Because offreakingbats.
That initial interest gave rise to a whole series of invasive posts and articles about me and my life. I don’t know what it was, but for a while there, local news and the internet gossip machine wereobsessedwith me. Every girl I hooked up with, every night I drank a bit too much, every mistake I made ended up on some gossip site somewhere. They didn’t even use my name.
Viral Bat Guy scores mystery brunette on a messy night out.
Viral Bat Guy’s secret threesome.
The night ends with a literal bang for Viral Bat Guy.
Most of it wasn’t even true.
Ok, fine, a lot of it was true. I haven’t always made the best choices– hell, I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff. My dad died when I was a teenager, and less than ten years later my mum was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. I was barely an adult myself when I suddenly found myself having to deal with a lot of very grown-up things: wills, family finances, advance care directives, custody of my little sister.
On the back of that, I made a very big choice, and it’s haunted me ever since. One night I managed to talk a very reluctant Elias into turning me. It was, I grant you, the stupidest idea of myentire life, but my intentions were honourable enough. I thought that I would somehow be able to save my mum.
Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.
The regret, when it hit, was quick and brutal– a brick to the face that made me spiral, and fast. I’d been shouldering grief around for years, but here was more added to the pile. The grief of knowing I would watch all the people I loved die while I remained, static. Grief for the life I once thought I’d have. For a wife I thought I’d grow old with. For our children and our grandchildren. And with all of that weight on my newly immortal shoulders, I did what any young, traumatised fledgling vampire would do.
I went off the fucking rails.
I drank, I fought, and I don’t want to sound like an arsehole, but I was a young man with certainurges, so when beautiful women made a pass at me, I didn’t mind in the slightest.
But then one day I woke up and realised that I’d have to live with the choices I was making for all eternity, and since then I’ve made a real effort to clean up my act.
And what have I been rewarded with? Internet infamy as Viral Bat Guy.
That’s karma at its finest, right there.
‘Anyway,’ Sammi says, pulling me from my thoughts, ‘I got a message which I thought was quite interesting.’
She lingers on the last word, which makes me immediately suspicious, but I’m open to anything. Sammi rarely steers me off course.
‘I thought it probably wouldn’t hurt your image to do a little bit of PR,’ she continues, dark brown eyes trained on me, ‘and this sounds like the perfect thing.’
‘PR?’
She shrugs, raising one eyebrow. ‘Volunteering.’
‘Ok.’
She laughs at my hesitancy, and then launches into an explanation, about how the local wildlife sanctuary is owned by some relative of someone we vaguely know– I don’t retain all the details– and how they’re currently caring for a creature which is significant in some way and has drawn a lot of interest from different media outlets.
‘So I thought,’ Sammi says, punctuating her words with a sip of her coffee, ‘that if you pop down today and make some small talk and clean a few cages out or something, it’s going to look like you’re taking accountability for your actions.’
‘For the actions that never happened?’
She snorts a soft little laugh. ‘Bram, you know as well as I do that in this day and age it doesn’t matter what the truth is, it only matters what people believe. You don’t want to be Viral Bat Guy forever, do you?’
I very much do not. I’d clean out a hundred cages if it’d make that whole mess go away again.
She sips her coffee but makes no move to stand, and I know that means we’re not done here. I’ve known Sammi since we were kids and I can read her like a book.
‘There’s something else.’
She nods. ‘You’re not going to like it.’
My chuckle sounds more forced than I’d like. ‘Hit me.’