Giovanni Avogardo

Giovanni is on the dance floor, 19 years old, something sparkling and cheap pretending to be champagne sloshing over his hand and a bad-to-decent fake ID burning a hole in his pocket. The bouncer squinted at it but looked at Giovanni’s broad shoulders and expectant smile and waved him in with a perfunctory “Don’t do anything stupid.” It’s the dawn of a new millennium, after all: nobody wants to deny an only somewhat underage kid the right to party, and there’s just something about the way Giovanni talks that makes you want to treat him right.

And party Giovanni does. A dance remix of Genie in a Bottle sounds through the room — it’s that kind of club — and the bass beat works its way from the soles of his Doc Martens all the way up his spine where it makes his very bone marrow reverberate and pound. The strobing lights illuminate the room in pulsing slices: the mass of writhing bodies on the floor, throwing their arms in the air at the behest of the DJ; a gaggle of dweebs in those New Year’s sunglasses where their eyes peek through two of the holes in 2000 doing some sort of coordinated dance; the very, very pretty girl in front of Giovanni, dancing with him. He drains his glass of sugary wine and, in the transition between two songs, bids her to come with him through an elaborate series of gestures that intimate another drink, a smoke break, a place where they can ‘just talk’…

Giovanni never does learn her name. There’s not too much ‘just talking’ going on, in the end.

Giovanni and the girl have parted ways after a brief and, ah, fruitful meeting out in the alley behind the club; he is now on his way back inside, nodding what he feels is a manly nod at the bouncer. People have begun to count down — a little prematurely, perhaps; they’re going to lose wind before the minutes are up, Giovanni thinks, but nobody likes a hater, and so he doesn’t mention it. Not that he has anyone to mention it to, but he’s got his eyes on another girl. On his way to the bathrooms (he has reason to need to freshen up, as it were) he passes by the gaggle of dweebs who are beginning to look a little pale behind their sunglasses. The Y2K bug, somebody mentions in self-important tones, the world could end: a collective shudder takes hold of the group. Giovanni doesn’t think the world will end. He knows a thing or two about computers.

Giovanni blinks back into existence, twice, each movement of his eyelids sending a searing ache cascading through his head like ripples on water, twisting his meninges.

Did I black out…?

He searches his sore head for answers: how much did he drink? Could he have been slipped something? Last thing he recalls, after some rearranging of memories, is looking at himself in the mirror, tilting his face this way and that, fixing his hair and his lapels. Deciding (with the aid of, yes, no small amount of overpriced booze) that he’s a pretty damn handsome fella. That stunner with the platforms and the butterfly clips could do worse! He remembers thinking that, and quieting his inner voice when it whispered to him that she could also do better, and he remembers nodding at his image before turning to leave, but he doesn’t remember leaving. He did leave, though, he must have: he’s outside now. The night is balmy, a little smoggy, and there are sirens. The strobing lights of the club have been replaced with the strobing lights of emergency vehicles, streaking the gray world in red and blue.

Did... the world actually end?

His hands are covered in blood. It runs all the way up his forearms, drenching his shirtsleeves, so dark in the low light of the morning that it’s practically black. Thick and tacky and tarry, his clothes are so suffused with it they feel noticeably heavier, and his palms stick to his skin as he tries to wipe it off. It doesn’t wipe off. If anything it seems to multiply, clogging beneath his fingers with every touch.

He throws up copiously.

Everything stinks of iron and meat and he sinks down onto his haunches, breathing shallowly through his mouth. Is there any way this can be rectified? Giovanni is not dumb: he knows what this is. He knows what happened, but it shouldn’t have happened now, it should have happened five or six years ago, not in the brand new millennium. Puberty’s come and gone and he’s long since resigned himself to the idea that he’s just Kinfolk, not a Homid, not a Garou at all. Yeah, every now and again he’s cursed his bad luck that the fates couldn’t have turned him a little more special or interesting — and now, looking down at his bloody hands, he curses his own foolishness that he ever wished for such a thing.

Giovanni ditches his fake ID and begins to run.

It turns out that the emergency vehicles weren’t there to investigate the brutal death of a bouncer; they’d been dispatched to tend to an extravagant New Year’s fireworks show gone horrendously wrong. So many and varied were the casualties of the resultant tragic fire that the ‘club murder’ (an unfortunately confusing name for a crime committed with nothing but claws and teeth) is relegated to the back pages of the L.A. Times where it enjoys the attention of a beat reporter for a few days before it disappears entirely from the public consciousness. There’s no hard evidence of… well, anything, really. A man torn from limb to limb with his throat ripped out can’t talk.

As for Giovanni himself, he keeps quiet about it, of course. He rinses the bouncer’s coagulating blood down into the drain of his parents’ bathtub and scrubs at his skin until he’s pink and raw.

“You didn’t really spend all night in front of the computer?” his mother asks as she and Giovanni’s father come home from their own fancy shindig the next morning, smudged mascara beneath her eyes, dweeby sunglasses askew. His dad’s sunglasses are upside down. They look almost upsettingly happy.

Giovanni sighs and begins to shrug, but he knows that he can’t keep this a secret from his parents, no matter how taciturn he usually is about his comings and goings.

“Listen,” he begins.