By the time I drag my feet through Thomas Jeff’s heavy glass doors the next morning, I am running on one hour of sleep, bus fumes, and the three bites of cereal I managed to take before Caroline’s over-the-breakfast-table scowl put the fear of sisterly retribution in me. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was mad by the way she ate three bowls of Fruity Pebbles, finishing off the box before I could go for seconds. Caroline doesn’t ingest that many carbs unless she’s getting back at someone. At least now I know the reason.
It only takes a few steps into the crowded lobby for me to realize that there’s no possibility of getting through today unnoticed. For the first time in my life, whispers dog me through the hallways, all of which involve the words “Vlad” and “party” and “engaged.” When I round the corner and see Danny Baumann bending over one of the school’s anemic water fountains, I realize that this is the perfect chance to start the rumor-squashing process. I just have to get up the nerve to talk to him.
His light blond hair curls at the neck, and he is wearing the shorts that entranced me so long ago in World Geography, but I am not here to ogle. Much like the hungry lion approaches the gentle, mega-attractive antelope, I move slowly, stealthily. I catch him as he turns around.
“Hey there. I have a favor to ask you,” I say, fully expecting him to ask who I am and why I am talking to him. But he just leans against the wall and wipes his mouth with his shirt, relaxed as casual Friday. When we get married, I’m going to buy him a napkin.
“Yo, Sophs,” he says. “What’s up?”
“You know my name.”
“Sure. You told me the difference between Uganda and Uruguay. South America, man. Crazy.”
I am aflutter that he remembers our special moment, but all I tell him is that I’m not dating or engaged to or involved in any other sort of relationship with Vlad. “And I was kind of hoping you could spread the word,” I finish.
“That’s not what he says. Dude is, like, madly in love with you.”
“But I’m saying that it is not true. And I thought maybe you could correct people if they mention it?” I give him a hopeful smile. “Okay?”
“I dunno. I don’t want to get in the middle or anything. Guy kind of weirds me out.”
That gives me pause; last week Vlad was still topping the charts. But by the time I think to ask for more detail, he’s already ambling away to do whatever Danny Baumanns do all day.
The next few hallways are better, and I start to think that maybe things aren’t as bad as the lobby made them out to be. But when I turn the final corner to my locker, the hope dies. A large cluster of people stands before it; I see sports jerseys and cheerleader costumes, but also a few pairs of ripped tights and dark band T-shirts. Morgan Michaels, my locker neighbor, flutters around the edge in a long crepe skirt.
“I’m going to be late,” she accuses when I reach the edge. “This is the fourth day.”
“Did someone write ‘French sucks’ on my locker again?” I ask just as the circle shifts to reveal a wall of bloodred roses where my dented, magic-marker-smudged door should be. There are dozens. Hundreds.
“Do you like it?” a smooth voice asks from behind me. When I turn around, Vlad is leaning against the opposite wall, smiling with sly expectation. Sauntering forward, he taps his cheek. “You may show your thanks as you see fit.”
Well, if he insists. Turning to the locker, I rip off the rose that’s looped through the handle and throw it at his crotch, smiling when it elicits an undignified gasp. “Thank you,” I say sweetly, “for making me late to math class.”
There are a few snickers as I open my locker and bat away the roses that rain down. Keeping my head firmly buried in the jumble of old newsletters and orphaned pen caps, I concentrate on digging out my math book. I am pulling it out from underneath Mangez avec moi, our porny-sounding French textbook, when the tips of Vlad’s boots appear beneath the locker door. I stand up and meet his eyes, matching his scowl and raising him a glare before I remember that, while he probably can’t force anything here, at some point I will either have to seduce the night crew or go home. Self-preservation kicks in; perhaps I should not provoke a hallway showdown.
“Excuse me,” I say with frigid politeness and try to ease past him.
He grabs my elbow. “I thought you would like them.”
“I’m allergic.”
“Your eyes are not red.”
“I’m sneezing on the inside.”
At a loss, Vlad turns to study our circle of onlookers. When I first arrived, their faces held only curiosity. But now I’m encouraged by their obvious unease. One girl with a nose ring and Manic-Panicked hair is texting rapidly and pausing every few seconds to look up warily. I hear a few scattered “weirds.”
“You all want to go to class,” he booms, and while this causes a few people to hitch up their books and shuffle away, the majority stay put. He begins to look nervous, changes tactics. “Sophochka is still feeling a little out of sorts due to her recent illness,” he says. “It has affected her judgment.”
Oh, vomit.
“My judgment is fine,” I say. “Your judgment is the one that’s out of whack.”
I can’t tell what enrages him more; my words or the fact that there are witnesses. He grabs my free hand in a way that, to an onlooker, might appear to be a romantic gesture, but I can feel his thumb pressing down on the pulse of my wrist. I try to pull away, but he still has the advantage in the strength department. “You are embarrassing me,” he hisses into my ear. “I would suggest refraining from that in the future.”
“I have to go to class,” I say loudly and catch the eyes of as many people as I can.
“Hey man, let her go,” says a short and stocky guy near the front, while the girl who was texting earlier says that she’s going to go get Ms. Kate. The murmuring increases, and for a moment Vlad simply looks betrayed.
“Very well,” he says loudly for their benefit, and lets me go. He scoops up an errant rose and places it on top of my binder with a flourish. “We will continue this conversation later.”
I knock it off and brush past him, but curiosity makes me look back before I round the corner. I immediately regret it. I have been on the receiving end of many heated looks in my day, but nothing compared to the one Vlad is giving me now. His back is to the crowd, his head angled down so that only I can see the way his eyes follow me from beneath his drooping bangs. They are full of such raw desire, such menace, and such hatred that my body revolts. As soon as he realizes that I am watching, he scrambles to realign them into something more benign, but it is too late. I’ve already seen what a mistake it was to come today.
He follows me everywhere. I come out of math, he is standing by the water fountain; I leave chemistry, and he is waiting at the corner with a cool offer to carry my books. I was crazy to think that I could avoid him for an entire day—I can hardly escape him for a minute. After a clever shortcut through the band hallway, I manage to make it to the cafeteria without a tail. Lindsay waves at me from her seat at the round table near the back. She scoots over when I approach, clearing away the papers and pens that are scattered all over the table.
“You made it!” she says. “We’re using lunchtime to work on the upcoming push to get recycled napkins in the cafeteria.” She points to the rest of the Green Team. Most of them are either college-prep junkies or band guys who have crushes on Lindsay. And then there’s Mark Echolls, who frowns at me from beneath his shaggy brown bangs. I can’t tell if the pizza sauce clinging to the corners of his lips makes him look more or less threatening.
“Thanks for covering for me on Monday,” I say, but he just slides to the side. I take a seat, doing my best to arrange myself so that the cement column acts as a shield between me and the rest of the cafeteria.
Lindsay reaches over to push a few glitter pens toward me. “Do you want to outline ‘Napkin’ in blue? Elise is doing ‘Change’ in green.”
I am grateful for the distraction, even if it involves glitter pens. I have just made it to the fifth letter when the sound of a familiar voice causes me to over-squeeze the tube in my hand and dot my “L.”
“Sophie McGee,” Vlad says. “Have you seen her? No doubt she will be sitting in a corner somewhere.”
I spot the back of his pale head several tables away. If I can see him, that means he can see me. I slide closer to Mark to conceal myself, but he pushes me away. When Lindsay notices our tussle, she follows my gaze to Vlad and then gives me a worried look.
“Don’t let him see me,” I say just he starts to turn around. Panicked, I duck beneath the table, holding my breath as his boots approach. When he asks if anyone at the table has seen me, Lindsay starts to tell him that I went home sick, but Mark interrupts.
“She’s under the table,” he says with obvious glee, but it’s followed by a smacking sound that I’m pretty sure is courtesy of Lindsay. “Ow!” Mark says. “What? She is.”
And that’s how nemeses are made.
When I creep out, Vlad is watching me with barely controlled rage. “Sophochka does like her games.”
Before I can figure out how to handle this situation, I hear the clatter of a tray being dropped. Caroline is standing behind us, trembling like someone just punched her in the stomach.
“Liar,” she says. “You are such a liar.”
“Caroline—,” I start, but she is already running toward the door.
I don’t catch up with her until she’s outside the auditorium, and I have to step in front of her to stop her from moving. The tear tracks running down her cheeks stop me cold.
“Caroline, none of what people are saying is true.”
“Then why did everyone see you having a lovers’ tuft in the hallway this morning?”
“A lovers’ tuft?”
“Yeah.”
Correcting her right now would be mean . . . and would probably result in my immediate incineration from the sister death ray. “That was not a lover’s tuft. That was a ‘stop stalking me’ tuft.”
“Vlad? Stalking you?” she scoffs, and runs her eyes over my outfit, which I admit happens to be a little mismatched due to my impending forced vampire marriage. “Please,” she says coldly.
Her dismissal stings. We have always had differing opinions on the amount of time and effort that should be put into designing an outfit, but she has never been outright rude. She knows it, too—for a second her disdain wavers, but then anger swamps it once again.
“You lied to me,” she says. “I asked you what happened at the party, and you lied. I asked you if Vlad was at our house, and you lied. It was his Hummer. You’ve been dating him the whole time.”
I grab her arms to try to get her to focus on me. “Caroline, he’s a crazy person. Nothing he could do would ever make me date him. Ever. I am doing everything I can to get him to stay away from me for good,” I say, but she slaps me off and starts to run down the hallway. I whirl around to call after her, and then freeze.
Vlad is standing at the end of the hallway, and from the way he is looking at me, I would say that he overheard everything. As Caroline runs by him, he makes a show of watching her disappear around the corner. When he turns back to me, he gives me a mean smile that I understand all too well.
Caroline makes it to her last two classes. I know because I check, earning a nice start to my tardy-slip collection. My plan is to find her at the end of the day, explain things as best I can, and whisk her away to the safety of home, where I will convince my father to start building a bomb shelter made entirely of garlic and sunlight. When the final bell rings, I try to rush out of study hall and intercept her at her locker, but Mr. Hanfield stops me.
“You can’t leave the book rack like that,” he says, pushing up his glasses and crossing his arms. “It’s a mess.”
The book rack is always a mess. Most of them don’t have covers, and all of them have at least one drawing of a penis in the margins. But I can’t get into an argument, not now. “I will do it next time, I promise.”
“No, I’m tired of you students treating things like they are yours to destroy.” He points to the books that hang over the edges of the rack, their pages mangled. “Do it now.”
I stack them up and jab them into the open spots. “There. Done.”
“That’s not finished,” he says.
“I don’t care!”
He screws up his face in disbelief. “Would you like detention, young lady?” he asks, grabbing his pad of conduct slips and starting to scribble something down.
I look to the hallway, now full of catcalls and laughs and meeting times. If I’m going to get detention anyway, might as well make it something worthwhile. While Mr. Hanfield’s head is still bowed, I slip out into the mass of exiting students and head straight for Caroline’s locker, which happens to be on the other side of the school.
She’s not there. I tell myself to be calm. Caroline is a popular girl of habit. After school, she and her friends can normally be found in the front hallway, perched on the empty ledge that used to contain photos of National Merit finalists until the year we didn’t have any. Now they are too embarrassed to fill it with anything else, and Caroline and company have moved in.
Today, however, Caroline is missing. After muttering a curse under my breath, I fight against the flow of exiting students and make my way to the side wall. When I get there, Caroline’s friends are busy arguing over whether or not belly rings are trashy. Amanda looks up as I approach.
“What do you want?” she asks, brushing at her designer jeans like I am emitting imaginary traitor dust.
“Have you seen Caroline?”
“No. She never showed up.”
“But she was supposed to meet you here? She never said anything about going home?”
“She wanted to spend the night at my house tonight.” She waits a second for it to sink in and then adds, “Because she didn’t want to see you,” in case I missed the insult.
“Do any of you have last period with her?”
“Hey, Marta,” Jessica says. “Where’s Caroline?”
“She has geometry with me. But she skipped out early, saying she felt sick. I think she wanted to go to the mall.”
It’s a possibility. Caroline has been known to blow a year’s allowance on boy-induced shopping sprees. But usually she takes yes-women and bag carriers. “Wouldn’t she have asked if you wanted to go?”
“My dad cut up my credit cards,” Marta says, shaking her head.
“I dated all the salespeople at Abercrombie and Fitch. I can’t show my face in there for at least another month,” says Amanda. “Evelyn?”
“She didn’t ask me,” Evelyn says, looking up from putting on bubblegum lip gloss. “And that’s weird, because we were supposed to go together the next time and buy matching pajama bottoms for next Friday’s spirit day.”
Marta claps excitedly. “The ones with the pink bunnies?”
“Yes!”
“You should see mine—they are covered in broccoli and say ‘Eat me.’”
“Cute! Mine have monkeys!”
“Mine have whales,” I say to regain their attention, and earn three surprised looks. I will not be sidetracked by pajama pants. “Call me if you see her,” I say, and then stand there stubbornly until I’m sure that they’ve all programmed the number I give them into their cells.
As I walk back through the hallways, I dig my phone out from the bottom of my bag. After a silent thank-you when it lights up fully charged, I dial home. Marcie picks up on the third ring, and I try to keep my voice calm and level when I ask if Caroline has come home.
“She called earlier and said that she was staying with Amanda. I asked if she wanted to pick up clothes, but she said that she would borrow something. She sounded upset,” Marcie says, and I can hear the concern through the crackle of indoor reception. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Just leftover boy stuff,” I lie.
“Then why are you calling?”
One point for Marcie. “One of her friends said that she had forgotten something in her locker and I wanted to bring it to her.”
Marcie seems to buy it. After claiming that I have to get to the tennis match, I hang up and head to the side hallway, planning on doing a few laps to hunt for Caroline. I’m starting to feel silly—she’s probably licking her wounds somewhere safe and warm and full of attractive men. Worst-case scenario, I’ll check the boys’ locker room.
I’m passing the open, chemical-smelling doors in the science hall when I hear a high-pitched giggle that I’d recognize anywhere.
“Neal, stop it,” Violet says, but it doesn’t sound like she wants him to stop anything. I run into a physics classroom only to walk in on Neal tickling Violet with a remote-controlled robot.
“Thanks for coming to the Robotics meeting,” he tells Violet, who has leaned over to tap the robot’s head with a very curious expression. “I don’t know where Adam is. He told me that he would be here.”
“We should name him,” Violet says. She picks up a pencil and taps the robot on its shoulders. “I dub thee . . . Simon.”
“Simon? Did you just name my robot Simon?”
“What is wrong with Simon? It was my brother’s name.”
“I didn’t know that you had a brother.”
Violet looks down at her hands with a mournful sigh. “He is gone now.”
“I’m sorry,” Neal says, immediately contrite.
“It does not matter anymore. It was a long time ago.” She shoots him a suggestive look from beneath her lashes. “A long, long, long, long—Sophie!” she says when she spots me in the doorway. “You are not supposed to be here.”
“Neither are you.”
“We got back early! And since I promised Neal that I would come to his Robotics meeting until he had more than one participant . . . What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find my sister or Vlad.”
Neal stops twirling Simon in a circle. “I saw them talking in the middle of last period.”
My stomach lurches. “You did?”
“Yeah. I forgot my graphing calculator, and her locker is by mine,” he says. “You know, ‘Garville’. . . ‘Garrett.’ It’s the curse of alphabetical order.”
I try to keep the panic from leaking into my voice when I ask my next question. “What were they saying?”
“I don’t know. I tend to tune her out. Most of her interactions involve really loud kissing.” He stops when he sees what must be my horrified expression. “Hey, it’s okay. It seemed to be a friendly conversation. I mean, at first she was mad, but then he stared soulfully into her eyes and then they walked off together.” Neal rolls his eyes, as if he hadn’t been doing his own soulful staring at Violet these past few weeks.
“Where were they going?” I ask.
“Um. To make out?”
“Where?”
Neal is starting to look nervous. He fiddles with the remote control, causing Simon to twirl in a confused circle. “I don’t know,” he says, uncomfortable. “Where do people usually make out?”
“I don’t have time for sarcasm right now, Neal.”
“But I really don’t know!”
I turn to Violet, unable to hide my panic.
“I will go find the others,” she says. “They should be at home now.”
“I’ll come with you,” Neal says, but Violet waves him back into his seat.
“Stay with Simon. This is a family matter.” When he protests, she stares into his eyes. Neal’s shoulders slump and he turns around to fiddle with a few loose screws.
“Violet!” I scold. “I’ve never seen you do that.”
She looks at me, innocent as a cartoon bunny. “What? We need him to stay! And the magazines said that we are allowed to use our feminine wiles. I do not understand your qualm.”
I doubt Seventeen would include vampire mind-control under the “feminine wiles” umbrella, but now is not the time. When she flounces away, I try not to worry that the cavalry is skipping.
I start to search for Caroline in earnest. Vlad disappeared with her in the early afternoon—too early for the direct sun not to drain him—so it would have to be somewhere in the building, somewhere removed and isolated. I check the auditorium, thinking that he could have her holed up backstage, but the heavy red curtain is open and a group of students is taking advantage of the unoccupied stage to practice choral parts for High School Musical. Next I scope out the band hallway, but it is brightly lit and filled with the sounds of tortured trombones and tubas. My search of the locker rooms—girls’ and boys’—turns up nothing other than a surprised and shirtless Danny Baumann who says, “Yo, South America. You’re kind of freaky, aren’t you?” and pats my dazzled head before he leaves.
Think, Sophie. Think. If he disappeared with her before fourth period, he had to take her somewhere that would have been empty since approximately one o’clock. That nixes all the rooms of the front office and the teachers’ lounge, and the library would have at least had the librarian and a few indentured study hallers. All that’s left is the cafeteria, and when I think about it, it makes sense. Today was not a Student Council day, and so it would have been free of any desperate souls doing their best to pad their college application. The cafeteria ladies clear out mid-afternoon, and so it may be the one place in the school that would have been empty when Neal says they disappeared.
Heart pounding, I start to run, taking the corners so fast that I’m lucky the halls are deserted. I burst through the doors and into the closed-down cafeteria, my footsteps echoing across the checkerboard tile. The fluorescent lights are off, and while the safety ones hanging near the front flicker dimly, the entire back half of the cafeteria is shrouded in darkness. To the front is the alcove that contains the lunch lines and, beyond that, the swinging doors that lead to the kitchens. Is it my imagination, or is there a light on behind those nautical peepholes?
As if in answer to my question, a sound rumbles up from behind the doors. This is it, I think, and I take a deep breath. Then it occurs to me that if Vlad does have Caroline tied up next to the instant mashed potatoes, I have no intelligent plan of action.
A weapon, I can at least find a weapon. But what? The cafeteria switched to plastic utensils long ago. And anyway, should I be looking for something wooden? More and more, my question-and-answer session with James is proving to be woefully inadequate. Next time I am in a room with any vampire—one that does not harbor violent and/or marital feelings toward me, of course—perhaps I should spend less time crushing on them and more time asking them to list their weaknesses.
Ignoring the escalated bump-bumping of my heart, I spot a cart of washed dishes next to the back wall and rush to inspect it. After a moment of deliberation, I grab the wooden spoon and a knife and do my best to file it into a point. Two thousand years of folklore can’t be that wrong, right? And besides, at the luau showdown, Vlad chased after Neville with a shattered piece of door. He doesn’t seem much for meta jokes.
I approach the swinging doors with as much stealth as I can manage. Pressing my ear against it, I listen for furious whispers or the struggle shuffle, but only hear a steady, persistent dripping and the low buzz of a running dishwasher. I nudge it open with my toe and peek inside—it is empty except for gleaming sinks, long metal counters, and a few large pots that must be the source of the school’s mystery chili. The light I saw comes from the two windows across the way. In a flash, I realize that there’s something else I should be noticing. The light is pale and gray. There is no sun.
Sliding across the tile, I go to the window. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and I can hear the tinny drops of rain hitting the aluminum sill. They could be anywhere. Caroline could be anywhere. I tell myself to calm down, but my chest is constricting so fast that it is difficult to think rationally. He is using her as bait, so he will not want to kill her. He still thinks I’m his ticket to the Danae, so he won’t want to kill me, either. This will be fine—I just have to keep moving.
My next step should be to see if Vlad’s car is still here. Tucking the spoon down my shirt and into my waistband, I jog back to the swinging doors. In my rush, I hit them with an ungainly smack and wince. When I open my eyes, the twin forms of Devon and Ashley are standing in front of me, side by side like a double statue. The low light plays tricks with their features, giving me the eerie sensation that I am looking at one face, one body, split in two by a magic trick gone horribly wrong. They move forward in grotesque tandem.
I stumble backward through the doors until my tailbone hits the hard edge of a metal counter. It vibrates beneath my fingers, setting off a high hum that competes with the rhythmic thumping of the dishwasher, which is sounding more and more like the rush of blood now pounding in my ears. “Where is my sister?” I ask as my hand searches for the reassuring hardness of the spoon’s handle.
They step into the light. First I see their square chins, then their lips, leeched of color and drawn into a flat line, and finally, their eyes. They are just as dead as usual—four shiny black buttons.
“I said, where is my sister?” I ask again.
The one on the left lifts his arm, and for the first time I notice that he is clutching a crumpled piece of paper. When I make no move to grab it, they step forward again. Realizing that they will not move until the delivery is complete, I flatten the note against the counter. A line of flowers and hearts dances across the top. There is only one person I know who has the guts to turn in decorated assignments. The paper is Caroline’s. The handwriting is Vlad’s. Who the dark red smudge—blood?—at the corner belongs to is anyone’s guess. I feel like throwing up as I begin to read.
Sophochka,
I would be most delighted if you would join me at our special place in the forest—your sister is already here and very eager to speak with you. However, please make haste. I fear I am impatient for your company, and night is coming fast.
With warm regards,
Vlad
I wad the note up into a ball and throw it toward the twin who carried the letter. He doesn’t even flinch. It bounces harmlessly off his chest, which does nothing to make me feel better or scare away the tears that are threatening. Leaning back, they beckon toward the exit in an eerie parody of an opening door. Inching forward, I start to move past them, only to feel two strong hands clamp around my arms and lift me up.