Suck It Up by Brian Meehl

“What this reporter and more than a dozen people just witnessed was the first vampire to come out of the casket.”
    As Drake began interviewing a wild-eyed onlooker, Morning glanced up at Penny. “What happens next?”
    â€œWe wait for the spin.”
    â€œThe spin? What do you mean?”
    â€œDid you literally ‘come out of a casket’?” she asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSee, Drake’s already got the story wrong. Now it’s everyone else’s turn to do the same. That’s spin. After they’ve all gotten the story ass-backward, we’ll set it straight.”
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    Penny was right. Over the next two hours, the story of a missing orphan turning into a misting vampire kept shape-shifting in the fog of news.
    During the five o’clock news, the local stations each twisted the “vampire story” in their own way. WABC reported it was a hoax concocted by special effects wizards at Hound TV. WNBC claimed it was a publicity stunt by an unknown magician making a grab for fame and fortune. And WCBS, after discovering that the street where it took place had been sealed off by the police, turned it into a story about freedom of the press and America’s slide toward authoritarian rule.
    The truth behind the WCBS story was less dramatic. Sister Flora had called in her markers at the local police station, and had the media circus in front of St. Giles swept off the street.
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    By six o’clock, about the only person in the city who had not heard a version of the vampire story exited a viewing booth in the Paley Center For Media on Fifty-second Street. Having calculated that Morning would not emerge from his room until after sunset, Portia had gone to the museum after school to knock off some homework for her Twentieth-Century Television class.
    As she stopped at the security desk in the lobby, she jumped when she heard Morning McCobb’s name. She looked around. There was no one else in the lobby but the half-dozing guard and a bank of television sets. As she scribbled her name on the sign-out sheet, she went into worst-case-scenario mode. Either Morning was capable of some kind of voodoo ventriloquism, or she was having a Joan of Arc moment, or—and this was the worst possibility—the image of Morning that had danced through her mind all day was now
talking.
    Hearing his name again, Portia spun toward the only source of sound in the lobby: the bank of TVs.
    All of the screens showed the same grim-faced anchorman delivering the network news. “Once again, the barrier protecting hard news from the flood of infomercials packaged by PR firms and sold as news was breached today.” The show cut away to footage of Morning a few seconds before he turned into a mist. “We’ve all seen the footage by now. Morning McCobb, the alleged vampire, supposedly shape-shifting into a mist.”
    Portia gawked as the anchorman droned on. “After conducting our own investigation, we learned that the collaborators behind this trumped-up story include Hound TV, a public relations firm known as Diamond Sky PR, and the Archdiocese of New York, which is about to launch a major fund-raising drive for the church’s foster care program.”
    Portia stopped listening. She felt like her brain had just been hit with a double-barreled stun gun.
Assume the worst?
This was surpassing all previous worsts. Not only was Morning’s geeky goth act just the tip of the iceberg, but her mother, the freak magnet, had finally gone too far. In the past, she’d always let her creepy clients do the TV time, but now there she was, front and center, part of the whole charade, part of a
media scandal
! At least the Greek child slayer, Medea, had the decency to kill her children quickly, Portia lamented. But her mother, Medea Dredful, was going to kill her with a thousand cuts of humiliation!
    On the bank of