Future Imperfect
Chapter 8 Not like her


Shanny Summers-Green sat in her bedroom listening to the quiet. David, her husband, was at work, the dog was snoring out on the porch and even the cat was curled up on the top of a bookcase, safe in the knowledge that the children were no longer around.

With the twins gone, the house echoed with emptiness. She missed them so much, but there was still that trickle of relief that she wouldn’t go downstairs and find the dog waltzing round the kitchen with bright purple fur, or the cat actually flying around the yard, chasing the birds through the air and sometimes catching them!

She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her neat, tidy self stared back at her; pale, tense, eyes permanently worried.

The light on the Answering Machine was still flashing. She knew it was her mother, ringing again, wanting to talk to her about the past, a past Shanny had buried so deeply that she didn’t know if she could ever bear to dig it up and look at it again….

…the club was hot and noisy, the music thumping hard and fast with a driving base note that drilled into your brain and made your eyes hurt. Shanny was with her friend Paget. She’d met her at another party and loathed and liked her in equal parts.

She knew Paget thought she was seventeen, nearly eighteen. Paget was eighteen already, knew her way round all the clubs in L.A., knew boys – no not just boys, but men – lots of them.

Shanny knew she was dangerous – oh, not in a demony, vampirey way. Huh, she reckoned Paget would faint if she met a vampire. But dangerous in a different way – a way that meant cigarettes and drink, drugs and sex. That meant breaking the rules, being free and grown up, being your own person, cutting the ties that bound you to parents who hadn’t wanted you, still didn’t want you, were always happier when they were together without you and hadn’t bothered to phone on this your fifteenth birthday….

Paget found them a place to stand at the bar and ordered two drinks. Shanny thought there was probably a lot of vodka in hers, but that was OK. Vodka only made you drunk when you went outside in the colder air, everyone knew that.

“Why d’you wear that cross all the time?” Paget asked curiously, leaning forward to finger the carved wood at Shanny’s neck.

“What? Oh, this old thing. It’s…oh, everyone’s wearing them this year,” Shanny said airily, gulping down half her drink in one go, and wondering what Paget would say if she knew her father had tied this round her neck when she was six and told her she must never, ever take it off and what might happen to her if she did.

Paget lost interest and stared round provocatively at the crowded club. “Check out those guys over there – they’re like – wow!”

Shanny turned and looked, then said hesitantly, “They seem quite old.”

“Yes, Shanny, that’s because they’re men, not boys!” Paget said, tossing back her long blonde hair and easing her top another inch lower down her bust. “Look – they’ve got champagne on their table! Bottles of it. I bet it‘s some sort of celebration, a birthday or promotion. Come on!”

“Wait!” Shanny grasped the older girl’s arm. “I mean – they look – well – drunk.”

Paget pulled away. “Scared?” she mocked. “I thought you were up for a good time. Or are you worried what your Mommy and Daddy will say?”

“I’m not scared of anything! And I couldn’t care less what my parents think!”

She followed Paget across the crowded floor and was soon part of the joking, drinking, laughing gang of guys who were all out for a good time. She found herself sitting next to one of them, held closely against his thin, muscular body. He looked younger than the others, but Shanny reckoned he was blessed with the boyish looks that would stay forever young even when he was an old man.

“You’re very sweet,” he muttered, kissing her ear.

Shanny wriggled but couldn’t get away. But then wondered why she should want to. He was cute, or as cute as a guy who would never see thirty again could be, of course. She took a long swig from a glass. She was feeling a bit dizzy; perhaps she’d had too much vodka, but what the hell! No one would ever know. No one cared what she did, so why shouldn’t she do exactly what she wanted to do.

The next few hours were just a blur – somehow she and Paget had been in a car with two guys, her nice one was kissing her a lot. They were in a photo booth at some point and she was sitting on his lap and they were laughing, helplessly. And then they were in the car, on the back seat and she was falling away, then pain and –

…

Shanny shuddered and focused again on the cool greens and greys of her bedroom. He’d been a nice guy. He’d wanted to see her again, but of course, he thought she was eighteen. He’d have run a mile if he’d known she was only just fifteen.

And then in the weeks that followed, things had gone from bad to worse. She’d felt hot and irritated, knowing that she was no longer a virgin, knowing she’d crossed a line in life too early, bitterly unhappy but at the same time defiant. She’d slept with David, her godmother Willow’s cousin, one afternoon when they were alone in the house. Carried away by the sexual tension that had suddenly engulfed them.

A week later, Shanny had realised that all her helter-skelter emotions were hormone driven. She was pregnant.

She sighed and reached into the bottom drawer of her dressing-table. From the very back, under a pile of running socks, she pulled out a small envelope. Folded tight inside were a few recipes, cut from magazines, and tucked between them was a strip of photos, the type you got from a cheap photo booth.

There she was, her hair loose and untidy, lipstick smeared, eyes blurred, obviously tipsy if not downright drunk, laughing madly with the man who she knew was the father of her children.

She sighed and gazed at his face, wondering where he was now. He’d be in his late thirties, probably married with kids of his own. And here she was, twenty-four, with two children she couldn’t control, and parents whom she didn’t know.

A Slayer and a vampire, the recipient of the Shanshu prophesy. The reason she was called Shanny. Oh, she knew all the stories; the fights with vampires, the apocalypses, the battle with the First. Mom dying instead of her sister, Dad dying to save everyone from the Hellmouth. Yes, she’d heard them from Willow, from Uncle Andrew, from her Aunt Dawn, from everyone over the years.

Buffy and Spike, their names always said together, as if they were one person, their exploits told over and over again. But to her they’d just been Mom and Dad, those miraculous people who flashed in and out of her life, trailing excitement behind them like stardust.

She’d loved them so much, until she realised that no matter what they said, they couldn’t really love her. How could they? She was just ordinary, boring Shanny, not a Slayer, or Chosen, or a witch or even a demon. Shanny smiled sadly: she’d always thought she’d have been far more interesting to them if she had been an evil demon!

She slid her fingers deeper into the envelope and pulled out a small, creased sheet of paper. It was falling apart; it had been read so many times. She opened it up carefully, looking at the words she knew by heart.

Dear grandchild,

I wish I could call you by name, but you are just a distant hope at present. I’ve no idea if you are a boy or a girl! When you read this, if you ever exist, I will have been dead for a long time.
What can I say to you? That I would have given much to have known you, to have shared in your life, to have loved you. I cannot give you presents, or trips to the zoo. I can’t bake cookies for you or take you skating. But all I can send you down the years is a little advice.
Whatever happens, you will grow up in a strange world. You will meet danger and difficulties that I can only imagine. You will be the Slayer’s child, one she doesn’t think she will ever have. Perhaps she won’t.
But if you have, by some miracle, arrived in this world and are finding life hard and impossible to understand, then believe just one thing – you have the most remarkable woman for a mother. Trust her completely. She will never let you down.
All my love to you,
your grandmother, Joyce Summers

Shanny folded the paper and put it, with the strip of photos, back into her drawer. She knew her Mom had been surprised when she’d named
her girl twin Joyce. Pleased, delighted, but surprised. Buffy knew nothing of the letter. which had come to Shanny on her twelfth birthday, forwarded by Hank, her grandfather, a man she rarely saw.

Shanny stood up and smoothed down the creases in her skirt. She liked to look neat and tidy, just as she needed her home to be perfect, organised, ordinary. No piles of stakes on the table, no crossbows under the windows where the curtains were never opened to let in the sunlight.

Ok, she still wore the cross around her neck, as did both the twins. But there was no weapon chest in the living-room and no talk of vampires, demons or death except when old family friends arrived to visit from Cleveland or England.

Would her life have been different if her grandmother had lived? She made her way downstairs to start preparing David’s dinner. He’d be in from work soon and she knew he wanted them to ring the twins tonight, so that meant her having to talk to her Mom as well.

What had Granny Joyce called her? A remarkable woman. Trust her completely she’d said in her letter. Well, Shanny hadn’t, not until two weeks ago. She hadn’t wanted her or her father anywhere near the twins. She broken all ties, refused to let them speak, even on the phone. She’d seen her Mom’s face frozen with pain, seen the despair in her Dad’s eyes, but she hadn’t relented. Let them know that for once they couldn’t have everything they wanted. They hadn’t wanted her – okay – well, they certainly weren’t going to ruin the twins’ lives.

She began chopping onions for a stew, then dashed a hand across her face as the tears began to fall. Stupid onions! Making her cry! Oh yes, keeping her parents from the twins had really worked, hadn’t it? All her plans for bringing up two nice, normal kids who would never need to know about vampires or demons or magic – smashed to pieces as soon as Joyce was old enough to focus her eyes.

And now, despite all her promises to herself, her Mom and Dad had the twins. Shanny chopped the onions harder, the knife flashing. They had exactly what they’d always wanted – children who were special, different, magical. Not like their daughter, not like her at all.

To be continued