POTATO MOON, Journal Entry Number 68: “Dear Diary, I Hate Myself today in a way that Makes Me Appealing,” by Noel Thingvall

As he drove up to the school, Edwood’s attention, which was normally drifting about with a steady level of disinterest except when it caught something reflecting his own image back into his piercing eyes with that striking thing he does with his brow and the firmly set lips and … Anyway, his attention was drawn to a swam of crashed vehicles near one end of the parking lot where all of the occupants were fighting one another to make their way to the head of a crowd. This certainly was odd behavior for the teenagers who were supposed to be looking at nothing but him, so Edwood quietly tucked his vehicle off to the side, just enough so its foreign make and expensive model would drive jealousy into everyone still entering the lot, and used his powers of exaggerated leaping to spring from tree to tree until he was able to peer over the crowd to the center of their attention.
 
His eyes, straining against the half-opened pensive appearance they’d become accustomed to, actually widened. They widened so much, in fact, that beads of blood drew from the cracks forming in skin that had met the limit of its developed stretching abilities. He never noticed because all he saw at that point was Bella. She had become … different.
 
Where once was was a pale, clumsy girl who still managed to draw the eye of every boy in school simply because she was the author’s own perfected image of herself, now stood a tanned, blond goddess with a light summer dress and a pair of gazongas that gave a word like gazongas genuine meaning, who was not only catching every eye in school, but grabbing their fullest attention in a way that couldn’t be ignored, just like a dog sinking its teeth into a man’s scrotum and refusing to let go.
 
And what was it that she did to draw such attention? In her mind, it was the posters she was tagging up asking for people to donate kidneys to gerbils on dialysis, a cause just too important to ignore. In reality, it was merely her existence that drove them mad, merely the presence of her newfound, and mystically granted, popularity. She could have asked them to do anything, and they would have fought for the opportunity to be the first to do it. Thankfully most teens these days are illiterate, or they would have actually read the posters tucked under her arm and the situation would have gotten very grisly, indeed.
 
As he looked down on the scene, taking everything in through the perfection that was his field of vision, Edwood once again narrowed his eyes, his sparklepire powers instantaneously healing the torn edges. Something very different was going on in his self-reflective mind, something that wasn’t coursing through the semi-hollow noggins of the thrall beneath, something that wasn’t an increasingly irrelevant spawn of his loins.
 
That something was jealousy.
 
Since the day he became a sparklepire, Edwood prided himself on his ability to creates gasps of astonishment in others when they first gazed on his model features, even as he casually dismissed them in a way that made him even more attractive. Throughout the years, he had drawn in many, but only for the thrill of the lure, never to keep as a prize. Until Bela, that is. Through her, he found the perfect mate. Why was she the one? Hëll if he knew, but if some woman in Arizona says it must be so, then it must be so.
 
Through the course of their relationship, he simply shifted the tease, encouraging her desire to become one of his kind, but always refusing to follow through in the end even though that meant their love would never be eternal, that he would always stay young and beautiful while she got all veiny and droopy and gave off funny odors before eventually going bottom up in a grave. She never knew that this was his intention, that in the immortal life of vampires, she was just a slightly more than casual fling. But now she had to go and get popular, far moreso than she already was, and thus ruin the plans he had so perfectly set in motion. Now that she could get anything she wanted, some form of immortality was just around the corner, leaving Edwood bound to her for a genuine eternity. That must never happen.
 
Scanning the crowd, he saw Jakob. Poor, pathetic, hopelessly in love Jakob, who never had enough of a spine to gain the respect of his friends or the love of Option 1: Bela, or Option 2: Woeisme. Was there some way, some small act Edwood could perform that would allow this were-rotater to grow some vertebrae and become an emotional threat, thus hopefully bringing things back to some semblance of what they were?
 
A light bulb suddenly appeared over Edwood’s head, popping and raining down bits of glass and filament on his jacket, indistinguishable from the sequins and natural sparkle. With the powers of his sparklepire kind, he resumed prancing gracefully through the tree tops until arriving once again at Sullen Manor. Standing at his computer (sitting on such occasions was for the non-sparkle kind), he began working back through the posts of a certain blog he frequented, that of a mighty writer of stuff, and …
 
There it was! In the 64th chapter of a jam novel that had crossed more than enough boundaries for a breaking of the fourth wall to be acceptable, he saw listed among the possessions of Vlad the Impeeler, Scourge of Potatokind and Lord Vampire, a certain item he knew he must retrieve to give Jakob the fighting chance the were-[insert] needed to be crushed once again by Edwood’s perfection.
 
Dashing through the window without opening it, thus adding yet more splinters of glass to his sequined jacket, Edwood set out to obtain The Corn Chip of Courage.