Katheryn Delacroix always had very long, very red nails, even before acrylics swept Pinterest and Instagram and it became something that everyone did, not just white trash or the– always said with a sniff and only the most gossamer of veiled racism– “the ghetto girls” did.

Clara assumed she did them herself, because she never saw her at either of the two nail salons within a forty five minute drive, and Clara had lived in town for a long, long time. Her whole life, in fact.

It was probably easier, she mused, to be a hermit a hundred or even fifty years ago. You could have servants or an inheritance or whatever women did whenever they went a little crazy and shut themselves up in the house, with the lawn growing wild and the live oaks haunting the winding. It must be a little bit harder to be the scary recluse in the fluorescent light of a Publix, probably.

If it was, Katheryn Delacroix was rising to the occasion admirably, Clara thought semi- hysterically, her hands tightening to white knuckles on the nearly slimy plastic of the grocery cart handle.

It was the humidity. It made everything faintly wet.

“Clara Franklin,” Katheryn Delacroix said, and smiled. It was a smile that had had dental work done, once, to be that white and clean, but lord knows Clara didn’t know when. It had red lipstick surrounding it.

Katheryn Delacroix wore a little black scarf around her hair, which was very pale and blonde, as were her eyebrows. Her sleeves were long and black, even in this weather, which had Clara Franklin in the thinnest tank top she owned and a pair of gym shorts she bought in middle school.

No one ever told you’d be wearing those shorts well into your early twenties. Mid twenties. Almost late. Where did twenty seven fit into that hierarchy?

She had been silent a beat too long to be cool and casual or even like, meanly shocked that Katheryn Delacroix was speaking to her, and so Clara fumbled, “Ma’am— I mean—“

Katheryn laughed, folded her arms on the handle of her own shopping cart. She was still probably taller than her, Clara thought miserably. “Please, Clara, call me Katheryn.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Clara said, shooting herself in the face. Spiritually.

Katheryn ignored it, but her mouth curved into a half-moon smile. “I didn’t know you were back in town,” she said. Purred. Clara didn’t know you could do that in real life.

“Ah, yeah,” Clara said awkwardly, the sudden half-enjoyable fearful awkwardness that came with speaking to a pipe dream childhood idol slash terrified crush slash possible sexual awakening suddenly dissipating. Crushed under the hard truth that Clara was once again back south, maybe for good this time.

Trapped with the humidity and the stranglehold of Spanish moss, tangled up like a fly in a pale green spider web.

“I heard you finished your thesis,” Katheryn was saying, and Clara barely managed to hop back into the conversation.

“Yeah,” she said, rubbed the back of her neck, where the short hairs were a little too soft and lank under her palm. She needed a hair cut. “Finally defended it, just, uh, waiting to hear back, you know?”

She had heard back. There was an email that was six days old sitting in her inbox, unread. It had popped up again this morning, a jump scare in her gmail, the helpful little tag of ‘Received six days ago’ in orange. She was too scared to open it, knowing that once she clicked it it was over, everything was done, and she would have no more reason or ability to pretend that she was going to leave again in the fall, escape to cooler weather and the bite of snow.

“I’m sure you’ll do very well,” Katheryn said. “You were studying…something about folklore?”

“Trance states and–, ” Clara starts automatically, and cuts herself off. “Yeah,” she says. “Vampires.”

“Fascinating,” Katheryn said, god help her, like she actually meant it. “You know, I’ve always been…interested in vampires.”

Clara gave her a weak smile. “They’ve become very popular in the past few years.” Too popular. Clara hadn’t quite caught the wave, more the receding tide pools. Just enough for the market to be oversaturated, chock full of fangs and things that went bump in the night, with her small, pathetic thesis comparing brain waves and glamor a footnote in larger, more interesting conversations about sex and death.

Katheryn waved a clawed hand. “Popularity,” she rolled one icy blue eye, the bright fluorescents shooting it through with light, making it colorless, whites all round for a brief moment. Like a sightless corpse, drowned and faded.

The thought shot through Clara’s brain and she startled, a little, at the brief soft touch of it. She blinked, hard, to get rid of the after-image, shoving her bra strap farther up in her shoulder, annoyed at the morbid turn her thoughts had decided to waltz down.

“No,” Katheryn was saying, “More than that, don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” Clara said, blindly, stupidly.

Katheryn’s fine, pale brow raised. “You do?”

“I mean–” Clara said, fumbling.

Katheryn’s gaze sat heavy on her face, a nearly physical thing, suffocating, almost. It had Clara opening her mouth in a half nervous gesture, sucking in too cold air conditioning through her mouth, making her tongue and gums dry.

“I used to be a musician, of sorts,” Katheryn said, apropos of nothing.

“Really?” Clara said, intrigued despite herself. It was easy enough to picture Katheryn in some sort of slinky dress as a lounge singer, glittering in sequins under stage lights or robed in smoky velvet. Her voice lent itself well to the image, low and drawling.

“Really.” Katheryn said.

They don’t tell you that light has a weight, even false light. Katheryn’s eyes catch hers, and hold, while the artificial grid blooms above her, chills Clara’s bare shoulders. Her bra strap, stretched out over seven years of visits home, slips down again, and Clara can’t reach for it. Not with the way her hands feel like frozen clawed things, stuck in place on the slimy plastic.

“What was your thesis about?” Katheryn says, voice quiet and thrumming. It reminds Clara, in the back of her mind, of an LED recorded with the wrong frame rate, a white breasted thing beating against the screen with a strange gray beat.

“Trance states, theta brain waves and the suggestion of glamor,” Clara said. “I was looking at the idea that the supposed vampire was actually inducing a sort of somnambulistic suggestive state–”

“How about that,” Katheryn said, tilting her head. She really did look good for what must be her age. Still the same unnerving kind of pretty that’s hard to photograph, easy to forget till it’s right in front of you, the same sense that had driven Clara into a panicked state of teenage sexuality. The too red tongue, the slow moving tilt of the head.

The, she noticed, feather soft pressure in her brain, to the same beat of the undercover thrum of Katheryn’s voice. 7.5hz, to be exact.

Clara had a pretty good idea of what frequencies did, at this point. Had spent that last three or four years in a strange limbo between the better funded, modern design of the STEM buildings and the decaying basements and archives of the liberal arts contingent. Had done research on hypnotherapy– had been hypnotized, at one point, or attempted to be– done the sleep studies, talked about the power of suggestion and the way you could sway eyewitness accounts, bystander effect, this that and the other thing.

It was one thing indeed to come to a fairly nuanced, neatly gift-wrapped conclusion about the possible scientific explanation for the skills of a mythological creature couched as a literary analysis about the collision between spiritualism and burgeoning forensic arts. It was another thing entirely to witness that skill– experience it, even– for herself.

What a strange thing, to realize in this bright halogen light, between the white bread and the slowly moldering apples– not fresh, here, in the height of summer, their thin skins loose on the withering flesh beneath– that death is leaning on the handle of their grocery cart.

“I read your thesis,” Katheryn admitted, her smile becoming charming, half abashed. “We all did. You have to keep an eye on these things, even if most of the research coming out is just rehashing uninteresting literary analysis.”

Clara’s tongue felt stuck to the roof of her mouth, thick in her cheeks. The way you cannot speak in dreams.

“You’re very clever,” Katheryn said. “Some of us keep our hand in the academic game– it kind of comes back and forth in fashion, you know. Depending on the time. And they ran some tests. You got damn close, for what seemed to be pure conjecture.” She shifted her weight, and some bolt of terrified, embarrassed heat ran through Clara at the curve of her black framed hip, the turn of her waist.

“Would you be willing to come give a talk?” she asked. “To a small symposium. We’d love to hear about how you reached some of your conclusions. Maybe talk about further research?”

When Katheryn smiled, her teeth are very white and very sharp and remind Clara of the harsh bite of snow up north. Of something promised. Of a chance.

Clara managed to move her frozen vertebrae, creak it up and down in a facsimile of a nod.

Katheryn blinked, once. Interested and relaxed, like a cat.

The sludge like feeling rushed out of Clara’s limbs, the frantic twitch flow of blood and nerves back to life. Hypnagogic jerk.

“Fantastic!” Katheryn said, sounding genuinely pleased. “Let me give you my card. Send me an e-mail, and we’ll discuss the details further. I think you’ll enjoy working with us, Clara. If anything else, we can almost always guarantee test subjects.”

She laughs even as she holds out a bone-white card in between those red nails, and Clara takes it in both hands, terrified to drop it.

“Talk soon,” Katheryn said over her shoulder, and wandered past Clara down the produce aisles.

When she pushed her cart away– and really, it was fascinating how every damn cart in this grocery store squeaked and stuck but hers– Clara had the sensation not that she was taking all the air in the store with her, but that it was rushing back in to fill the void that her absence had created.