Let Me In

Owen is twelve years old and quietly miserable, living with his distracted mother in a New Mexico apartment complex in the winter of 1983. He is bullied at school with a persistence and cruelty that the adults around him either do not see or have decided is not their problem. He retreats to the courtyard at night with a penknife and rehearses what he would like to say to them.

A girl named Abby moves into the next apartment with her father. She comes out only after dark, walks barefoot in the snow, and smells faintly wrong in a way Owen cannot name. She tells him they cannot be friends. They become friends anyway — a wall shared between their bedrooms, a private code tapped on the plaster, conversations in the courtyard at midnight. Abby's father leaves the complex every night to kill people, draining their blood with a system that is practiced if not always clean. When he is caught and disfigures his own face rather than be identified, Abby visits him in the hospital and drains him herself.

Owen learns what Abby is. She needs an invitation to enter. She has been twelve for a very long time. His bullies escalate to holding his head underwater in the school pool, counting to three minutes. He counts. At two minutes something changes above the surface. The water turns red. Limbs separate and fall.

He finds Abby the next morning preparing to travel — a large box and a plan to move on. He climbs in with her. They take the train out of town. He taps the wooden side of the box in their code. She taps back from inside.