Never Bite a Boy on the First Date (8 page)

So it wasn’t exactly Nancy Drew–caliber work. Perhaps you can tell that I’d been stuck with Zach for the last six months of moving and hiding and
not
meeting hot new guys, so I was having some side effects. I don’t normally obsess over abs that much. At least I don’t think I do. Then again, my experience with hot-guy abs is fairly limited so far. Presumably in, like, a century or so, I’ll be all blasé:
Oh yeah, abs, whatever—been there, done that
.

I checked Tex’s blog again to see what the last entry said. Scrolling back, I saw that he usually posted twice a day—once in the morning to record his breakfast and morning workout, and
once in the evening to talk about what else he’d eaten, how totally kickass he was, and what sports he’d watched that day. He’d posted the last entry on the morning of the day he died.

It said:

Well, that told me nothing, although it did make me hungry. Birds were starting to twitter outside, and the pale blue light coming through my blinds told me it was dawn. I hid my clue sheets in my desk and went downstairs to ferret out some breakfast. Breakfast in a vampire household…let’s just say:
Sigh
.

Okay, brace yourselves for a really hilarious joke here: Being a vampire sucks. Ahahahaha,
I know, so clever. I bet you’ve never heard that before.

But seriously? It
sucks
.

For one thing, I used to be a vegetarian. I mean, I’d been a vegetarian for only, like, four months when I was turned, but still. I had to go directly from “Peace, haters! Cows are our friends! Let the chickens live! Fish deserve rights!” to “Oh, yes, thanks, I would love another gallon of blood for lunch. Yum.”

Also, blood is disgusting.

I used to make myself drink a glass of orange juice every day because I thought it was good for me and it would help me live longer (ha ha ha ha…ha), even though I hated the taste.
Well
. Right now I would give anything to
drown in an ocean of orange juice
rather than have to take another sip of disgusting, cold, ooky pig’s blood.

But I have no choice. We need blood every day to live. I literally have to choke down at least two glasses of blood every morning, just to make it through the day.

I’ve tried disguising it in lots of creative ways, the way my vampire family does—in
milkshakes or on top of ice cream (highly not recommended) or scrambled into an omelet or baked into pancakes. But it is
still blood
and it is
awful
and plus then the pancakes or ice cream or eggs are totally ruined. So now I just hold my nose, pour it down, and eat as much as I can of something else afterward to get rid of the taste.

In the old days, vampires got their blood from people, of course. It’s a lot more exciting and it tastes much better that way, and a vampire needs to do that only about once a month to survive. But it’s hard to be subtle about six vampires feeding in one town once a month, plus, if we start, Olympia is sure we won’t be able to stop. So instead she sends Bert out on blood runs to towns that are at least two to four hours away to buy animal blood in bulk, which just barely sustains us and is also completely disgusting.

When I got downstairs, Olympia was rummaging in the fridge and Crystal was slicing tomatoes. Bert was sitting at the kitchen island, pouring blood into his cereal bowl. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose, and he was peering at the
Wall Street Journal
. Bert and Olympia manage our finances in some
mysterious way that involves shadow companies and long-held stocks and stakes in lots of big corporations (obviously not
those
kinds of stakes), so we have plenty of money and none of the adult vampires have to work if they don’t want to.

I’m sure I’ll appreciate that once I’m done with high school and I can live a charming life of leisure, too. But right now I just picture them sleeping peacefully all day while I suffer through band in a hot music room that smells like sweaty marching uniforms, and it makes me wildly jealous.

I sat down and stared gloomily at the blood going
gloop-gloop-gloop
over Bert’s cornflakes.

“It’s
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-oss
!” I joked.

Of course, nobody got my brilliant Tony the Tiger reference, because none of these people have ever watched enough television. Bert gave me a puzzled look and then went back to his paper.

My mom would have laughed. I can’t believe I miss her
.

“Hey, Kira,” Crystal said brightly. “Olympia says you’re solving a mystery!” Crystal was
twenty when she died, in 1926—I’m not sure how, because in my house, we don’t talk about how we died. Except for Zach, who
ought
to be embarrassed about it but apparently isn’t, since he brings it up incessantly. I was surprised when he remembered all the details of his death; I barely remember anything about the car accident that killed me.

Anyway, it’s a good thing Crystal got to stick around for the sixties, because that was the perfect decade for her. I think she’s hoping it’ll come back sometime. She still wears tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottoms as often as she can. She has pale blond hair that curls around her chin, and she likes to come into my room and dance in the middle of the night, no matter what music I’m listening to. She’ll dance to anything. As vampire sisters go, she’s not bad. Certainly better than Apolla, the very quiet little sister I had when I was alive. She was ten when I died and was known around our house as “the good one.”

Crystal is my favorite member of my new family Although the early morning perkiness—actually, the
all-the-time
perkiness—is probably
going to get old after a couple of decades.

“Yup,” I said. “A mystery.
Wheeee
.”

Crystal found Bert sometime during the Great Depression and turned him into a vampire after they fell in love. This turned out much better for her than it did for me with Zach. Which is sort of mysterious, since Bert is a buttoned-up math nerd and Crystal is a ditzy free spirit. I never would have put them together, but here we are, like, seventy years later, and unfortunately they still act schmoopy around each other all the time.

Crystal dropped a kiss on Bert’s head as she sat down with us. Her morning blood was spread on three toasted tomato sandwiches. I couldn’t even look at them.

Olympia plunked a tall glass of blood on the island beside me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to heat it for you?” she asked, like she does every morning.

“No, thanks,” I said. It might taste more like living blood that way, but when it’s hot I can’t drink it as fast and get it over with.

“Where are you going to start?” Crystal asked me, bubbling with excitement. “Do you
have a list of suspects? Are you going to interrogate them?”

“Don’t forget the one we saw yesterday,” Olympia said.

“Rowan something,” I said. “I know. I thought I’d try to meet him today. Crystal, would you help me with my makeup?”

“Oooo, yes!” Crystal chirped, bouncing up and down.

Not having a reflection anymore is a huge pain in the butt.
You
try getting ready for high school every morning with no mirror. I’ve mostly given up on wearing makeup these days; otherwise I’d have to wake up Crystal every morning to do it for me. It’s pretty difficult to put on eyeliner when you can’t even tell where your eyes
are
. But I figured that on this occasion it would be helpful to be as cute as possible—you know, if I was going to subtly investigate cute boys. Not for flirting purposes, of course. Just for clue-finding and mystery-solving, yes, sir.

The good news is, I can still see my clothes, although in the mirror they kind of look like they’re floating in space, which is not always
helpful. Yes, a vampire has no reflection, but our clothes still do. I mean, why would our
clothes
suddenly not show up in mirrors? Wouldn’t that be weird? It’s not like anybody sucked all the blood out of my
sweaters
or anything.

The same is true for anything we put on ourselves—earrings, makeup, et cetera. For instance, Olympia recommends that we all dye our hair regularly. The fake color shows up in mirrors, which is enough to trick most people. If, out of the corner of their eyes, they catch clothes and hair going by in a mirror, they probably won’t notice the missing face and hands.

Of course, I think Olympia was picturing a nice brown or blond or even red for me. She dyes her own hair black, which if you ask me is a little cliché.

Me? I went for green.

Not bright, crazy, Kermit green or anything. I have pretty dark hair usually, although I used to get highlights every other month that kept my hair a light, shiny brown. But once I realized Mom couldn’t stop me anymore, I let it grow out dark, so with the hair dye it ends up being this kind of a dark forest green. You can’t spot the
green right away in most lights, but in the sunshine suddenly you’re like,
Poof, emerald!

Well,
I
think it’s cool.

My mom would have had a heart attack. We used to have enormous fights because I wanted a belly button ring (which I now have, thanks very much). Olympia just wrinkled her nose at my dark green hair, then shrugged and said, I’ve seen worse.”

That pretty much sums up the difference in their parenting styles.

After breakfast, Crystal carefully applied eyeliner and mascara and lipstick to my face. I had to be very stern with her when she pulled out the bright green eye shadow, though. She loves bright colors (I know, it’s not very vampire-y of her) and she insisted it would look perfect with my eyes. Crystal has told me a few times that my eyes are greener than they used to be, in sort of an iridescent way. I’d really like to check this out myself, but of course that’s impossible. However, I can still be pretty sure that bright green eye shadow is not the way to go.

“Oh, fine,” Crystal huffed. “I suppose you look very pretty anyway.”

She helped me pick out a jean miniskirt, knee-high black boots and black tights, and a green fitted tee with a grumpy-looking anime panda on it. I added a black hoodie, since it was early October and starting to get colder outside. You know how vampires in the old movies wore big cloaks with the collars turned up, all sinister-like? Wilhelm says he used to wear those all the time, because it was a great way to hide your face if a mirror popped up. Hooded sweatshirts are the same way, like the modern-day version of those cloaks, stylish and updated for hip teenage vampires of the twenty-first century.

“
So
cute,” Crystal proclaimed.

“Really?” I said, turning around and trying to figure out what I looked like. “So cute that you’d spill your deepest, darkest secrets to me? Like, for instance, that you threw a guy out a window a couple days ago?”

Crystal tilted her head the other way. “Maybe not
that
cute,” she said.

“Oh, thanks.”

“But if you had some green eye shadow—” she added hopefully.

“Come
on
, Kira!” Zach yelled from downstairs as I ducked away from Crystal and grabbed my book bag. “We don’t want to miss the big mourning assembly!”

Oh, man. The school had had one of these assemblies on the first day, so that everyone could get together and grieve about some ancient French teacher who’d died over the summer. It was wicked boring when you didn’t know the person being mourned. On the other hand, if my Ann Arbor school had had one of these for me, that’d be okay. I’d have to ask Olympia if they did; she was the one who filled me in about my funeral and everything, which I missed, what with how busy I was being really dead and all. It takes a couple days of being a corpse before a vampire rises.

Zach and I were early to school, as usual, so I lurked around the gym doors while everyone else filed in and found seats on the bleachers. I was watching for any of my suspects. I knew I should start by talking to Rowan—you couldn’t get more suspicious than what he’d said to his dad yesterday—but part of me was hoping that smiley guy would walk in first. Or, you know,
Daniel…that’d be okay, too.

I poked around inside my book bag as if I was looking for something while everyone went by. It was a lot quieter than our normal assemblies; I heard a few muffled sobs and a lot of shocked and curious whispering. The football team is usually the noisiest group, pounding on bleachers as they go by and whooping to each other across the gym. But today they were subdued, shuffling along with their heads down. I’m no fan of jocks, but even I felt sorry, seeing them like that. Tex had been a doofus, but from everything I’d heard about him, he’d been a well-liked, good-natured doofus. Not the kind of obnoxious guy with lots of enemies who usually gets murdered, at least on TV.

A few minutes before the bell rang, I finally spotted Rowan’s big combat boots stomping through the doors. The hood of his black sweatshirt was up and his shoulders were hunched. He didn’t look at anyone as he slouched into the gym and climbed the bleachers, taking two at a time with his long, skinny legs. He reached the top and sat down, way back from the gym
floor—far from most of the football players and cheerleaders, who were sitting in the front two rows, sniffling and consoling each other.

I already knew that my one new friend in town, Vivi, wasn’t coming to the assembly. She’d emailed me last night that she was “too overcome” and “shattered” by the whole murder thing (even though I was pretty sure she didn’t really know Tex). Her parents were letting her stay home for the rest of the week. There was no sign of Daniel or Smiley Guy either. So I took a deep breath, scrambled up the bleachers, and casually plunked myself down next to Rowan.