow’s weather forecast. But this guy was different. For the first time in a long while, she couldn’t size up his age within a few seconds of meeting him like she could with others. Something about his penetrating gaze threw her guessing ability off, like he was guessing her age while she guessed his. Somehow their optical equation canceled each other out. Or perhaps they had engaged in some other kind of ethereal handshake.
    She curtly said thank you and closed the door. She wouldn’t have to track through the snow to the mailbox after all. She could make up anything she wanted. She could say she had no idea where the report card was and with no tracks in the snow who would be the wiser? There was a fifty-fifty chance that Camilla would believe her. Or maybe it was seventy-thirty. Who knew, since there was always those off days where she couldn’t predict Camilla’s behavior. Like some old junkyard dog, you just couldn’t set your watch by her, even when the outside was filled with blue jays, sunshine and daisies. Trixie pulled back the lavish, purple curtain and peered through the window to the cobblestone street. No tracks in the snow at all. The envelope might have been lying halfway down the street for all she knew, but it belonged to Trixie now. It had Trixie’s name on it, not Camilla’s. Nothing good ever came from Camilla knowing about her academic “progress”, because regardless of that progress, rain and failure was always the end result from Camilla. Always, except today. Today was her day.
    Trixie ran back to her room upstairs. A few minutes later, she heard Camilla’s Cadillac crunch the hardened snow in the driveway. Trixie always dreaded the sound of that car, like a pile driver in a construction site, announcing to everyone that peace was forbidden and a blissful sleep was rewarded with a smack to the head. She heard the obese Boris trot downstairs to greet its master like Igor to Dr. Frankenstein. Trixie for all her maturity might as well have had iron shackles and her auburn colored hair tied up in a hangman’s noose. The cold winter only seemed to tighten Camilla’s icy grip on her since she had made few friends since moving to Montreal and had nowhere to conceal her day from her.
    “Camilla! Come!” her stepmother screamed.  Trixie’s blood turned ice cold. She took her time getting up from the bed to drag herself downstairs, which she thought of as a minefield.
    “You already know what I’m going to ask Trixie. Where is it? It wasn’t in the mailbox. Did you get it?” she barked.
    “No I didn’t get it. I’ve been in the house all day.”
    Camilla looked at Trixie’s shoes in the corner of the kitchen, eyeing them for traces of fresh snow.
    “You’re lying aren’t you? Go and GET that card or you’re going to be in more trouble girl” she snorted. Sometimes Trixie could almost