Vampire High Sophomore Year - By Douglas Rees Page 0,43

like a rock rolling uphill.

One good thing did happen. After school, we met the guy from code enforcement out at the mill.

Turk and I were waiting when he drove up.

He took a look around and said, “Man, how did you kids do all this?”

“Never mind,” Turk said. “We did it. So certify us, or whatever you do.”

“Well,” the guy said, “I’m not sure I can. The Dumpsters are still here.”

I raised my hand over my head.

From up on the roof of the mill where they had been lying, Gregor, Constantin, Ilie, and Vladimir came spiraling down. Ms. Vukovitch, who had been watching from inside the mill, came out with six big seniors.

Vladimir and Ilie leaned on the guy’s car. Gregor came over to us.

“Everything is fine now, yes?” he asked me.

“He thinks the Dumpsters might be a problem,” I said. “But he’s not sure.”

“Oh, I can let it go for now,” he said. “Let the guys downtown sort it out.”

“It is sorted out,” Gregor said. “It is sorted into the Dumpsters, yes? What more is there to sort?”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” the guy said. “I’ll just sign off on it. I mean, you’re not going to keep the Dumpsters, are you?”

“Not even one,” I said.

The guy scribbled his name on a certificate of compliance that looked like it had been printed in 1890, and got out of there.

We all waved.

“Score one for the homesteaders,” Ms. Vukovitch said. “Back to work, guys.”

The Dumpsters disappeared that night.

So the settlers had stood off two attacks now, and I should have at least been happy about that, right? Right. But then, the next day, I saw Justin and got my guts kicked in again.

He was walking down the hall talking to Ileana. His right hand was bandaged.

As they passed me, I heard him say, “Yeah. Burned it over the weekend, camping. With the Mercians. Stupid of me.”

I was pretty sure those words were for me. And I was even more sure that they were a lie. Justin camping was about as likely as me singing grand opera. And I had a sickening feeling that I knew exactly where, and how, he’d really burned his hand.

“You’re right,” I said to his back. “You don’t know how stupid.”

Justin didn’t seem to have heard.

At least the work on the mill was going ahead. Ms. Vukovitch and her seniors treated the old turbines and generator like they were a work of art they were restoring. And when they had them running again, they replaced every rat-eaten, rubber-covered, hundred-year-old conduit in the place with new wiring, and ran extra lines for all the new features.

“What’s down in that generator room was built to run big, inefficient machines,” Ms. Vukovitch told me and Turk when we went by to help. “We’re going to have extra power to burn.”

They modernized the heating system, too. The old place would never be a very green building, but from somewhere came triple-paned windows and insulation for the attics.

Meanwhile, Turk, Gregor, Ilie, Constantin, Vladimir, and yours truly did all kinds of stuff. My hands stung from feathery little fiberglass cuts. My eyes were red from sawdust and cleaning chemicals. I was wiped when I fell into bed each night, and I barely thought about my schoolwork. But the building was coming to life under our hands. I clung to that.

But homework was homework, whether I did it or not.

Friday night, when I would normally have been doing something with Ileana, I was up in my room staring at the science assignment that was due last Wednesday. It was a Vlad classic.

Compare and contrast the anatomy of the modern cod with that of the bony fishes of the late Devonian period. In part one of your answer, confine yourself to a detailed analysis of jaws and skulls. In the second part, speculate intelligently on what might be deduced about the soft anatomy of the Devonian species from the modern examples. 2,500 words.

I knew what the words meant. But as far as doing anything about them went, they might as well have been in Babylonian.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Justin and Ileana. Literally could not stop. Even when I was working at the mill, my mind kept running over what they had said, remembering Justin’s burned hand. The world was a gray, hollow place without them, and there was nothing that would help that. Plus, they’d always been there to help me with the impossible assignments that made Vlad the toughest school in the known universe. And