Vampire Crush (9 page)

“Yes,
dum dum dum
. Thank you.”

“No prob.”

“A few weeks after I moved in, I started taking walks. Sometimes I’d even go in the middle of the night, climbing out my window and down a tree like in the movies. One night I walked farther than I ever had before—anything to keep my mind off of reality—and I came across one of those rambling old country houses, complete with a wraparound front porch. For a second, just a second, I thought it was our old house. Or this house,” he says, squinting up at the ceiling. “Honestly, other than its size, it was completely different. But it was enough to make me try the front door.”

“Breaking and entering. Awesome,” I say, happy when it makes him smile. I prefer it to the sadness, times infinity.

“The inside wasn’t nearly as rundown as I expected,” he continues, “and there was an old couch against the wal . Newspapers were everywhere. Old, yel ow ones. And stacked up in the far corner was what I thought was a pile of sticks,” he says.

The emphasis on “I thought” makes me a little queasy. I almost don’t want to ask. Almost. “Let me guess. Not sticks?”

“No,” he says flatly. “Not sticks. Animal bones and fur, from a lot of animals. More than could crawl inside for warmth and then die in the exact same place. I turned and ran for the door, but then there was Violet, standing with her arms twined around the pole of the porch and smiling. You know, I think I actual y said hel o. She looked like a dol , especial y in one of those dresses.”

“Anyone can look like a dol when their waist has been cinched to the size of a milk ring,” I say peevishly and then feel foolish when James gives me a confused look.

“Anyway,” he says, “Violet grabbed my arm and said that she was glad to meet me.”

“And then she dragged you to the shed and bit you, right?”

I ask, thinking that I’m being helpful by fil ing in the blanks. A+++ for me. I wait for a sign of affirmation, a mouth twitch, a blink, a head wiggle, anything, but nothing comes.

“Right?” I repeat.

James suddenly finds his shoelaces fascinating.

“Are you kidding me? You mean it didn’t happen that night? You mean you went back?”

“After my parents died I couldn’t believe how normal everything was,” he says before I can ask him how he could have been so stupid. “Even though I was in a different place with different people, it stil felt the same. Susanna made dinner every night at the same time my mom did. She even used some of the same magazine recipes. Every morning I would wake up to the same dumb bird chirping, and every day I would put on the same clothes. And yet al it did was remind me how different everything was, how horrible. Nothing at Violet’s was the same. Not her, not the life, and not the rest of them. It felt like getting lost in a movie or book. It was an escape.”

“But didn’t their extreme strangeness set off any warning bel s?”

He gives me a withering stare. “Give me some credit. But vampires are supposed to be outside the realm of possibility, right? And besides, I didn’t see you jumping up and down in the cafeteria crying monster.”

“True. But I didn’t see their animal-bone col ection, either.”

“Fair enough,” he says. “The truth is I didn’t care. It felt like a dream, and I acted like it was a dream. One night Violet asked me if I wanted it al to last forever. I said yes. She bit me, she told me to bite her, and by that time I was so out of it that I did. When I woke up I thought, hey, at least nothing wil ever be the same.” His head thunks against the desk. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. You can’t kick me more than I’ve kicked myself.”

“Couldn’t you have just dyed your hair purple and cal ed it a day?” I ask weakly. When I think about the loneliness and grief that drove him to do this, I am suddenly choked up. I slide halfway across the floor to be closer, to let him know that I appreciate his honesty. When I stop, he lifts an eyebrow.

“Real y? That’s the best sob story I’ve got. What does a guy have to say to make you move al the way?”

When I don’t answer, he scoots forward, closing the distance himself and leaving me to stare dry-mouthed at the inch between our knees.

“Do you know that al the blood in your body just rushed to your cheeks?” he asks. “They’re glowing.”

My head jerks up. Without thinking, I clap my hands to the runaway body parts, which do feel a little bit warm.

“Whatever. It’s too dark to tel that,” I say with false bravado.

“Darkness doesn’t matter. One of the few benefits of my new condition.”

“What?”

“I can see body warmth, pools of blood. And right now, your cheeks are two giant beacons.” He points at my face like I might not know which cheeks he means.

“I flush easily,” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he says, clearly a nonbeliever. Now seems like the perfect time for another subject change.

“So what other superpowers do you have?” I ask. “And if you say X-ray vision I am going to shoot myself.”

He doesn’t respond. It’s obvious that the question makes him uncomfortable—he sits up straighter and shifts his weight from side to side. Apparently I am going to have to play a guessing game. “If Vlad is any indication, I would say that you have powers of persuasion.”

“To an extent,” he says cautiously.

“And you’re stronger?”

“Yes.”

“And you have heightened senses.”

“Yes.”

“And you sparkle in the sunlight.”

His lips make the “yuh” shape, but then he does a double take. “What?”

“You, uh, sparkle?” I try again. When his bafflement fails to disappear, I begin to ramble. “I mean, now that I think about it, I’ve seen you in the sun and there doesn’t seem to be any glitter action. But aren’t you not supposed to go in the sun?”

Someone real y needs to step in and universalize vampire lore, pronto.

He continues to look at me as though I like to eat grass in my spare time. “Sunlight doesn’t kil us, but it makes us weaker. So does using any of our gifts,” he says, and the sarcasm is thick on the last word. “The more we use them the more we need to …”

“Need to what?” I prod.

“The more we need to drink,” he says.

My stomach lurches. While I knew that vampirism was a blood-sucking operation, this is James.
James.
He likes red licorice and banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches. I know this because he used to steal them out of my lunch box al the time and replace them with pieces of paper that said, “James: 1, Sophie: 0.”

I turn to study him in the moonlight. He has gone back to studying his shoes, but I can tel that he is watching me from the corner of his eyes. My mind is tossing up images of him bending over the ivory columns of exposed necks and snatching up rabbits in the woods. In these images he is dressed in a cape with red lining and a tailed tuxedo, not the T-shirt and jeans he’s wearing now.

Unconsciously, my fingers creep up to my neck. The puncture wounds have scabbed over into two bumps that are hard and curved like tiny turtle shel s. Perhaps I should be more worried than I am.

“Yes,” James says darkly. “I do drink blood. But never yours. Never anyone alive’s real y. Too dangerous. And …

you know. Wrong.”

His voice startles me—I hadn’t thought that I said anything out loud. I look at him, confused.

“Er, right. We can sort of read thoughts when we’re close to someone. Sometimes. Occasional y. We have to be touching you if we want to go very deep. But it goes hand in hand with the mind-wiping thing that we should talk about.”

I know that I should be like, “Yes! Mind wiping! Please explain at length and in detail!” but right now I just feel like seeing if I can stuff myself beneath my bed for the rest of eternity. I frantical y try to think back to the times we’ve been

“close” in the last week. There was that first night in his backyard, and then today in the lunchroom, and then—

“Now,” James fil s in helpful y.

I scoot sideways faster than anyone has ever scooted before, and I don’t stop until my back is against my bedroom door and there’s at least twelve feet between us.

“Oh, come on,” he says, “I haven’t picked up on anything embarrassing. Although it’s nice to know that someone thinks my arms are pretty.” His mouth starts to twitch. “Wel , mine and Danny Baumann’s.”

Dear God. Danny Baumann was something that I had meant to take to my grave, unless that fantasy played out where we met at a twentieth high school reunion and he was blown away by my poise and reporting experience, and I got to spend a lifetime staring at him before we were buried side by side. Which would stil mean taking him to my grave, actual y. So yeah.

“This is not funny,” I say when I can final y speak. “This is an invasion of privacy. Stop it.”

“I would if I could,” he says. “It just happens. They say that you learn to control it as you get older—the other vampires can—but so far it’s been a year and it’s stil going strong.”

He rubs his eyes, suddenly weary. “I’m glad this came up, because we need to figure out what’s going to happen on Monday. Vlad wil be expecting you to know nothing about what happened today in the woods. If you show the slightest ounce of mistrust, he wil become suspicious, and I can’t predict what he’l do next. If you haven’t noticed,” he says wryly, “he’s kind of a loose cannon.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Not think?”

“No. But if the way you fol owed four hungry vampires into the woods is any indication, you weren’t doing much of that this afternoon anyway.”

I hold up a finger. “Okay.
One,
I didn’t know they were vampires—I just thought they were part of some sort of weird cult thing. And
two,
” I add, because number one doesn’t sound al that smart in retrospect, “insults are not going to help me keep my neck intact. Seriously, what am I supposed to do?”

“There are things that make it harder for us to pick up anything.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve noticed that if people are concentrating real y hard on something, I don’t hear anything. It’s the stray thoughts that come through, the departures from regularly scheduled programming.” He stops, a new emotion flickering across his face. “Are you real y going to keep hiding in the corner?”

“Can you hear me over here?”

“Not real y.”

“Then yes,” I say, and he frowns a little and looks away. I may not be able to read minds, but he’s obviously hurt, and that makes me feel guilty. Especial y considering that the reason he’s here tonight, tel ing me al of this, is because he had to stop me from becoming Vlad’s very special Pringle.

Knowing I’m going to regret this later, I scoot back across the room until there are only a few inches between our knees.

“Okay, let’s practice. Try to tel what I’m thinking,” I say, but he’s already dropped his gaze to squint down at my legs.

“What are those? Dancing raisins?”

“Whales. And I would kind of like to focus on the tips and tricks to vampire mind defense right now, not my pajama decisions.”

“Fair enough,” he says and then leans forward, close enough that I can make out the green of his eyes. I’m suddenly distracted by his bottom lip, which real y is very nicely shaped. And there’s a freckle punctuating the corner of his mouth that I can’t recal from our early years.

“That’s because I doubt you ever looked at my mouth this closely when we were eight,” he says.

I rear back. “I wasn’t ready!”

“Sorry. It’s not a one-two-three-go kind of situation.”

I point behind him. “Argh. Just … go to that side of the room.”

“What?”

“You say you have to be close to hear anything, and since I can see Vlad coming, I should at least have two or three seconds to start concentrating. So go over by the bookcase and then walk toward me.” When he doesn’t move, I add, “Any time now.”

Reluctantly, he stands up and moves to the far wal , and I search for a topic. I could choose a subject like the weather or why I hate the word “pungent,” but that’s not going to prove that I can hide my thoughts when it real y counts. After I hop to my feet, he starts his re-approach. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on the things that I would never ever want to say aloud.

James, the fact that your new hobby is drinking blood
does not disturb me nearly as much as it should. Also,
you have grown up to be quite cute.

When I open my eyes, his chin is in front of me. I look up to find him staring down at me with patient attention and something else that I can’t quite define.

“It worked,” he says after a few moments. “Nothing but fuzz.”

“Real y?”

“Yep. Complete blank. What were you thinking about?”

“Er, nothing important,” I say, staring up at him. When did he get so tal ?

“Sophomore year,” he says and then winces. The brief courage that came from my previous success starts to crumble.

“How am I supposed to do this?” I ask.

“Avoid Vlad. Period.”

“But I have English with him! I mean, he sits in the front and I sit in the back, but—”

“It should stil be fine,” he says, sounding about as reassuring as a doctor who’s just dropped his keys in his patient’s open heart cavity. “Like I said before, Vlad’s old enough that he won’t be picking things up unless he’s actively trying. Just try not to let him get too close.”

Realizing how close I am to James, I retreat to take a seat on the end of my bed. “What about Violet? She’s in my English class too.”

“Violet doesn’t use her powers very often. It’s draining, and she thinks blood drinking isn’t very ladylike. Besides, she has enough problems in her own head to worry about anyone else’s.”

“Harsh words for your girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend,” he corrects quickly. “If that.”

“Nice.”

James blinks in a way that would be cute if he were not being a dirtbag. “I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

“Maybe I just think you should be a little nicer to the girl who shared eternal life with you.”

He runs his hands through his hair, which I am quickly learning is his I-am-exasperated with-your-craziness tel .

“Eternal life that I don’t want,” he stresses. “A girl that I don’t want. If we’re being completely honest, I
want
—”