Once Justin turned toward the salad bar to join Tracy, Tony swallowed and then reeled on me.
“Okay, so Lenah, that was the first time since eighth grade or something that Justin Enos has said a word to me. I hate those guys. Every fiber of my being hates those guys. Whenever I know they’re going to something, I don’t go. On, like, purpose.”
“Just think of all the things you will see while snorkeling,” I said. “All the things you could draw.”
“Wait.” Tony blinked, the realization hitting him. He put down his fork. “You think, on the boat, Tracy will wear a really revealing string bikini?”
So snorkeling involved a boat. Interesting…
“Yeah,” I said, leaning in close. “You’ll have all kinds of body models,” I said with a smile.
Tony turned to look at the salad bar. “This could be really good,” he said. “I can stare at their boobs all day and pretend it’s for my art.”
I laughed out loud, a real laugh, from the middle of my gut.
Nighttime was the most comfortable time of the day. My breathing was smooth and rhythmic. My eyes blinked more slowly—it was easier to relax. The minutes passed too quickly, though; my new human body needed more time to sleep than I would have liked. That night, I sat on the couch with my feet curled underneath me. White candlelight flickered onto the hard cover of The Order of the Garter book that sat closed on the coffee table.
I leaned forward and lifted the heavy leather cover with my index finger. Inside, the title page read, A Complete History. I started to flip through the massive book, page by page.
I placed the book in my lap and ran my fingers across the thick leather. The title was raised in gold caps lettering. Before I knew what I was doing, I was flipping to the chapter titled “1348: The Beginning.” There, beneath the original names of the order, was a crude engraving of a portrait of a man. And underneath that engraving was the name Rhode Lewin. The British knight who pledged allegiance to King Edward III. There were his fine features and his angular jaw. The engraving did no justice to the vampire I was privileged to know. I ran my fingers over the engraving, yet all my fingers could feel was the smoothness of the page.
I looked at the bureau. There were the two photographs there. One of them was called a daguerreotype because it was a photo on a mirrored surface, a piece of glass no larger than a portrait photo. The daguerreotype was of the coven and me, but I wasn’t interested in that. I looked at the photograph of Rhode and me. I narrowed in on Rhode’s ethereal glow, the regal glance in his eye, and, of course, the smirk. My stomach lurched, and I took a breath. I got up from the couch and walked with my head down into my bedroom. There was an aching in my gut.
“Where are you now?” I whispered to the empty room.
I left the book open on the coffee table so Rhode’s engraving would continue to look up at the ceiling of the living room. The candles flickered, throwing moving shadows about the apartment. The wicks snuffed out sometime in the middle of the night, but I fell asleep while they burned. I watched the flames shiver by an invisible wind. The dance of their dark shadows reminded me of home.
Chapter Nine
“Claudia!” Roy Enos yelled. Claudia clutched a pair of boys’ tight white underwear in her hand and held it high above her head. She sprinted back and forth in front of Quartz dorm with Roy trailing in her wake. Eventually he tackled her, bringing her to the ground and rubbed her nose in the underwear. The rest of the Enos clan sat in a group laughing so hard Kate had to hold her hands over her stomach.
I sat behind a tree, watching. Although the girls continually called me a freak and a bitch, I was fascinated. Why did women in this age judge one another so bitterly? Perhaps they always had and I never knew—I was forced to watch it through the ages from the outside.
The days of September seemed to move with a lazy secondhand. I hoped this would continue because every day that passed was one day closer to the start of Nuit Rouge. I admit I was easily distracted. Between my classes and my library job, my days at Wickham were fixed on one thing: following Justin Enos. I suppose you could say that people have auras, that the energy they harbor inside radiates from within and casts a color around their bodies. With Justin, his aura was a bright gold light. He raced speedboats and drove a fast car. He played difficult sports and, a couple times, in those first few days, he came off the lacrosse field with blood on his uniform.
It wasn’t that hard to follow him. Most of the time he was at his usual spot in the library, in that little atrium. Over the tops of the books I stared at his white teeth and his spiked hairstyle. I didn’t even care that he was always with the Three-Piece and his brothers Curtis and Roy. Together, they moved like a pack of animals. The ritualistic behavior, the touching, the social interaction. I couldn’t explain how comfortable this made me. This is what I did as a vampire: watched you, stared at you until I knew how your chest looked when you breathed. Then, I killed you.
At Wickham, Tony was my only companion. His friendship kept me company as well as all the memories of my vampire life, piling on and on in my mind like a stack of books, each memory a leather binding, reaching higher and higher toward an endless ceiling.
Wednesday morning, I had anatomy class at 9 a.m. The day be fore, at breakfast, Tony and I had happily discovered we had this class together. Anatomy would meet twice a week for two hours.
“Skull and crossbones?” I asked Tony when I walked out of Seeker. He was sitting on the bench facing the parking lot, wearing a black T-shirt covered in skulls and crossbones. He was also wearing black pants and his two different black boots.
“In honor of blood and guts,” he said, referring to his T-shirt. Together, we walked away from Seeker and down the path toward the science buildings. He sipped on a cup of coffee. We followed the winding path for a quarter of a mile. I, of course, walked under the shade of the branches.
“What are you gonna do in the winter?”
“What?” I asked.
“When the leaves are off the trees and you don’t have any branches to hide beneath.”
Well, there was a stumper. Tony turned off the path.
“I’ll get a bigger hat,” I said, trying to smile and keep the conversation light.
Science classes were held in the buildings right before the stairs to the beach. The buildings were made of red brick and shaped in a semicircle. In the center was a fountain, a bronze sculpture of Madame Curie, a scientist who discovered the element radium. She sprayed water in an arc from her hands. We walked past her and into the middle building.
Tony looked me up and down. “We’re inside. You can take those off.”
I shoved the glasses in my bag. Tony and I walked past posters for safe sex, and Biology Club, and various students passed us, younger and older (again, relatively speaking), and I watched them as much as they watched me. Tony pointed at a door at the end of the hallway. The science classes were on the first floor.
“If you could be anything when you grow up, what would it be?” Tony asked.
I looked down at the linoleum floor as I walked. It was newly waxed, and my boots made a sharp click as Tony and I made our way down the hallway.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My life’s been really…complicated.” It was true. I’d never had much to do besides read, study, and, well—murder.
“Come on, there’s gotta be something you like,” Tony said as we finally approached the science lab door.
What did I like? I twisted the onyx ring around my finger as I thought it over. I had almost forgotten I was wearing it. Though I was reminded of it in moments like this, when I wanted to think. I liked biology. I loved to investigate the workings of the human construction. Mostly for my own appetite. I looked down at my fingers working the onyx ring in circles and I stuck my hands in my pockets.
The biology classroom was simple enough. There were lab tables, each with two at a seat. A line of windows faced the Madame Curie sculpture and underneath were cabinets. Each table had its own sink a
nd Bunsen burner, which was a small flame used for science experiments. I followed behind Tony into the back of the room, where there was a free table. I never got a chance to answer his question because the rest of the class filed in behind us.
I slid into the seat next to Tony. He sipped his coffee and then took out a book from his bag. I did the same. A young teacher came into the room, followed by a few latecomers, including Justin Enos. My heart thumped at his unexpected appearance. This was the only other class we had together besides English. I looked down, away from him, and at my blank notebook. I smoothed back my hair and threw the longer strands over my shoulder. Tony was chatting up someone in front of us, but I tried to stay focused. I wanted to stare at Justin, talk to him some more. I wanted to snorkel. I wanted it to be Saturday.
“AP Anatomy is the toughest class at Wickham. I tried to call in sick for the placement test last semester, but when my sister found out she hit me on the head with a violin bow until I left to take the test,” I heard Tony say to the person in front of us.
“Your sister?” I asked. “I didn’t know you had any siblings.”
“She’s really into education. Rides my ass.”
Odd. No one had made me responsible for myself in so long that it didn’t seem to matter what I did or didn’t do. After all, the only reason I was there at Wickham was because Rhode loved me and had died proving it.
The teacher placed a briefcase on the table. Everyone reached for their notebooks, but the teacher smiled.
“You can take out a piece of paper and pen, but you don’t have to. Not yet.”
She reached down to the floor and lifted a cooler up to the top of her desk.
“I’m your AP Anatomy teacher, Ms. Tate. I’m brand new to Wickham Boarding School. I hope you’ll give me not only your attention but respect.” No one said anything, which I suppose was appropriate. “Today, I am giving you an example of what you will be doing in my classroom this semester.”
She reached into the cooler, took out a white thing in a plastic bag, and placed it on the main desk so we could all see it. The bag was so cold that it was foggy inside. We couldn’t see what was inside, not even me. I couldn’t see through fog.
“Now,” Ms. Tate said, and dimmed the lights. She pulled down the screen to begin her lecture. The white thing in the plastic bag was still on the desk. I didn’t want to look—I already had a hunch that it was something dead. In the moment, I couldn’t have scripted it any better. Justin, who was in the front row, glanced back at me and smiled. I felt a tingle in the pit of my stomach. I smiled, too, but just barely.
Ms. Tate asked if anyone did the summer reading. No one did. “Well, if you did, you would know we’re starting this semester with blood.”
Despite everything in my body, I rolled my eyes.
The lights clicked off. I instinctively looked around me—at the classroom now shrouded in a gray light. Ms. Tate flipped on a switch at the back of a small machine at the front of the room. There was a low, fluttering sound, kind of like a hum. Then an image of a human heart, a real heart, shined onto a screen. It was like a magnifying glass, only very large—another piece of technology, another marvel of the modern world.
“Now,” Ms. Tate said, “if any of you had done the summer reading, then you would be able to identify the key elements of the heart. They are the…” Ms. Tate was leading.
No one answered. But I knew.
I could hear Rhode in my mind. We were in London in a tavern late at night. I had only been a vampire for four days and I had so many questions. Even though I was watching Ms. Tate point at the three unmarked sections of the heart, I could only hear Rhode.
“You will have instincts now that you didn’t before.”
“Like?” I asked.
The rain pelted the windows of a British tavern in the fifteenth century. The flicker of the candles made Rhode’s porcelain features glow, and I wondered if I looked the same in his eyes. Around us, men and women clinked glasses and ate stew from ceramic bowls. I looked at the hearty stew but turned away, uninterested.
“You will know exactly which part of the neck to bite. You will become an expert on creatures that you never knew existed. You will feed and you will sink your teeth with such precision that your prey will die instantly.”
Over the years, this technique was perfected, but Rhode was right. If you bit into the jugular vein on the neck, then it would be connected to the right ventricle, which was responsible for pumping blood in and out of the heart. It was the most direct way. The most pleasurable way. Because the vampire bite was not painful—it was the most complete feeling of satisfaction that a human could ever experience.
The lights clicked back on in the biology classroom but the mood had changed dramatically. Ms. Tate was monstrously disappointed that no one had done their summer reading. After snapping on plastic gloves, she took the white mass out of the bag. A couple of the girls gasped, and one of them shrieked. Ms. Tate dropped the dead body of a cat onto a metal plate.
“Yes, I know, shocking. But this is physiology, so you better get used to the idea of dealing with dead specimens in this class.”
I couldn’t help it. I was rising up in my seat to get a better look.
“Furthermore, you should all recognize this as a cadaver of a cat.”
A girl in the front row burst into tears, gathered her things, and ran out of the room. As the door closed behind her, Ms. Tate looked back to the room and spoke in a much softer tone.
“This is an AP-level class. Achieving an A will ensure that you will not only be in advanced classes in your college years but will put you ahead when compiling your applications. Anyone else who has a problem cutting open or dealing with dead specimens should leave now.”
Ms. Tate moved the cat to the top of a rolling cart. The cart was similar to those in the library except underneath it were scalpels, tiny knives, and assorted tubes.
“Anyone want to brave the cat? Cut her open so we can take a look inside and see for the first time perhaps what it means to see how a body works?”
No one did.
I looked left at Tony, who was staring at Ms. Tate with wide eyes. I glanced forward at Justin’s rigid back.
Cut it open? It was dead already, so there was no sport in it. Besides, I felt no fear of something dead. I looked around. A guy in the front row doodled on a piece of paper. A girl next to him flipped through pages in her textbook and kept her eyes to the desk. Death was the ultimate fear to mortals. I breathed a weighted sigh. I could take breaths and feel the warmth of my fingers, though I was no human. I was a killer, a vampire stuck in the body of a sixteen-year-old girl.
I raised my hand. What would be so hard about dealing with a dead carcass?
Ms. Tate smiled wide.
“I didn’t anticipate anyone actually being brave enough. Ms. Beaudonte, please come up.”
Every single person turned around to stare directly at me. Justin raised his eyebrows. I walked up the center aisle and placed my hand out to take the knife.
“No, no, Lenah. You need gloves.”
“Oh, right. Of course,” I said, and took a pair of latex gloves in Ms. Tate’s outstretched hand.
The cat was skinned, without fur, and had been preserved in formaldehyde for so long that it didn’t even really look like a cat anymore. The skin was pruned as though all the water had been sucked out of it. The mouth was open, and the tongue was yellow and a pasty white. In my past life I would have ripped the thing open with my teeth, but this was a mortal life now. Bacteria and germs mattered.
I put on the plastic gloves, which smelled like rotten eggs. I used the tiny knife and cut the rubbery carcass so it exposed the preserved insides. As the tiny knife cut through the skin, I felt a slack in my shoulders and I exhaled for one brief moment. I was doing something I knew: cutting open a body.
The carcass had already been precut, but I wanted to make sure I could expose the heart. So I used my fingers and pulled the skin open a litt
le more. The pressure of the rubbery, dead skin against my fingers reminded me of the many nights the coven spent digging holes in the earth. I helped them pick up the bodies and heave them into the ground. This cat had been dead six weeks. A few people gasped behind me. A lens suspended above the tray projected the image of the cat onto a screen.
“Yes,” Ms. Tate explained. “The cat’s innards are too small for me not to project them. So, Tony Sasaki,” she said, checking a class roster, “where should Lenah point if she wants to show us the right ventricle?”
Tony immediately started flipping through his textbook.
“Um…,” he said, stalling.
“I see Mr. Sasaki has also not done the reading.”
A couple of students laughed.
“What about the left ventricle, Tony?” I thought Ms. Tate was kind of relaxed initially, but now she was picking on Tony, my friend. His cheeks were red, and students were starting to stare, even Justin.
“The way you phrased the question is confusing, ma’am,” I said without giving her time to stop me. “The right ventricle is on the left, but only to the animal. To us, it’s on the right side, facing me.” I just kept going. “This is the ventral part of the cat.” I pointed at the body of the animal. “Because the cat is on its back and the stomach is exposed.”
Ms. Tate crossed her arms in front of her body and let me finish explaining the particular portions of the heart that I could remember.
“What is the system called?” Ms. Tate asked. Her blue eyes were fixed on me. I could tell she wanted me to be right. She wanted me to explain it correctly, not like Professor Lynn, the English teacher, who wanted to make a fool out of me.
I thought of the books in my Hathersage library and the nights looking at diagrams by candlelight.
“The circulatory system,” I said honestly, and handed the tiny knife over.
“Thank you, Ms. Beaudonte,” she said.
I knew I ripped that cat open as a test—for myself. To see if being human would make death and decomposition more difficult to bear. It didn’t. My heart fluttered, and I blinked my eyes. I ate, drank, and slept. I did what a human did, sure. But so far, humanity was mocking me. In the moment I pried the folds of the cat’s skin open, I felt nothing but a relief from frustration. When I sat back down next to Tony, Ms. Tate continued with her lecture.
Infinite Days Page 10
