#14 Caterine Belrose – Student

This is really my favorite week of the year, Finals Week. When all the other students are feverishly cramming in a futile effort to improve their grades, the campus is deserted and I have the free-run of the streets. The bars and restaurants with lines around the block will show me right in, no matter what time I decide to show up. It’s just so much fun.

Half the students are always furious at me, cursing me for ruining the curves with perfect scores on every test. The other half just keep begging me to join their little study groups. I try to turn them down politely, but it’s hard to not laugh. Study? Me? Ha. And it’s not like I’m cheating, despite what the professors think. I just know the subject matter. It’d be a surprise if I didn’t, after working with it for more than a hundred years.

I don’t know why the government made that stupid law, just because all of us monsters came out of the darkness. Nobody ever complained about my work before I came out, so why do I have to go through re-earning all of my degrees just because their a few decades old?

I actually thought people would come to me, wanting to ask questions. I was at the Solvay conference, watching the greatest minds throw up their hands at nuclear radiation, and I was there a decade later when Heisenberg proposed his quantum theory. I was teaching aide at UIC and stood next to Fermi when he started his reactor. This is the foundation of science and I could tell them all about it.

But no, they don’t want that. They just want us bloodsuckers and lycans to disappear again. Since they can’t shove us back into their nightmares, they do the next best thing. They bury us in an ivory tomb.

Category: 2011, Fantasy