Never Bite a Boy on the First Date (9 page)

• “Mind if I sit here?” I asked.
  

  His long red-brown bangs hung over his face as he leaned his elbows on his knees. He pushed his hood back a little to give me a nod. I saw him notice my legs first, and then his gaze traveled up to my face.
  

  Now, I’m not drop-dead gorgeous like Vivi is, but I think—given my tasteful emerald nose stud and my half-Japanese features and my striking, dark green hair—that I’m not exactly
  the most horrifying teenage girl on the face of the planet.
  

  But when Rowan met my eyes, he gave me a look that said exactly that. In fact, he looked so spooked that for a moment I thought he was either going to scream and dive off the bleachers or have a heart attack and literally die right there in front of me. Which would make it much harder to get him to confess to a murder, don’t you think?
  

  “Who…what…?” he stammered. He actually started to get to his feet like he was going to run away.
  

  “Whoa, what’s wrong?” I asked, touching his shoulder. “Are you okay?” I’ve found, in my limited experience, that touching a guy lightly in a nonthreatening, quasi-flirty manner is a good way to get him to stay put. It totally worked this time, too. Then again, the principal was tapping his microphone at that same moment, so possibly Rowan just wanted to avoid making a scene. But let’s assume it was me.
  

  He sat down again, putting one hand on his narrow chest and taking a couple of deep breaths. Maybe he was just startled to find a
  girl talking to him. He seemed like someone who kept to himself; hot girls probably didn’t talk to him very often. Or even semi-cute girls like me. Maybe that was what had scared him.
  

  His skin was really pale, even paler than Vivi’s, and she’s a natural redhead who looks as though she’s made of porcelain. Rowan’s eyes were an interesting dark blue, like the evening sky just before the stars come out. If I dyed my hair blue instead of green, it’d probably end up being that color. And his eyelashes were really startlingly long. I kind of wanted to touch them to see if they were real, but of course I didn’t do that. He stared at me for a long moment, his eyes flicking from my hair to my multiple earrings to my shimmery green nail polish.
  

  “Do I know you?” he finally asked in his soft, mossy voice.
  

  That surprised me. “I don’t think so,” I said.
  Uh-oh
  . Maybe his vampire radar was a lot better than mine. Could he tell there was something inhuman about me? Was he afraid I was here to expose him? Or what if we’d attended the same summer camp as kids or something? I didn’t
  recognize him, but he might have known me when I was Phoebe Tanaka.
  

  Quickly I said, “I’m Kira. Kira November.” We pick new names as vampires, obviously, or else someone from our past would be liable to find us someday while surfing the Internet or something. Zach, for instance, used to be Cash. We were stuck with the last name November (Olympia’s choice several decades ago), but I chose Kira.
  

  “Kira,” Rowan echoed, looking confused. “You look familiar.”
  

  “You’ve probably seen me around school,” I said. “Or maybe it’s ’cause I look like the actress from
  Samurai Girl
  . I get that a lot.” Sure, in wishful-thinking world. But I didn’t want him to connect the dots if he did sense my vampireness.
  

  “I don’t—” he began, but then the principal started to speak, and I went, “Shhhh,” hoping he’d forget all about it by the time the assembly was over.
  

  Principal Lovato went on for a long time about what a stand-up guy Tex was and what a treasure he was to the school and how much
  everyone liked him and how his smile lit up the halls. It actually sounded like he knew who he was talking about, instead of making up stuff about some student he couldn’t remember. I guess being star quarterback nets you some decent eulogies. Several cheerleaders in the front row were sobbing, their mascara streaking their faces.
  

  I snuck a notebook out of my bag, opened it to a blank page, and scribbled,
  Did you know Tex?
  at the top, then handed it to Rowan.
  

  He looked at my notebook for a long moment, like it was a spider that had just landed in his lap. But finally he took my pen and wrote,
  No
  .
  

  All right, Mr. Chatty.
  

  I took the pen back, letting my fingers lightly brush his, and wrote,
  Me neither. We just moved here a month ago from Florida
  . Olympia makes up backstories for us (and produces supporting documents like magic) every time we move. Usually they’re not too far off from our real story, so they’re easier to remember.
  

  After another long pause, he took the pen again and wrote,
  Same. Two years ago. From California
  .
  

  California!
  I wrote. I’d never been there. So there’s no way he could’ve known Phoebe-me.
  Cool. What part?
  

  Excruciatingly long pause.
  San Francisco
  .
  

  Oh
  , I wrote.
  Hilly. Right?
  

  This time he just shrugged.
  

  Well. This was going swimmingly. I could tell that deep, dark secrets were going to come pouring out of him any second.
  

  I realized that he hadn’t introduced himself yet.
  What’s your name?
  I wrote. He couldn’t answer
  that
  with a shrug.
  

  Rowan
  .
  

  All right. Now I knew almost exactly as much as I had when I’d sat down. Maybe it was time to try a more direct approach.
  

  Poor Tex
  , I tried.
  I was so shocked when we got to school yesterday. Did you see the body?
  

  He touched the page with his long fingers, staring at my handwriting. After a moment, I nudged the pen into his hand and he wrote,
  What body?
  

  Um. Okaaaaaay.
  

  Tex’s body
  , I wrote.
  

  No
  , he wrote quickly.
  Yes. Not really
  .
  

  Pause. I wrestled the pen away from him.
  

  Lots of blood, huh?
  I watched his face closely as he read that, checking for an expression that might say, “Yeah, ew,” or “Mmm, hungry” or “Yeeessss,
  I
  did that.”
  

  But his expression told me nothing quite that clear. He just gazed at the page like he was looking right through it.
  

  I’d never seen a dead body before
  , I tried.
  

  Almost immediately he seized the pen from my fingers and scribbled,
  I wrote a poem about it
  .
  

  So he really
  was
  Poet Guy. Look at me, all insightful. I’d have this case cracked in no time.
  

  Can I see your poem?
  I wrote.
  

  Not yet. Not finished
  .
  

  What’s it called?
  

  In spiky capital letters, he wrote one word:
  BLOOD
  .
  

W
ell, my job here is done
, I thought. I was about ready to grab his wrist and confirm that he had no pulse, when the assembly suddenly ended. Rowan bolted to his feet right away, but he couldn’t get out without stepping on a lot of other people, so he was stuck there for a moment.

“Awesome to meet you, Rowan,” I said, standing up and putting away my notebook. I tried to look cute and flirty and not at all creeped out. “Maybe we can eat lunch together sometime.”

Now I finally got my first real boy reaction from him: He blushed and shoved his hands in his pockets awkwardly.

“Really?” he said. “You wanna eat with me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe you can show me your poetry or something.”

“Yeah, all right,” he said. “If you really want
to see it. It’s not very good. My photography is better.”

“Oh, I love photography,” I said, giving him my most winning smile.

You know how in movies (at least, in Jake Gyllenhaal movies, which are all I would watch if I had a choice) there’s always that moment when you see the hero gazing at the heroine with this intense, yearning, deeply meaningful look in his eyes?

In real life it kind of knocks your socks off. I completely forgot that there were students clomping and thumping on the bleachers all around us. It was like Rowan and I were the only real, three-dimensional things against a flat background. He must have felt it, too, because his awkwardness seemed to melt away. He reached out and trailed his fingers lightly down my cheek to my chin.

“Maybe I could photograph you,” he said softly.

Was I being mesmerized? Was he pulling vampire tricks on me? Was it even possible for a vampire to mesmerize another vampire? I had no idea. Perhaps he was just a strangely
compelling, regular guy with really cool eyes. Maybe I hadn’t eaten enough for breakfast, and that’s why I was feeling light-headed….

Someone jumped down the bleachers and jostled into Rowan, and he dropped his hand quickly. “See you,” he mumbled, ducking his head. Hunching his shoulders again, he hurried away into the crowd.

Well.

Solving this mystery wasn’t such a bad assignment after all. Apart from the fact that one of these totally cute boys was also a murderer, of course. Rowan’s clue sheet might say “Cool eyes” and “Potentially sensitive soul” but it also had to say “Poetry about blood…creepy? YES.”

I was still in a daze when I got to my history classroom, but everyone was freaked out by the assembly, so Mr. Wright just gave us a chapter to read and then sat at the front of the room watching us faux-sympathetically with a phony
Talk to me if you need to
expression.

And then, five minutes later, Daniel walked in.

He was even better-looking in the light, although today he was wearing a long-sleeved
dove-gray shirt that hid his abs, which I didn’t approve of. He handed a note to the teacher, scanned the classroom, and spotted me. He smiled in that slow, charming way and gave me a wink. I saw a couple of the cheerleaders twist around to check who he was winking at. Apparently mourning for Tex wasn’t going to stop them from keeping an eye on the new hot boy and any potential gossip.

I was sitting in the back row, mainly because it was out of the path of the sunlight coming through the windows. It so happened that there was an empty desk next to mine. If he sat there, would it be because of me? Or would he just be avoiding the sun, too?

“Class,” the teacher said, “let me introduce our new student, Daniel Marvel. It’s a tough day to be starting out here, so I hope you’ll all be welcoming to him.”

Yes, please
, I thought.
I’d like to be
very
welcoming to him
.

“It’s so odd,” said Mr. Wright, handing the slip of paper back to Daniel. “Normally we have a little warning about new students. I had no idea you were coming.”

Daniel shrugged. “That’s what the principal said,” he said innocently, “but my parents cleared my transfer to the school a month ago.”

Oh, did they?
I wondered.
Or did someone, ahem, sneak into the school last night and put you in there?
Was that really why he’d been here in the middle of the night? But if he’d killed Tex, why would he be sticking around afterward? Surely most vampires don’t have to keep going to high school once they’re, you know, like, a hundred years old. I don’t care if I still look sixteen; one diploma is all I intend to get.

“Huh,” said Mr. Wright. “All right, take a seat.”

Daniel sauntered down the aisle and slipped right into that seat beside me. Blond heads in the front row swiveled and craned to get a look at him. Did I mention how hot he is?

“Hey, there,” he said to me.

“Hey, there yourself,” I said. “You missed the assembly this morning.”

“Forms,” he said, spreading his hands. “There seemed to be an awful lot of them. I think a certain guidance counselor didn’t want my first experience of the school to involve funeral services.”

“Count yourself lucky,” I said. “It was long and tragic. Can I see your schedule?”

“Shhh,” said Mr. Wright, but sort of halfheartedly.

Daniel slid a piece of paper out of his notebook and passed it to me. All of his movements were graceful, like those of a cat or a panther or a really well-trained dancer.

I ran my eyes down his schedule.

He was in every single one of my classes
.

I shot a glance at him. He had his eyes on his history book, leaning back calmly in his chair as if this were the most natural place in the world for him to be.

Was it a coincidence? Or had he done that on purpose? Maybe I was reading too much into it. At least one of the cheerleaders and a couple of band guys from the woodwinds section were in all my classes, too. Surely that happened all the time.

And Daniel couldn’t have changed his schedule last night
after
meeting me, because we’d left the school together.

Right?

We kept quiet for the rest of class, but when
the bell rang, I leaned over and said, “Want to hear something freaky? We have the exact same schedule.”

He gave me that wry little smile. “That sounds very fortuitous. Does that mean you can lead me to”—he glanced down at his schedule—“physics?”

“Sadly for you, yes,” I said. We gathered our books as I told him about our scatterbrained physics teacher. When we walked down the hall together, he stayed close beside me, and a few times his arm brushed mine as we swerved around the rampaging hordes.

It felt so normal, you could almost forget the whole meeting-in-a-dark-hall-at-a-murder-scene thing.

Speaking of which, I still had one suspect to check off my dance card, and I didn’t even know his name yet. Part of me thought,
Aren’t
two
dreamy, mysterious guys enough for you to investigate?
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to know more about the guy with the cute smile. Not because of the cute smile, mind you. No, no, no. I was interested in the way he’d looked at
the murder scene. Surely that warranted further investigation.

And then finally, at the end of the day, I saw him.

I had just left Daniel at his locker, which was on the first floor because all the regular junior lockers on the top floor were taken. I was on my way toward the school’s back exit, hoping that if I snuck out that way and headed through the cemetery, I’d make it home before Zach did. He was always trying to walk home with me, but I usually managed to give him the slip.

Between the main body of the school and the cafeteria and gym buildings, there’s a little courtyard with benches and trees and tables where the upperclassmen usually eat lunch. Luckily for me, Vivi prefers to eat inside because of her delicate, easily sunburned skin—yet another reason I’m friends with her.

I happened to glance out there as I went by, and there he was: Mr. Smiley, sitting on one of the tables and joking around with a couple of muscular blond guys.

I stopped by the door to the courtyard and
reapplied my lip gloss, watching him surreptitiously. This was a bad sign—or a good sign, I suppose, depending on whether I wanted him to turn out to be a murdering vampire or not. He was sitting right out in the sunshine, which seemed like a very un-vampire-y thing to do, unless his supercharged vampire sunscreen was a lot more powerful than mine. His sunglasses were pushed up on his head, holding back his curly mop of dark hair, and I could see gold flecks in his brown eyes. The sleeves of his faded blue shirt were rolled up, revealing toned arms.

How was I going to meet him? I could just saunter out there and say hi, but (a) sunshine, and (b) would that make him suspicious? Like,
Why is a random girl talking to me? Oh, and also, gee, the sunlight sure seems to make her dizzy…. Hmmmm
.

What I really wanted was some way for us to “meet cute”—you know, like in a movie, where the hero and heroine accidentally run into each other and it’s hilarious, and then of course they fall in love. Except, of course, we’d skip the “falling in love” part if it turned out that Mr.
Smiley liked to savagely bite people and throw them out of windows.

I listened with my vampire hearing, hoping that something would give me an idea.

“All right, I’m heading home,” said one of the blond guys. “Need a lift?”

“Sure,” said the other blond guy.

“Nah. Thanks, though. I brought my car today,” said my guy. He had an accent! A cute accent, kind of British-sounding—maybe Australian or South African. “I think I’ll do a few more laps before I go.”

Laps? Like around the track? That wasn’t going to help me. There was even
more
sunshine out there.

“You’re a machine,” the first blond guy laughed. “My arms are way too sore after this morning.”

Arms?
Who ran around the track on their arms?

“Yeah, but that’s ’cause you’re a wuss,” my guy said kindly. He cracked up as the first guy pushed him off the table.

“One day I’m going to put ants in your swimsuit, and then you’ll finally lose a meet,” the
second blond guy teased.

Aha
.

They were on the swim team!

Something poked at my memory. Tex had mentioned the swim team in his last blog post. Something about how he’d quit swimming—which meant these guys probably knew him. Now I had even more reason to meet Mr. Smiley.

And I knew just how to do it.