It was well into spring, and James couldn’t help but enjoy the weather, cool but sunny, fair but breezy. It was almost like a second fall, only everything was coming to life again instead of letting go and falling away for the winter. The promise of warmer days and sunshine drew all the plants and animals, so abundant in these lush woods, out into the world again. James started hearing more night sounds as he lay awake, unwilling to sleep. Even still, relaxing as those night sounds may be from the outside, he knew they were a product of chaos no person could understand. In their world, it is kill or be killed. His world was hardly different.

James methodically placed various fresh fruits and vegetables into their respective bins, sorting from an assortment of crates and boxes the small, motherly woman he worked for had dragged out of storage. Her name was Ms. Betancourt, and she had refused assistance, and even once James was thoroughly buried in fruits, she had still tried to make conversation with her only employee. She barely even remembered hiring him—it was like he had simply materialized one day, although she was certain she remembered his first day in the shop. She’d had to show him around, teach him how to use the register, explain to him that he couldn’t scowl at the customers—but that had been months ago. She didn’t give it much thought outside of vague musings. He never caused any trouble.

“Would you mind wiping down the shop windows before you go?” Ms. Betancourt asked him. It was nearing the end of the day and he had barely spoken a word, but had gotten all his work done with a degree of accuracy Ms. Betancourt couldn’t help but be impressed by. Today had been a slow day, with only one or two customers coming into the shop, but rather than loll about, James had taken the opportunity to tidy up the shop. Ms. Betan court didn’t want to give him more work than he could handle, but no matter what she threw at him he seemed to tackle with ease once he had it figured out. Sure, the first time around he might be a little unsure of himself, but whatever he learned he had down pat within days. She appreciated him more than she cared to let on.

“Not at all,” James replied in his soft, demure voice. “I’ll get right on it.”

The admiration was not one sided, although James respected his employer in a very different way.

He went into the back to retrieve the window cleaner and a rag. The tasks Ms. Betancourt gave him were always the meditative, decidedly unsocial ones, which gave him plenty of time to mull over his private thoughts. Ms. Betancourt often wondered if perhaps he was some manner of neurodiverse.

She wasn’t as far off as she could have been, but she certainly didn’t hit it on the nose.

Spring passed them by, and the first day of summer heralded a season James had been dreading since spring break. Ms. Betancourt had a daughter, about James’ age, who would be visiting home from college for the duration of the summer months. Her spring visit hadn’t exactly gone over well, which did not give James much hope for the future, particularly because she worked in the shop for a little extra cash, meaning they would be forced to spend hours together each day, which James was less than thrilled about. She didn’t treat him badly, he just didn’t like her. She made him uncomfortable in ways he couldn’t really explain.

At first they were equally unsure of each other, both wary of a new, unfamiliar face, but eventually Roxán took a strange, unprecedented liking to James. Something about him made her decide he was either alright or worth messing with for entertainment. After she decided she didn’t want him gone, James felt pestered by her, even when she wasn’t speaking to him. She had a tendency to just watch him silently from the counter while he mopped the floors, or stocked shelves, or wiped down the windows. It didn’t help that she was as quiet as he was, either. He would forget she was there and get startled by her making a sudden noise, or moving, or if he turned around and saw her watching him again.

Eventually James snapped. “Why are you so weird?” he asked, half shouting at her from across the shop. That was the loudest Roxán had ever heard him speak, and possibly the longest sentence she’d heard him string together. In any case, she was taken aback by the sudden outburst.

She stared at him more intently still. She knew exactly what she was doing. “Hm? What do you mean?”

James was embarrassed now. It struck him that maybe she wasn’t all right in the head. “I don’t know. You just stand there and stare at me constantly,” he said, his voice stripped of any confidence, or volume for that matter. “That’s weird. Makes me feel… weird.” He had said ‘weird’ too many times. He wanted to hide.

Roxán shuffled out from behind the counter, and James actually looked at her properly for the first time. She was shorter than he was, but her slight platform shoes made them exactly the same height. She gave off the energy of black coffee, which was probably because she often drank it and was usually buzzed from the caffeine, but James did not know this.

“Maybe you make me feel weird,” she said, “I don’t know you. You’re just some weird little guy working in my mom’s shop.”

James turned bright red. “I’m not little.”

Roxán raised one eyebrow. “Barely. And that’s not an achievement anyway.”

Ms. Betancourt emerged from the back room and did a double take. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying not to laugh, “but from in there, you two sound like siblings. And I came out here and you look like twins.”

James hated that she was right. They had the same heart shaped faces, the same wide, dark eyes rimmed with thick, long lashes. The same rich, wavy hair that never did quite what it was told. The main difference was that James was scrawny and almost looked frail, while the Betancourts were of a stronger constitution, although both Roxán and her mother were on the smaller side. Neither broke five foot five inches, except Roxán when she was wearing her platforms. James was, to his mind, a respectable five foot six.

Ms. Betancourt regained her composure. “Anyway, I came out here to tell you that I’m closing the shop early for the day. I have errands to run. But I want you two to stay behind and organize the storeroom together. You, James, can go home either when you finish, when your work day ends, or when I get back. I trust your judgment.”

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James resented every moment he and Roxán had to spend in the storeroom together. He was hungry, tired, and had little to no tolerance for Roxán’s antics. He swore she took the opportunity to screw with his head as much as possible, which struck him as a terrible idea, but she had no way of knowing that. By the time they were finished, James felt just about ready to commit a murder.

“I’m going,” he muttered at Roxán as soon as he clocked out. “Try not to burn down the shop.”

Roxán mistook what he had meant to be a biting remark for a playful jest, and responded in kind.

“Try not to burn in the sun,” she scoffed. “Freak.”

This made James nervous. She couldn’t know, could she? There was no way. Unless she was a vampire herself, there was no way she could have possibly figured out that he was one, too, and he would have known if she was. Vampires carry a certain scent about them, like rotting flowers, undetectable to humans, but sickening to other vampires. He would have known if she was like him. He wrote her words off as stupid and ignorant and left the shop. It was also the first time he’d had any connection to vampires made to him based on appearance alone, he thought. Typically people didn’t realize anything was off about him until it was far too late, if they realized at all. He was certain she didn’t know—how could she, especially given her comment about the sun, which is a myth—but all the same, it rubbed him the wrong way. Humans who felt comfortable enough with the topic of vampires to crack jokes were no better than the vampires themselves.

He had ignored her the rest of the time she spent in Windrow, and didn’t quite feel comfortable again until she went back to college. Now he was going to have to deal with her again, but tenfold this time, as instead of spending a week in town, she would be staying for three months. He wasn’t convinced he would survive, much less that she would, if their dynamic turned out to be anything like it was over spring. He forced himself to make an internal promise that he wouldn’t harm her. He needed this job; anything that could jeopardize it was out of the question. Murdering his employer’s daughter seemed to fit into that category.

It didn’t turn out as badly as he had expected. Roxán seemed to have learned her lesson, and left him alone this time around. They were forced to interact while they worked, but she no longer tried to make idle conversation, and James caught her staring much less. She seemed to have decided that they were better off with a cordial, business-only relationship than with allowing the tension to continue building the way it had been.

James gained a sliver of respect for her because of this. He might not have been able to stand her personally, but he appreciated her efforts to keep the peace. He even felt a little bit bad—in hindsight, her interest was probably more akin to innocent curiosity than the prying he had interpreted it as.

Less pleased with the arrangement was Ms. Betancourt. She had been under the impression that they got on rather well over spring break, and was put off by their cold and callous indifference. They didn’t fight or bicker the way they had in the spring, but they hardly looked at each other either. The only reason she never said anything was because they got all their work done just fine; she couldn’t force them to like each other, after all. She figured it was better to live and let live. All the same, she would rather they got along better.

James was sweeping oats off the floor in the back room one weekend when he heard the shop door open. It was just him and Ms. Betancourt working that day, and he hadn’t heard from his employer in some time, so he assumed that she was upstairs and he would have to subject himself to customer service—so he was quite shocked when the door to the back room was thrust open and Roxán sidled past him. He shifted from shocked to irritated as a young man he’d never seen before followed after her, looking around with an air of uncertainty and wonder that told James he’d never been in this part of the shop before.

“What are either of you doing here?” James asked Roxán, his tone snide. He leaned his broom against a stack of crates and crossed his arms. Roxán was digging in her mother’s personal refrigerator, which she often used to store her own food that wasn’t intended to be sold. “You’re not working today. You were supposed to be hanging out with a friend.” He shot a sour glance at the young man standing awkwardly by Roxán.

Roxán didn’t even bother to look at James, still rummaging through various ancient jars looking for something James was sure should not have been so difficult to find.

“That’s Tim,” she said, “and we are hanging out. I put our lunch for today in here but I literally can’t find it.”

“Why couldn’t you have put it in the fridge in your own home?” asked James. He bit the inside of his cheek and debated moving out into the shop so he wouldn’t have to deal with her.

Roxán finally shut the fridge door, still empty handed, and looked James in his eyes.

“Broken,” was all she said, before walking out of the room and out into the shop. Momentarily, James heard her footsteps thumping up the stairs, and very faintly her voice calling, “MAMÁ!”

James raised an eyebrow at Tim, who stared back in a way that made James feel he was afraid to be left in a room alone with him, which James found amusing. He heard more muffled speech from upstairs, followed by two sets of thumping footsteps, and Ms. Betancourt entered the storeroom followed closely by her daughter. She opened the fridge door, took a brown paper bag out from one of the door shelves, and handed it to Roxán with an I-told-you-so expression. James heard Roxán mumble that she could swear she’d looked there, and she led Tim out of the shop in a hurry.

Ms. Betancourt pursed her lips. “She’s never exactly acted her age,” she muttered, “but it really stands out now that she’s moved away.”

James shrugged and picked the broom back up off the crates.

The next few weeks were scattered with similar encounters between James, Roxán, and whichever childhood friends she was visiting at any given moment. It struck James that it was a relatively small rotation, which hardly surprised him initially, but he wondered if maybe that was unfair of him. She got under his skin, she was weird, but she was never outright unpleasant or cruel, and she always seemed to have a good time with the friends she did have. None of this stopped him from resenting her and her friends hanging around the shop when they had nothing better to do, which confused him endlessly. As much as he loved the quiet little grocery store full of fresh fruits and stale, old-fashioned sweets, it was just that—a quiet little store. He couldn’t imagine why young adults like Roxán and her friends would choose to spend their summer days hanging around what James could only assume was the most boring place in town, and he was sure they weren’t out partying at night, because there were times when James clocked out long before Roxán or her friends showed any signs of leaving. He figured Ms. Betancourt would take them home, but she would frequently stay well into the night on days when she didn’t leave at close.

Out of all Roxán’s friends, only one really stuck out in James’ memory. Of course, there was Tim, but he had made about the same impression as a lump of clay, and although James saw him quite often, he failed to leave a mark as substantial as that of a tall young man James saw only once, and briefly. Roxán had run into the shop, leaving her friend to wait for her outside, and James couldn’t help but steal a few quick glances. He was in the habit of sizing up just about everyone he met, but this boy in particular intrigued him. Unlike Roxán’s other friends, namely Tim, who seemed decidedly ordinary people, this guy looked like he and Roxán would be friends. He wasn’t quite as far down the spectrum as she was, but he had certain alternative sensibilities that made him stand out in the generally cohesive, conservative small town of Windrow. As quickly as he came, he was gone, and James didn’t see him again for some time.