Vampires Never Get Old - Zoraida Cordova Page 0,83
is trying to think of something to say, something witty or clever, something to earn one of those rare, low laughs, when her shoe scuffs something on the ground.
A bracelet, lost, abandoned. Something fancy, fragile, and Jules reaches down without thinking, fingers curling around the band. Pain, sudden and hot, slices across her skin. She stifles a gasp and drops the bracelet, a red welt already rising on her skin.
Silver.
She hisses, shaking the heat from her fingers as she cuts through the tide of traffic in the hall and ducks into the nearest bathroom. Her hand is throbbing as she shoves it under the tap.
It helps. A little.
She rifles through her bag, finds the bottle of aspirin that isn’t aspirin, and dumps two capsules out into her palm, tips them into her mouth. They break open, a moment’s warmth, an instant of relief.
It helps in the way a single breath helps a drowning man, which is to say not much.
The thirst eases a little, the pain recedes, and the welt on her skin begins to fade.
She glances up at the mirror, tucking wisps of sandy blond hair behind her ears. She is a watery version of her sister, Elinor.
Less striking. Less charming. Less beautiful.
Just … less.
She leans closer, studying the flecks of green and brown in her blue eyes, the scattered dots across her cheeks.
What kind of vampire has freckles?
But there they are, flecked like paint against pale skin, even though she’s careful to avoid the sun. When she was young, she could spend a good hour outside, playing soccer or just reading in the dappled shade of their family’s oak. Now, her skin starts to prickle in minutes.
Add it to the growing list of things that suck (ha ha).
Her eyes drop to her mouth. Not to her teeth, polished as they are, fangs tucked up behind her canines, but to her lips. The boldest thing about her. The only bold thing, really.
Her sister told her that good lipstick is like armor. A shield against the world.
She digs through her bag, draws out a blackberry shade called Dusk.
Jules leans into the mirror, pretending she is Elinor as she reapplies the lipstick, carefully tracing the shade along the lines of her mouth. When she’s done, she feels a little bolder, a little brighter, a little more.
And soon, she will be more.
Soon—
The bathroom door crashes open, the room filling with raucous laughter as a handful of seniors barge in.
One of them glances her way.
“Nice color,” she says, a note of genuine appreciation in her voice. Jules smiles, showing the barest hint of teeth.
Outside, the hall is empty, the bracelet gone, rescued by someone else. The tide of students has thinned to a stream, the current heading one direction—the cafeteria—and Jules is thinking of skipping lunch, or rather the performance of it, and curling up in a corner of the library with a good book, when Ben Wheeler comes crashing into her.
Ben, fair skin tan from a summer of running in the park, brown hair sun-bleached a tawny gold.
She hears him coming. Or maybe she feels him coming. Senses him the second before he knocks his shoulder into hers.
“I’m wasting away!” he moans. “How is a growing body supposed to make it between breakfast and lunch? The hobbits had the right idea.”
She doesn’t point out that she saw him scarfing down a bag of animal crackers between first and second period, a granola bar between second and third. Doesn’t point out that he’s clutching a half-eaten candy bar in one hand even as they make their way to lunch. He’s a distance runner, all sinew and bone and wolfish hunger.
She leans against Ben as they walk.
He smells good. Not bitable but likable, pleasant, homey.
They’ve been friends for ages.
In seventh grade, they even tried being more, but that was right around the time Ben figured out he preferred guys and she realized she preferred girls, and now they joke about which one turned the other.
Gay, that is. Not vampiric. Obviously.
Nobody turned her, either way. She was born like this, the latest in the honorable line of Fairmonts. And as for the whole blood gift, or curse, Ben doesn’t know. She hates that he doesn’t know. Has thought a hundred thousand times about telling him. But the what-ifs are too big, too scary, the risks too great.
They reach the cafeteria, all scraping chairs and shouting voices and the nauseating scent of stale and overheated food. Jules takes a deep breath, as if diving underwater, and