I began writing NAME, my vampire novel, on July 7, 2010 and completed the first draft on August 7, 2010. It is 20 chapters and 125 pages. I wrote NAME to pay my rent.

—Joseph Young

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He stood for just a moment, contemplating the thing that was coming. He didn’t have to do it, didn’t have to come to the girl in the red bikini and call to her. He didn’t have to listen to the voice inside her head, sounding so much like the slosh of the sea, like the spitting of blood in her throat, the inside voice that would tell him her name.

As he approached, her pink toes curled into the wet sand, he trained his mind to hers, narrowing his attention to dive below the surface of her dampened hair, into the twirled sea of her thought. He slipped into her mind like a man dropping into a nighttime wave, soundless and effortless, looking for a pearl tumbled in dark water. He swam there for only a moment, grasping the dark and shining word, Jennifer, before coming to the surface with it: Jennifer.

As he came near her, her arms settled loosely across her bikini top, he called that name. “Jennifer,” he said, waving. “Hello.”

The girl, her red bikini flashing in the dark, her hair tumbled in a curl of waves above her eyes, turned toward him. Her own name in the throat of a strange boy didn’t startle her. She opened, arms falling away from her chest, the now unprotected skin of her belly, her throat.

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(Union Street Press, 2010)