Big Vamp on Campus - Molly Harper Page 0,4

change form, and we have superstrength.”

Jamie shrugged. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good workout.”

I shook my head. I loved him, but sometimes I didn’t understand him.

“I am not spotting for you,” Ben said, in a tone that implied he’d learned the hard way. “And I came to see my friend Jason, who lives on one of the human floors.”

My eyebrows rose. Was Ben friends with Naked Jason? Somehow that made Ben slightly more interesting.

“How are you enjoying your semester so far, Ben?” I asked.

“Eh, it’s my senior year, I’m just trying to coast on electives while I search for a good job,” he said, shrugging with the disdainful boredom so common to his generation. He apparently noticed the flicker of annoyance cross my face and straightened his shoulders, formalizing his tone to add, “Jamie said this is your very first experience with modern education. How are you enjoying it?”

“Classes are . . . not what I remember them to be,” I said, thinking of long-ago childhood mornings spent in a freezing-cold schoolroom, memorizing religious texts that would be considered advanced secondary material by today’s standards.

“Have you chosen a major?” Ben asked.

I frowned at him, and Jamie winced. Ever since the Council had sentenced me to an undergraduate program, I’d struggled with choosing a degree. I didn’t know what I wanted to study. Frankly, if the vaunted scholars who ran this campus allowed us to count life experience, I could have walked out of this place with a doctorate in about a week.

Science had never appealed to me. I didn’t want to major in something as mundane as accounting, though I’d always excelled at bookkeeping. Well, I excelled at keeping my considerable finances organized, regardless of inappropriate expense reports. Art? Sure, I was a decent draftswoman and knew enough about the history to put my human professors to shame—which I had done on multiple occasions since the semester started, because it amused me. But I would never be able to get a job with a fine arts degree, according to the rants I’d read on the Internet, unless it was in “digital media.” But thanks to my lifetime savings, I didn’t really need a job. For right now, I was undeclared, and that was a bit of an embarrassment.

Even Jamie had a major, and he was only nineteen years old. He was already a hit in the sports medicine department and was on track to serve as an assistant trainer for the baseball team in the spring (for the night games). This was the life he should have started just a few years ago, except he’d be eating solid foods and able to go out during the day without self-immolating. Maybe my punishment for contributing to his losing that life was my own difficulty in settling into similar contentment.

It was embarrassing at my age to be so directionless. I was lost. And I had never been lost. I supposed the problem was that while he was choosing what he wanted to be when he grew up, I’d already lived several lifetimes. I’d learned so much already that it was difficult to find a new subject that interested me. And Jamie was so young. He’d seen so little of the world. No matter what Jane said, I didn’t want to keep him from it. Quite the opposite—I just wanted to be there with him when he saw it.

“Uh, Ophelia’s undeclared for right now,” Jamie said, squeezing me against his side.

“Well, you’ll figure it out,” Ben assured me. “Gigi had been in college for a couple of semesters before she figured out she had a talent for coding. And look at how she’s doing now.”

“And how is . . . Gigi?” I asked, trying to keep the growl from my voice.

The sparkly smile disappeared from his button face. “Oh, uh, we haven’t really talked much since this summer. We broke up, you know, and she’s been real busy adjusting to being a vampire. I mean, we parted as friends and all, but you know how it is when you say you’re going to stay friends. You never really do.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. No paramour I’d parted with had ever asked to remain friends. Mostly, they begged to remain attached to all of their limbs. But, given her tendency to enthrall every man she came into contact with, it didn’t surprise me that Gigi had left Ben a morose shell of the man-puppy he used