Beaming down at her, Sainvire ladled some of the pudding in the bowl on her tray.
“She’s suddenly the center of attention,” Joseph commented, looking about him. Vamps and humans alike had ceased supping to stare at the stranger and her mound of food.
“Don’t mind them,” Sainvire assured her. “They seem to have forgotten their manners.”
“It’s ’cause my tray looks like the mashed potato mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Poe said quietly, not in any way deterred from the meal.
“I forgot to tell you that you can come back for seconds. Or thirds,” Joseph said, his perpetual smile shining. He was holding orange juice and grape soda in his hands.
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The two vampires led an extremely crimson Poe to an empty table. Joseph pushed the juices toward the girl.
“Hope grape and orange is fine.”
Poe nodded her head and mumbled her appreciation. She didn’t immediately dig in to her plate, thinking that this might very well be her last supper before she became someone else’s dinner.
Sainvire and Joseph sitting across the table made Poe uncomfortable. It was as though they wanted to watch her gobble down the tower of tikka and laugh at her expense.
Bastards. They finally ignored her and started talking quietly about Trench and his angry goons.
Trying to remember proper fork and knife etiquette, Poe slowly dug in. The traffic cop in her head hollered for her to slow down. She slackened the pace for about a minute. Then it was suddenly about vengeance, like Lardass at the pie-eating contest in Stand by Me.
Unlike Lardass, however, Poe paused now and then to appreciate certain dishes by closing her eyes and memorizing the flavor and texture, for she knew it could be another decade before she tasted anything so yummy and warm.
With her eyes closed, she reveled in the teriyaki sauce over rice. There were simply no words to describe the explosion of flavor. Even the orange juice got a fist-slamming show of appreciation. In the midst of the pauses, grunts, and lip smacking, Poe was oblivious to her surroundings.
“I don’t think anyone’s given our cooking such a resounding compliment before,” Habib, one of the four chefs, commented while looking on.
Sainvire was careful to wave away certain humans who inched to their table for a closer look. Vampires who dared to hover too close received a quelling look 117
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from the master vampire. To all this, Poe was blind, lost in gastronomical delights and remembrance of her mother and father who believed sampling different kinds of food to be a privilege.
To everyone’s surprise, Poe obliterated her plate, down to the last crust of bread that wiped the sauces clean. The tip of her nose dusted with sweat. Only when Poe swallowed the last spoonful of rice pudding did she become aware of the pain in her stomach.
Then there were hooting and clapping. The cafeteria audience had converted the meal into a cheesy reality show, the kind her parents didn’t let her watch because it brought out the worst traits in the contestants. The voice police returned and said, I told you so!
Her stomach, tremendously stretched by the amount of food shoveled in there, gave a kick. Flame-faced Poe had no recourse but to extend her hand to the four chefs that encircled her: Habib, Janice, Petra, and Ray.
“What a show, what a show,” random people said as they clapped her on the back. She didn’t appreciate the gesture at all. The movement jarred her belly, causing terrible discomfort.
And to think, she had even briefly considered Joseph as a sort of friend. Sick jerk. He laughed the loudest. Sainvire, having had enough himself, extended his arm to Poe to hoist her up. The girl merely threw him a piss-off look and rolled herself out of the chair.
The unnaturally large bulge of her stomach garnered another round of applause.
As she headed for the door, she ignored the laughter. On the right, Poe noticed a dreadlocked vampire sucking on a clear plastic bag bursting with thick fluid. The vampire winked at her, and the human girl sitting next to him clapped. This was such a 118
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strange place, definitely not how she expected a cattle farm to be.
(((
Poe shut out the conversation between Sainvire and Joseph as they walked ahead along the long corridor to the vestibule of the library. She could care less about them.
All those wasted years craving for human companionship. There were tons of humans, fifty at least in the cafeteria, and they treated her