Tamara Summers - Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

“Is he going to wake up like us?” Zach asked. “I mean, will he be a vampire? Should we stake out his grave?”

Olympia winced at his choice of words. She’s a little sensitive about things that can kill us. Hardly anything in our house is made of wood, for instance.

“It depends,” Olympia said. “If he was bitten before he died, then yes, he’ll become a vampire.” She pointed at the river of blood dripping down the steps. “But judging from that, he was killed first and then bitten. Otherwise the vampire would have drained much more from him before tossing him out the window. My guess is that the vampire decided to have a snack after throwing him through the glass, but she—”

“Or he!” I protested.

“—was probably interrupted, since there’s still so much blood inside the corpse too.”

“This,” I said, “is a seriously sick conversation.” I haven’t entirely adjusted to the whole yum, blood, yum aspect of being a vampire. My body wants it, but my head is still like, Ew, that is BLOOD, time to faint.

“I’ll have to talk to Wilhelm about this,” Olympia said with a sigh. Wilhelm is my vampire “dad”. (He prefers the word “patriarch”. If you call him Dad, even ironically, he will flail his pale arms around and make outraged huffing noises through his moustache.) He mostly lies in his coffin, brooding and issuing proclamations about how degenerate the world is today. Apparently things have gone way downhill since, like, the Middle Ages.

“Well, tell him I said I didn’t do it,” I said.

“Who else could it be?” Zach said. Very helpful. Thanks, Zach.

“It could be you ,” I suggested. “Whoever said you had good impulse control?”

That was kind of a low blow, I’ll admit. He flushed angrily, which was only possible, by the way, because of that two gallons of blood breakfast I mentioned earlier.

“ I was on a blood run with Bert last night,” he said icily.

“That’s true,” Olympia agreed. “They were gone for hours.”

“Where were you ?” Zach asked.

Out by myself, as usual, which he totally knew. If I’d known he was out, I might have stayed home and watched TV instead. But lately I’ve been in Zach-avoidance mode, which means lots of long, solitary midnight walks until I’m sure he’s asleep. (He’s still on a more human schedule than the rest of us.) Doesn’t make for a great alibi, unfortunately.

“At the cemetery,” I said with a sigh. I know – I’m such a cliché. But it’s really peaceful at night. I like looking at the gravestones and trying to guess whether any of their inhabitants came back as vampires too. Also, moonlight makes us stronger, which is handy when you have to put up with Physics and Gym the next day. I’m sure vampires back in Transylvania in Wilhelm’s day never had to suffer like this.

“If it wasn’t one of us,” Olympia said, “that would mean there’s another vampire in this town.” Probably more than one, in fact. We mostly travel in families, just like regular, non-bloodsucking folks. It’s easier to blend in that way.

I scanned the growing crowd of students in the parking lot for anyone who looked suspicious. Or, you know, hungry.

Mostly everyone just looked sleepy. I mean, it was six o’clock in the morning. Dead body or not, that’s way too early for anyone to be awake. I felt that way as a human and I definitely feel that way as a vampire. This is when I should be going to bed and sleeping away all the daylight, but Olympia believes in acting as much like a human as possible. Trust me, I fall asleep the minute I get home from school, though. I wake up with the darkness and do my homework at three o’clock in the morning.

Most of the faces around us looked tired, like they’d been up late too.

But there was one guy…

OK, I’ll admit it. He caught my attention mostly because he was hot. I mean, sure, I’m a bloodsucking vampire, but I am also still a teenager in a new school; hence, I am always on the lookout for hotties. This one looked like he might be part Japanese, like me. But he had to be part something else too – maybe Polynesian? Hawaiian? – because his hair was dark and curly, and frankly he looked as if he ought to be surfing, or at least starring in a movie about surfing. He was leaning against a black car a few feet away from the police barricade, all casual and whatever: Oh, look, a murder…whatevs. He had one of those cute little rope necklaces around his neck and he was wearing sunglasses.

But with my vampire super-sight – all charged up from last night’s moonlit saunter – I could see his eyes through the dark lenses, and that’s how I could tell that he was staring intently at the body. It wasn’t the Whoa, dude, there’s a dead guy on our steps kind of staring everyone else was doing.

It was more like I know exactly what that is.

OF COURSE, I’M not a mind reader. Though I hear that’s a nifty power, which, like mesmerising people, you can use only after a lot of practice and about a thousand years as a vampire. (Just in case that’s true, I’m careful not to think any of my more “degenerate” thoughts around Wilhelm.) So I couldn’t be sure what the hot guy’s expression meant. But I certainly wanted to know.

“Maybe I should go investigate,” I said, my hand already on the door handle.

“Wait,” Olympia said. “Let’s observe for a moment first.” I assume her high level of caution is how she’s managed to survive seven hundred years, but it drives me bats. (Ha ha ha! More vampire puns! OK, OK, I’ll stop.)

Well, I don’t know what she was observing, but I kept my “observational” eyes on Mr Hot. Could he be a vampire? He seemed a lot more tan than me, but maybe he was just born with darker skin.

The problem is that vampires don’t look particularly unusual most of the time. I think my canine teeth are maybe a teeny bit longer, but they only get really long and pointy and obvious right before I bite someone. Zach’s normal smile, for instance, is toothy and obnoxious, but not in a Look out! he’s going to bite! kind of way. It’s more like Look out, he’s going to hit on you, and then you’ll discover that he never flosses! And if you ask me, dental hygiene should rank pretty high on a vampire’s to-do list. Sure, we can’t get cavities, but Zach proves that bad breath can be eternal.

Other than his meaty breath, I don’t think there are any clues about Zach that would make someone think he’s a vampire. He looks like any other doofy seventeen-year-old jock, all muscles and shiny, sandy-blond hair and stupid jokes about body parts. None of that dark, pale, brooding vampire stuff that you read about. He’s tall, but that’s where the resemblance to Dracula ends.

My new best friend Vivi thinks Zach is dreamy , which I find faintly horrifying. (Despite the fact that I once felt the same – which is even more horrifying.) But I can’t convince her of how wrong she is, because she thinks I’m just like, “Ew, that’s my brother,” when of course the truth is that he’s not my brother at all. And I am definitely an expert on his long-term dateability potential.

Zach has no problem with the blood-drinking part of being a vampire, by the way. He mixes it into his morning health shakes with raw eggs and protein powder and all kinds of other unmentionable goop that he says will make him more buff. No one’s had the heart to tell him that vampires pretty much stay the same shape they were in when they died. Crystal will never lose that last five pounds; Bert will always look like a teeny-weeny accountant, despite being in reality stronger than any of the men in town. That growth spurt I was sort of hoping for in my senior year is never going to happen – but on the other hand, I can eat as much ice cream and as many cheeseburgers as I want, which I’ll admit almost makes up for the fact that I still have to drink blood to survive.