My Blood Approves (9 page)

“
It’s really not that bad,”
he repeated, but he let me take his arm.

The hoodie was soaked with blood that
covered his hand, so I doubted his claims. Very carefully, I pulled
up the sleeve of his shirt and gasped.

There were three little teeth holes in arms.
That was all. They were slightly red and raised, but they were
smaller than a pencil. On top of that, they weren’t even
bleeding.

Blood covered his arm, but the trails seemed
to connect just outside of where the teeth marks were. He probably
didn’t even need a Band-Aid.

“
Oh my god,” I whispered,
gaping at his lack of injury.

“
I told you it wasn’t bad.”
Jack yanked his arm back from me and pulled down his
sleeve.

“
How?” I stared up at him.
“There’s all that blood…”

“
I bleed easy. I’m a
hemophiliac,” Jack replied, and for some reason, that answer made
him smirk.

“
No, it’s not possible,” I
shook my head. “I heard the dog crunching into your bone. There’s
no way that wounds that shallow would hit bone.”

“
It all happened so fast.
You can’t be sure of what you heard,” he attempted to explain it
all away.

“
I know what I heard!” I
said it with more conviction than I actually had. “You should have
massive bite marks and maybe even a broken arm. And how did you
even get that dog down?”

“
You saw me do that.” He
looked at me skeptically, but there was something brewing in his
eyes that I couldn’t read.

“
That dog was huge and
crazy!” I remembered the way that Jack had stopped it with one hand
before he threw it the ground. It easily weighed over a hundred
pounds, and it had clamped onto his arm. “It’s not even humanly
possible for you to be able to stop a dog like that, not without a
massive fight, and you have one barely-there bite mark! If he could
be taken down that easily, then…”

“
What exactly are you
saying?” Jack narrowed his eyes at me, but there was a brightness
to them. He was hoping I would figure it out.

“
You were bit, but there’s
hardly a wound, and-and you have like super human strength and…
everything in the whole world wants to have sex with you and… you
don’t have a temperature!” I spouted.

Biting my lip, I didn’t look at him. I tried
to figure it all out, but none of it made sense. I could feel him
looking at me, but I just couldn’t put the puzzle together.

“
So?” Jack asked
encouragingly.

“
So…” I threw my arms up in
the air, feeling completely exasperated. “I don’t know! You’re a
werewolf!” Jack scoffed and looked disappointed.

“
There’s no such thing as
werewolves,” he rolled his eyes and opened the car door.

“
Well, what else is there?”
I whined, but he shut the door instead of answering me. I ran
around to the other side of the car and jumped in. “What’s going
on, Jack?”

“
I bleed a lot, you’re
confused cause you got caught up in the emotion, my adrenaline gave
me the power to take down the dog, and I am just stunningly
attractive,” he explained, but his tone was teasing, especially on
the part about him being attractive. “Oh, and I do to have a
temperature. Everything has a temperature.”

“
Okay, yeah, but you don’t
have a normal human temperature.”

“
Are you like a walking
thermometer?” Jack started the car and looked over at
me.

“
Where are we going?” I
asked, ignoring his question.

“
I’m taking you home,” he
said, then added, “Just for the night. I’ll see you tomorrow. But
you’ve had a long enough night, and you have school in the
morning.”

“
You still need to go to
the hospital,” I pointed out. “The bite broke the skin. You need a
rabies shot.”

“
I do not.” He started to
pull out of the parking lot and turned on the stereo, but kept it
low so we could talk.

“
Look, I know the wounds
aren’t very big, but if any of his saliva mixes with your blood,
you can get rabies,” I said. “I read this book by Chuck Palahniuk
all about rabies, so I’m almost nearly an expert. It’s even
sexually transmitted.”

“
Well, luckily for you-”
(at that point he stopped to wink at me, but I just rolled my eyes)
“-I do not have rabies.”

“
You don’t know that,” I
said. “It wouldn’t hurt you just to get a stupid shot.”

“
No, Alice, I don’t need a
shot.” He looked at me, completely serious, and then it finally
dawned on me.

“
You can’t get rabies.” I
sighed and leaned my head back against the seat. “That really blows
my whole werewolf theory.”

“
I already told you they
aren’t real.”

“
So is it just rabies or is
it any communicable disease?” I asked it even though I wasn’t sure
he would answer. “Oh my god. It’s any disease, isn’t it? Any form
of illness?”

“
You’ve had a very long
night,” he said quietly. “Maybe we should drop it for
tonight.”

“
But-” I started to protest
but I couldn’t think of a single argument for it. All of this was
getting maddening, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t tell me
what was going on. So all I could do was get more and more
frustrated and perplexed. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
Like… you got injured
tonight for me, and I just want to know that you’re okay.” That
might be the only information I’d get, and it had to be enough for
me to settle with that.

“
Yeah, I’m fine,” Jack
smiled at me. We had stopped in front of my building, but I was
reluctant to get out.

“
Ugh, this is so unfair,” I
groaned, opening the car door to get out.

“
You know what you’re
problem might be?” Jack asked, giving me an odd look. “You worry
too much.”

“
Yeah. That’s my problem,”
I grumbled getting out of the car.

Jack was still laughing when he pulled away,
and I stood on the curb for a minute, trying to put everything into
perspective. Sure, he had killed a rabid dog and then magically
healed from the attack, but at least he saved my life. Again.

There isn’t a single sound in the world
that’s worse than an alarm going off. After Jack had dropped me off
last night, it had been all but impossible to fall asleep. Between
lingering adrenaline from the near-death experience, and Jack’s
increasingly cryptic responses and bizarre behavior, I had too much
on my mind.

Once the warm water of the morning shower
splashed my face, it all seemed even more ridiculous. I lived in
Minneapolis, not Gotham City, or whatever other bogus city where
supernatural forces at work.

Here, in the real world, there were no super
powers or werewolves or unicorns. Everything in life had an
explanation, and Jack’s probably had more to do with cocaine or
mescaline than it did magic.

People addicted to speed were known to
exhibit superhuman strength, and combine that with some kind of
chemical imbalance that made him smell irresistible to women, and
there it was.

Problem solved. And he was just kind of a
jackass and didn’t want to let on that he had a drug problem.

I spent too much time in the shower, and I
almost missed the bus to school. Milo sat next to me, but he didn’t
seem to be in a talking mood, so I put in my ear buds and decided
to pass the time listening to Rogue Wave on my iPod. Resting my
forehead against the glass of the window, I watched my breath fog
it up.

Milo kept giving me the cold shoulder even
though I hadn’t done anything wrong, and this guy that I barely
knew but really liked had fought off a rabid dog last night. What
exactly had happened to my life over Spring Break?

School passed more slowly than it ever had
before. I slept all through my second hour, but I managed to sneak
my iPod into my other classes. I just stared out the window, at the
chilly rain falling down, and tried not to think about Jack. By the
end of fifth hour, I had completely exhausted myself not thinking
about him.

When I stopped at my locker between classes,
I managed to drop my History book on the ground. I bent down to
pick it up, and when I stood back up, Milo was standing right next
to me, scaring the crap out of me. He admired the clutter that
occupied my locker, including the obligatory collage mess of
magazine cut outs lining the inside of the door.

“
God, you scared me,” I
grumbled, shoving my History book into my book bag.

“
So are you gonna be at
home tonight or not?” He had one of his hands on my locker door,
and he swung it back and forth, just enough to make it
squeak.

“
Of course I’m gonna be
there. I live there.” I continued fiddling around with something in
my bag, but mostly I was trying to look busy.

“
I meant, are you gonna
hang out with Jack?” His tone was icy, and I didn’t understand what
he found so offensive about me being with Jack. Even if he was
having some kind of jealousy, shouldn’t he be trying to cover it up
better?

“
Yeah, probably,” I
shrugged.

We hadn’t actually talked yet, but Jack had
said that he would see me today, and I didn’t have any reason to
doubt him. Well, except for the fact that he was hiding something
major.

“
So are you guys like
dating or what?” Milo asked, dripping with angry
sarcasm.

“
No. It’s not like that.” I
slung my bag over my shoulder, and he just narrowed his eyes at
me.

Suddenly, it pissed me off that I had to
explain myself to him. We weren’t dating, but it shouldn’t matter
to him anyway. It wasn’t my fault that Jack’s abnormal
attractiveness had made his sexual orientation even more confusing.
If he had told me he was having issues with it, I wouldn’t have
brought Jack around.

“
Whatever,” Milo
muttered.

“
What exactly are you
accusing me of?” I slammed my locker door shut. He let his hands
fall to the sides, looking startled. “Even if I am dating Jack, so
what? I can do that. There’s nothing wrong with being friends with
him or dating him or whatever it is I decide to do with him. He’s a
nice guy and it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.”

“
Whatever you say,” Milo
said, but he wasn’t as confident or angry.

“
Milo, this is stupid.” I
readjusted the strap over my shoulder and looked at him softly. “I
get it, okay? I saw the way that you looked at Jack.”

“
I don’t know what you’re
talking about.” He flushed and averted his eyes, shifting
uncomfortably.

Outing him in the middle of the hall at
school probably wasn’t the best idea, but I just couldn’t take his
indifference to me anymore. He normally told me everything, and it
looked like he wasn’t going to talk to me about this unless I got
the ball rolling.

“
It’s okay.” I lowered my
voice so other people wouldn’t overhear. “If you’re gay. It’s okay.
I understand.”

“
You don’t understand
anything!” Milo shouted.

When he looked up at me, tears filled his
eyes, and I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. I couldn’t
force him to come to terms with anything, and if he wasn’t ready to
talk about it with me, I should’ve respected that.

“
Milo-” I started to say
something, but I didn’t really have anything to follow it
up.

He didn’t wait around for it anyway. He just
turned and stormed off down the hall, leaving me alone to think
about what an ass I was.

When I got on the bus after school, he made
sure to sit on the opposite side. On the way to our house from the
bus stop, he jogged on ahead of me. I tried to hurry and catch up,
but by the time I made it inside, he’d already slammed the door to
his bedroom.

He must’ve been really upset if he risked
the wrath of our mother just to show me how angry he was. I sighed
and flopped on the couch, wondering how he had managed to put up
with me for so long.

I had made it through two
full episodes of
Judge Judy
while lying sprawled out on the couch without any
word from Jack or Milo, and I was starting to think that maybe the
whole world had ostracized me. The only time that Jane had talked
to me all day was during lunch, and then it was just a list of how
much she drank and who she had sex with over the break.

I just wanted to curl up on the couch and
completely give up on life, but then I heard the familiar ring of
“Time Warp” and I quickly snatched up my phone.

Are you done with school
yet?
Jack text messaged, making me wonder
how long it had been since he went to school.

Yeah. I’ve been done for
like two hours. Why?
I replied.

Good. Ready to hang
out
? He hadn’t really answered my
question, but hey, what’s new?

Yeah. Sure. What did you
have in mind?
I messaged him.

I’ll pick you up in 15.

And that was that. My clothes from school
were fine (I’d gone with jeans, a long shirt, and a cute little
black vest), but most of my makeup had worn off, so I rushed to the
bathroom to reapply and run a brush through my hair.

I started heading towards the front door,
but decided against it. Exhaling nervously, I knocked on Milo’s
door.