Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,20

sheriff shooed her off the grounds. She’s the only one who knows my family is different. Just not how. I loop my arm over her shoulder. “At least we’re still the superior species on campus.”

She laughs. “Uh, yeah. No contest!”

Landry crosses his arms over the Mustang logo emblazoned across his red-and-white cheerleading uniform. “Uh, yeah. I like to think of the Sweetwater football team as our sideshow. Everyone knows these pom-poms are the real crowd-pleaser.” He smacks each of his butt cheeks in case there is any question which pom-poms he’s referring to.

Wade Thomas, a barrel-chested white guy, turns around from the football team’s bench. “You know we can hear you, right?” he says.

“Good,” says Peach. “All y’all need is a little more real talk and a little less of people blowing sunshine up your asses.”

Wade flexes his bicep and winks. “You kiss your mother with that mouth, Peach?”

“Anyone but you,” she pipes back.

The score on the board reads VISITOR: 11 HOME: 48. The only thing more depressing than that is watching Aunt Gemma try to make dinner out of whatever random leftovers we’ve accumulated from whatever takeout we’ve had throughout the week.

“That was a close one, boys!” someone yells from the crowd.

I roll my eyes. A close one? Why is everyone so concerned with giving boys like Wade gold stars for doing the bare minimum? You wanna know what was a real close one? That drifter vamp who almost made Wade her dinner last week when he was pulling a solo shift at his dad’s gas station. Big, strong Wade, who’s been riding the bench for the last two weeks but still has an ego the size of a tractor? Well, he had no idea how close he came to being just another sack of blood.

It didn’t matter that I saved Wade, though, because I didn’t kill the drifter and then three days later Aunt Gemma found three truck drivers in a ditch on the outskirts of town with their throats ripped out.

“Let’s load it up, y’all!” I call out to the rest of my team.

“Roger that, Cap,” Landry says, as a few girls from the opposing team whistle at him. Landry is hot. Not just hot for Middle of Nowhere, Texas, but real-life hot. He’s a six-foot-tall bisexual dreamboat with deep brown skin and tight and smooth cornrow braids. The whole world has eyes for him, but lately he’s only got eyes for Peach—if only she’d notice.

We all gather up our signs, pom-poms, and gym bags. On the bus, I pull on my sweatpants under my skirt and yank my hoodie over my head.

“Hey, Karily,” I shout into the dark bus. “Great job on that toe touch!”

“Yeah!” a few other people chime in.

“Thanks, y’all,” says her tiny freshman voice from the back of the bus.

Ms. Garza, our faculty sponsor, boards the bus last with a romance novel tucked under her arm. “All right, Ms. Rhodes,” she says to our bus driver. “Let’s get going.”

Ms. Garza settles into the front row with her reading light and book as we rumble down the road.

I sit with a bench to myself while Peach and Landry settle in across the aisle from me, the two of them huddled over Peach’s cell phone, watching their favorite beauty guru vlogger unload the details of her very messy and very public breakup.

I’ll never know what it feels like to not know that vampires exist and should be feared, but moments like this are the closest I come to the sweet relief of ignorance. In this bus, I’m not responsible for the lives of everyone in a ten-mile radius. In this bus, we’re speeding down the road faster than any vampire can move. I love the safety of this bus when we’re driving home late at night after another away game, and I can just let my guard down.

Even if I wanted to shirk my duties back in Sweetwater, my anatomy would never allow it. Vampires set off some kind of reaction inside me. My own internal dog whistle. It’s like when you know you’ve forgotten something but you just don’t know what it is, or that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and realizing you didn’t write the paper that’s due tomorrow. All this energy piles up inside me, and I’m not satisfied until it’s released. Suddenly every frustrating hour of training with Mama and Aunt Gemma clicks for me, and every other desire and care fades away until all that’s