Travis looked into my mouth, examining what I realized were fangs from the way one of them poked at my finger.

“Those are some big boys,” Travis told me. “It’s like you have two sets of fangs in there. I don’t really recognize the shape of these ones here.”

Travis poked a small wooden stick at one fang, and I moved my head as my jaw throbbed.

“Are they supposed to be this sensitive?” I managed to ask.

“I don’t really know, actually,” Travis confessed. “I’ll ask Dr. Sheng to keep his schedule open for you.”

They reached for the juice box and helped me place the straw inside. “Drink for now. You seemed awfully hungry when we met.”

My hand continued to shake as I looked down at the juice box again. The thought of me, a vegan, drinking blood that once came from a living thing, almost made me laugh. But this really wasn’t a laughing matter. For me, really.

I tried to get the straw in my mouth, but my fangs kept scraping against my lips. I just took the straw out and started unfolding the top of the box—which was surprisingly easier than juice boxes I used to try to “unbox” when I was younger..

I was scared of what would happen once I drank this, if I would still be “hungry” for more. But I tried to push my fears to the side mentally and just chugged the bitter liquid in one go.

I felt this revitalizing feeling that I’ve never felt before, like a surge of life that just shot throughout my whole being. This sensation felt like a drug and had kick-started whatever senses I haven’t felt or used since I woke up.

I felt like I was truly brought back to life.

I stared down at the emptied juice box in my hand, which had stopped shaking at some point. Travis took the box and straw from my hands and tossed them.

“You feel any better?” Travis asked me as they sat beside me on their bed.

“If that’s what this feeling is, then yeah,” I confessed. “I feel like I just drank like five cups of coffee. Is this normal?”

“From what Monroe and I have seen, yeah.”

I had not realized how close Travis was sitting next to me, and it made me uncomfortable. Not because of them, but because every time I looked at them, I thought about when I almost attacked them at the hospital. They weren’t scared of getting close to me while this hunger grew. And now that I think about it, they must have seen the future of when we would have met, since they were psychic. Or maybe because they had helped so many vampires over the summer that they weren’t scared of being anywhere near them.

But I was scared of what would happen if they got too close to me.

“Can… Can I ask you something?” I asked Travis. “Well, a few things, maybe?”

Travis nodded. “You’re more than welcome to ask anything you want. I’ve been wondering when you were going to.”

I began to think about all the questions that popped up in my head a few seconds before, but then I wasn’t sure which one to ask first.

So I decided to ask them all in a completely random order. “How are you not scared of being near me? What was that thing you did to me back at the hospital? Do you usually let vampires stay at your home? What’s gonna happen when my family wants to see me at the hospital? Do they even know what happened to me? Do they know—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Travis said, making me lose my train of thought. “One at a time please! I know things are very confusing, and probably overwhelming, for you right now. But I can only answer so many at a time.”

I felt a little embarrassed for my outburst. “Sorry,” I told them.

They smiled at me. “Don’t worry about it, I totally get it. We can start with the easier questions and work our way to the harder ones, if you want.”

“I’d like that a lot.” At least I was finally getting some questions answered.

I adjusted my sitting position to face Travis, and they did the same. I just sat there, trying to sort out which questions were more important to ask first. “So,” I began, still struggling to decide. “About our… meeting, at the hospital.”

I could still remember it as clear as day, even though it had only happened I don’t know how many hours—or minutes—ago.

Travis took a quick breath. “You asked why I wasn’t scared of you, because of what happened,” they said. “Well, as a seer, I am capable of foreseeing the future. But as you know, the future is full of endless possibilities, so I am able to foresee such possibilities.”

That makes sense, I thought to myself. They knew that I would try to do something to them.

“However,” Travis spoke up, as if to interrupt the thought I was having, “the visions I get don’t come in any regular order. Some visions that I get tend to be of future events that would occur minutes or hours ahead of time. I have gotten visions of events that wouldn’t happen until days, weeks, months later. Sometimes years later.”

That sounds really troubling. I couldn’t begin to comprehend the amount of stress that would come out of that.

“I would have no idea of when these events will occur,” Travis continued. “I couldn't focus on parts of the visions to help give myself an idea of how late in the future the events would take place. As I got older, the more frequent the visions came, and the farther the events depicted were. It gave me so much anxiety, because I was overthinking everything, and I was second-guessing all actions I would have taken that would trigger the reality of those visions. I lived in fear of the uncertainty of my powers for years.

“It wasn’t until Monroe and I moved out of my family’s home and ended up here that I was able to get a good grasp on some certainty. When we started helping out the vampires in the summer I was able to use my visions to see if they would be hostile or not. They all ended up being very nice, although on high alerts, which was a normal thing to expect."

I was taking everything they were saying surprisingly well, as if I had accepted that this was the reality I would be living in.

“So, when we met at the hospital,” I began, “did you get any visions that showed us meeting in a different way?”

Travis seemed surprised by my question. “Yes, actually,” they told me. “I had quite a few. But to my surprise, none of them showed what went down when we finally met.”

That explains why they had that expression on their face when we met, I thought.

“But, that’s enough about me!” Travis told me. “Ask me questions about, well, anything besides me!”

I was shocked with how quickly Travis just changed the subject. I hadn’t even thought of the next question I wanted to ask.

So I decided to ask about the one thing I didn’t want to think about: My family.

“Does… does my family know what happened to me?”