Free Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

squinting. What did the moon most resemble to him? Nal wiped at his dry eyes and dug into the paper. One of the seagulls had settled on an auburn coil of seaweed a few feet away from his bare foot. He tried to ignore it, but the gull was making a big production out of eviscerating a cigarette. It drew out red flakes of tobacco with its pincerlike bill and ate them. Perfect, Nal thought. Here I am trying to eulogize Mother Nature and this is the scene she presents me with.
    Behind him, Samson growled Vanessa’s name. Don’t look back, you asshole! he thought. Good advice, from Orpheus to Lot. But Nal couldn’t help himself. He lacked the power to look away, but he never worked up the annihilating courage to look directly at them either; instead, he angled his body and let his eyes slide to the left. This was like taking dainty sips of poison. Samson’s broad back had almost completely covered Vanessa—only her legs were visible over the dune, her pink feet twitching as if she were impatient for sleep. “Oh!” said Vanessa, over and over again. “Oh!” She sounded happy, astonished.
    Nal was a virgin. He kicked at a wet clump of sand until it exploded. He went on a rampage, doing whirling karate kicks into a settlement of abandoned sand castles along the beach for a full minute before he paused, panting, to recover himself. The tide rushed icy fingers of water up the beach and covered Nal’s foot.
    “Ahh!” Nal cried into one of the troughs of silence betweenSamson and Vanessa’s moans. He had wandered to the water’s edge, six or seven dunes away from them. His own voice was drowned out by the ocean. The salt water sleuthed out cuts on his legs that he had forgotten about or failed to feel until now, and he almost enjoyed the burning. He looked around for something else to kick, but only one turret remained on the beach, a bucket-shaped stump in the middle of damp heaps. The giant seagull was standing beside it. Up close the gull seemed as large as a house cat. Its white face was luminous, its wings ink-dipped; its beak was fixed in that perennial shit-eating grin of all shearwaters and frigate birds.
    “What are you grinning at?” Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle—too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape—and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal’s shadow and was pulling his darkness from him.
    NAL WASN’T SUPPOSED to be in town that summer. He had been accepted to LMASS, the Lake Marion Achievement Summer Seminars: a six-week precollege program for the top three percent of the country’s high school students. It was a big deal—seniors who completed all four summers of the program were automatically admitted to Lake Marion College with a full scholarship package. “Cream Rises” was the camp’s motto; their mascot was an oblong custard-looking thing, the spumy top layer of which Nal guessed was meant to represent the gifted. In March a yellow T-shirt with this logo had arrived in the mail, bundled in with his acceptance letter. Nal tried to imagine a hundred kids wearing the same shirt in the Lake Marion dormitories, kids with overbites and cowlicks and shy, squint-eyed ambitions—LMASS!he thought, a kind of heaven. Had he worn the shirt with the custard-thing to his own school, it would have been a request for a punch in the mouth.
    But then one day his mom came home from work and said she was being scapegoated by the Paradise Nursing Facility for what management was calling “a distressing oversight.” Her superiors recommended that she not return to work. But for almost two weeks Nal’s mother would set her alarm for five o’clock, suit up, take the number 14 bus to Paradise. Only after she was officially terminated did she file for unemployment, and so far as Nal could tell this was