Melissa Darnell - Crave

When Greg looked back down at me, his smile wasn’t quite as blinding. “Yeah, sure. Next time.” Then he walked away.

I cringed, hoping I hadn’t hurt his feelings. Though why he’d care if I came to one of his games or not was beyond me.

I glanced at my friends and grinned. Their shocked expressions matched how I felt. “Did that just happen?” I asked, a short laugh slipping out.

Silence at our table, even as the other nearby tables recovered.

In the continuing silence from my friends, I leaned forward and looked more closely at them. “Um, hello? Anyone care to comment on that?”

Yeesh. Yes, it was true that boys never talked to me, and definitely none had ever made a point to come up to me during lunch. But my friends were acting like he’d also jumped up on the table and performed a song and dance for us or something. I’d never seen them all this speechless at the same time. I had the strong urge to snap my fingers under their noses just to bring them back to planet Earth.

I met Anne’s stare first, then Carrie’s, then Michelle’s. Without fail, each girl’s eyes widened as I met their gazes. Okay, this was getting weirder by the moment.

“Look at me.” Anne’s command, an echo of Dad’s demanding tone on Saturday, reminded me of my changed appearance. And of the crazy family secrets I wanted to forget as quickly as possible.

“Oh, yeah.” My good mood faded. “I forgot, you haven’t seen how weird I look.” Now Anne would tell me what an imaginative idiot I was and how I looked the same as I always did.

Her eyebrows drew together. “You don’t look weird. But you do look different, that’s for sure. What’d you do to your hair? It looks like a flippin’ Garnier commercial. Did you get it colored? It’s not so orange now. And it’s … poufy.”

Oh. So maybe I hadn’t imagined the changes in my appearance.

Feeling like a circus sideshow, I blushed. “I know, it’s kind of odd. But I swear I didn’t do anything new to it.”

“And your eyes,” Michelle whispered.

I looked at Michelle, who reminded me of a nervous rabbit today for some reason. Her gaze darted away.

Oh, crap, that’s right. Dad had mentioned that my gaze might have a strange effect on others. But he hadn’t said what kind of effect. He should’ve warned me that my friends would treat me like an alien that had crash-landed at our table.

“What do you think, Carrie?” I met her stare head-on, my hands clenching into fists under the table as fear battled with a tiny bit of curiosity. Exactly what did they see when they looked into my eyes now?

Carrie was the calmest, coolest, most levelheaded member of our group. She had a mind like a scientist, or the doctor she claimed to want to become someday. She could offer some practical, objective feedback.

I held her gaze for several seconds as something like the weekend’s panic threatened to overwhelm what little curiosity I’d had. Maybe I didn’t want to know, after all.

Then I saw it … that same fearful widening of the eyes just before Carrie looked away.

Ohhh, crap. And according to Dad, that was a vampire thing.

I tried to remember how to breathe past the growing thickness in my throat. The noise of the cafeteria ramped up, roaring in my ears like an angry ocean during a storm, even as too many different emotions from others rushed in waves over my skin. I wrapped my arms around myself in a futile effort to block them out.

Did this mean I was turning into a vampire?

“Here, let me see again.” This time, Anne’s voice was far from its usual command.

And suddenly, I did not want to make eye contact with her. I didn’t want to see my best friend look at me and become afraid. Then again, maybe it was all in how I was looking back at them, and I just needed to relax. Maybe then they would settle down and it would be no big deal.

I slid my gaze up and over, seeing Anne’s chin first, then her mouth and nose. I hesitated, took a deep breath, focused on being calm and hopefully projecting soothing thoughts with my eyes, then made direct eye contact. And heard her gasp.

Well, crap. That didn’t work, either. My gaze dropped to the tray of food I no longer wanted as my head began to swim.

After a minute, Anne took a deep breath before saying, “It’s okay, Sav. Your eyes aren’t that different, at least not in a way I can really describe. They just seem kind of … intense for some reason.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Michelle said. “Reminds me of how my mom looked at me when I accidentally broke the coffee table last month. Like she wanted to kill me.”

“But I’m not mad!” I blurted out. “In fact, I was pretty dang happy a minute ago. That guy who just came over, Greg Stanwick, is a junior and a varsity soccer player. He just introduced himself out of the blue while we were in the food line. It was kind of weird actually….” Weird didn’t even begin to cover all the recent things I’d been going through since last week. And couldn’t talk about with them. How in the world could my friends believe me, much less understand? They hated the Clann. Michelle thought witches sacrificed small animals, Carrie was too practical to ever believe in vampires and Anne’s Pentecostal family would never let her be friends with a half vampire/half witch. They barely liked her hanging out with a bunch of Methodists and Baptists. And I still hadn’t figured out how she’d convinced them to let her wear jeans every day and cut her hair. The other Pentecostals on campus had to wear skirts and couldn’t cut their hair, which they wore down to their knees.

“He’s a junior?” Carrie said, her stiff posture melting around the edges a little.

“Ooh, and a varsity soccer player, too?” Nothing like a new piece of gossip to make Michelle sound like her old self again. She claimed she wanted to be a nurse and help Carrie in the operating room someday, but Anne and I had a private bet that she would end up working for a gossip magazine instead.

A little of the tightness in my chest eased as all three of my friends attacked the juicy news, and gradually the tidal wave of everyone else’s emotions fell away. I forced a smile as I answered their questions about Greg and ended up giving a word-for-word playback of my earlier conversation with him. But I was careful never to look higher than their noses while I spoke. I didn’t want to risk freaking them out again with my eyes.

My vampire eyes.

“Oh, speaking of boys acting weird,” Michelle said. “Savannah, you seem to have another fan.”

As soon as Michelle said the words, I could feel it. Tristan was staring at me from the Clann kids’ table across the cafeteria. I didn’t know how I knew it was him, but I would have bet a lot of money on it.

“And he’s staring at you right now,” Michelle added with a grin, completely unsubtle in trying to bait my curiosity.

“Tristan Coleman, right?” I tried to keep my voice calm, hopefully even bored-sounding.

“How’d you know?” she gasped.

Because I can feel his gaze boring into the back of my dang head, I wanted to growl. Instead I shrugged and tried to act like it didn’t bug me.

“Well, I bet you didn’t know that he was asking about you last week.” Pride flooded her voice. “He said he and the Clann girls at his lunch table had heard you were sick and were worried about you.”

Whoa. Tristan had noticed I was gone and asked about me? Out of personal interest, or for the Clann?

Anne snorted. “Oh, please. As if any of those spoiled brats care about anyone outside their elite little circle.”

Unless their parents had told them all about me, and now they were worried I would attack them in the halls.