Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,30

on our own, at least for now.

Justin and Ileana were a different story.

“That sounds crazy,” Justin said when I told him.

“But homesteading,” I said. “Living history. Resurrecting the past. A-plus from Gibbon.”

Justin gave me a stony look.

“What about your Mercians?” I said. “All those old-time families. Would any of them be interested in helping out?”

“Nope,” Justin said.

“Civic improvement,” I said. “Community—things. Isn’t that what you do?”

“No,” Justin said. “Anyway, not that kind.”

“Well, what do you do, just sit around and wait for the redcoats to attack?” I said.

“Look, Cody. Just don’t do it. Please,” Justin said.

And when I told Ileana, she looked at me over clasped hands and said, “I hope that you will fail.”

Turk went crazy buying things that week. Buckets, mops, paper towels—if it cleaned, she loaded up on it. Our garage started to look like a janitorial supply store.

“Where are you getting all the money for this?” I asked when she came home Thursday with the 179th load of sponges.

“Art, Cuz,” she said. “My brilliant career pays for it all. I sold two big pieces just before I came. But they’re nothing compared to what I’m going to do when my art center’s up and running.”

“Ah, yes. Your art center,” I said. “The living flame to your eternal genius.”

“Yeah. Something like that,” Turk said.

I wasn’t around much while Turk was busy with all this. I spent most of my afternoons with Justin, getting help with my math, or upstairs in my room trying to figure out on my own whether the giant panda was taxonomically a bear or a raccoon (no fair checking the DNA) and why, in either case, a meat-eater had evolved into a bamboo-eater without giving up carnivorous dentition. Fun times.

Or I was in the special collections room with Mercy, going over her journal, page by page, feeling that strange connection that came from looking at her spidery handwriting. Feeling her life touching mine.

To make sure that Ms. Shadwell didn’t discover Mercy’s journal and take it away to be cataloged or something, I always hauled out several of the ephemera collections along with it and pretended to look into them from time to time. This worked. When I told her the title of my report was Comparative Ephemera of New Sodom in Colonial Times, she was as happy as a clam at high tide.

So Mercy remained my secret.

The more I reread her words, the more questions I had. Some of them were things like “You actually ate robin pie?” and one was “Who was that lover you missed so much for the rest of your life?” But most of them were about the Mercians.

I was really interested in those guys. I made a note of every mention of them in Mercy’s journal. She wrote about them fairly often during the Revolution, and then never again until the War of 1812. Then it was just:

August 8, 1812

The New Sodom Militia, Mercians and gadje alike, have voted not to go to the new war. The whole town do be against this fight with England.

After that, nada, zip, zilch.

Mercians. Whatever they had been, they were still around. But if they weren’t a militia, what were they, and why wouldn’t Justin talk about them? There couldn’t be anything wrong with them, or Justin wouldn’t be one. But why act like a conspiracy when you’re not?

Then Saturday came and I had other things to think about.

When we drove up to the mill at nine, Gregor was already waiting. The back of the Volkswagen was filled with cleaning stuff, gardening tools, and a couple of hatchets.

I had something of my own, tucked into a Styrofoam cooler, for later. A surprise for Turk and Gregor.

“The first thing is to stake our claim,” Turk said. “Then clean up.”

Gregor sneered. “You had better use a different word than stake if you want my help,” he said.

I handed him a hatchet. “Come on, Gregor. You and me. Let’s get the poles for the wigwam.”

But Turk picked up the other hatchet.

“I’m doing the wigwam,” she said. “You start the corn patch.”

“But I read up on the wigwam,” I said. “I pulled some stuff off the net.”

“So did I,” Turk said. “And I’m smarter than you. Dig.”

“She is right, you know,” Gregor said. “She is smarter.”

“Wigwam,” I said. “We’ll all help.”

We walked down to the river, where some thickets of small trash trees were growing. We found some young ones that were about the right size, and flexible enough to bend.

“We need sixteen for the basic