Vampire Encounter

Rose had an interesting story to tell when she came home from school yesterday, having gone to school with a ring of teeth-mark beside her eye!

Apparently one of her little first-grade classmates (we'll call him Edward, after the vampire swain in Stephenie Meyer's runaway hit novel/movie Twilight) has been playing a forbidden game on the playground lately. He pretends to be a vampire -- and then he bites. Apparently the victims have been 4th and 5th graders, because the teacher from a 4/5 class came to talk to Rose's class about this situation, and a 4th-grader in her after-school program was showing off the bite-mark on his finger.

Rose had a much more impressive bite-mark to show! Status symbol, apparently. Who knew?

I'm guessing that the game was likely connected somehow to this whole teenage vampire mania that's going around. I actually did read Twilight myself recently. The book's premise runs something like this: a high-school lass, who considers herself something of an uncoordinated misfit, moves to dreary rainy Washington, where she falls into a tingling romance with a gorgeous vampire who is attending the same school (even though he's really 100 years old, he's got the form of a 17-year-old.) The best part of the book is the forbidden desire between the two, upon which they cannot act because, well, he'd kill her. The plot is otherwise a bit creaky. But I digress.

Last week I read an interesting bloggy take on how Twilight may appeal particularly to young women -- or even older women -- on the spectrum:

The Twilight series connects to those left out and different feelings, and it provides a fantasy of a romantic hero and an eternal connection. Just what lots of girls with Asperger's may be looking for.

As Rose finished her account of the vampire incident at school, I realized exactly which kid this Edward was. It was the little guy we ran into at the park earlier in the fall, who called Rose over to the tennis courts and really really really wanted to keep talking with her even though we were kind of on our way home at the time.

Good grief. Rose is (or at least was) the crush-object of a vampire wanna-be!

Well, at least she'll be used to the biting...

Meanwhile, Rose made a different connection between the two biting incidents.

Edward's was worse than Joy's, she said, even though hers was bigger.

Because Edward knew that his biting was wrong, and Joy didn't.