Team Human

by Justine Larbalestier

  “That want to eat me?”

  “The Donner party?” Kit pointed out. “Jeffrey Dahmer?”

  “Okay, but humans eating humans happens in extreme circumstances involving a very few individuals, unlike with vampires, where it happens on days ending in y!”

  Kit stopped looking smug about his brilliant historical point. “I’m only saying that they’re people,” he mumbled. “They’re just different.”

  “They’re very different,” I told him. “It’s hard not to be scared of that. It’s harder to understand that my best friend wants to be one of them.”

  “Well,” Kit said, “maybe the zombies will make her a bit less keen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did they make you less keen?”

  Kit looked away, lashes lowered, at the suddenly fascinating hospital curtains. “It’s different for me,” he said. “They’re my shade. They’ve always expected that I’d become one of them. I don’t know how to be anything else—I don’t want to be anything else,” he added defiantly.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Kit, his hackles going down. “I can see how you might want something different for your friend,” he admitted, almost reluctantly. “She’s got a lot of options. It’s a big decision to make. Also, and I say this with, like, affection and everything, but risking being a zombie for Francis’s sweet sweet love does seem a bit crazy.”

  “A bit?” I said. “You think?”

  I grinned, and, still pale and a little shell-shocked, Kit grinned back. Just like that, I had an ally.

  “Do you think you could talk to her? Tell her what you told me?” I asked.

  If someone besides me said it to her, maybe it would sink in.

  “Sure.” Kit smiled at me. Not a pay-attention-to-my-wit smile. This smile was slow and warm, and made me want to kiss him again. Not that I would. I coughed and changed the subject. “How was Cathy doing back there with the zombies?”

  “Not getting sick,” Kit said, his smile turning wry. “Which makes her tougher than me, at least.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to her. She’s not going to transition without hearing all the pros and cons.”

  I sighed and bowed my head. “She’s so in love.”

  “Mel,” Kit said suddenly. “I know this might not be the perfect moment to mention this, since you just saw me get sick four times and all, but I liked that kiss.”

  My head jerked up so fast, I almost bit my tongue. (It occurred to me that biting your tongue was probably very painful for vampires. Another thing to point out to Cathy.)

  Kit was blushing again. “When you and I kissed the other day at the beach, I mean.”

  “I know which kiss.”

  “Right, of course. I’m trying to say it was nice and, um, I don’t think I told you that. I wanted you to know that I liked it. It was warm. And, um, oh, Cathy!” He turned. “How are you doing, Cathy?”

  I turned too. Cathy was possibly a bit paler than usual. The overly bright lighting made it hard to tell. She did not look anything close to as shaken as Kit had.

  “Are you okay, Kit?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be up and ready to go in a few seconds. The doctor said quite a few people respond to the smell like that.”

  “It was bad,” Cathy agreed sympathetically. “Nobody could blame you for losing it. That was quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever smelled.”

  “Or looked at.”

  “Oh, yes.” Cathy shook her head. “The poor things are all old and withered. They can barely move. It seems cruel to keep them alive just to look at.”

  That was so Cathy. Not overcome with horror, not swearing she would never risk becoming such a thing. No, she’d decided that she felt bad for the zombies.

  “The pamphlets say that zombies don’t feel anything—that part of their cortex is the first thing destroyed by zombification,” I pointed out to her.

  There had been a lot of pamphlets in the waiting room.

  “But their eyes, Mel, their eyes! They were so full of pain.” Cathy shuddered, more upset by the horror she could imagine than the horror she had seen. “Francis has promised me that if that happens, he will end my suffering himself.”

  My hands clenched. Kit caught my eye, his own eyes steady. “No second thoughts, then?” he asked, very lightly. Much more lightly than I would’ve been able to.

  “Of course not,” Cathy said, sounding surprised. “It was terrible, of course, but we haven’t learned anything we didn’t know already.”

  So the zombies’ eyes were full of suffering? There was a lot of suffering going around.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Clues over Cantonese

  “I can’t believe you didn’t even get to see the zombies,” my little brother, Lancelot, said scornfully at dinner that night. “That’s such crap.”

  “Lance,” Mom said, her voice stern.

  We were all sitting down to a proper Cantonese meal. My dad’s only third-generation American, and occasionally he has fits of guilt about us kids being raised not knowing about our heritage. My mom’s family has been here since the Gold Rush and she’s a lot more easygoing, but if Dad wants to cook us a ton of Cantonese dishes, she’s not going to turn that down.

  Mom is always very keen on someone else doing the cooking.

  Normally, I wouldn’t turn it down either. But today my gai lan—Chinese broccoli, so much better than normal broccoli—in oyster sauce didn’t look as good as usual. I might’ve read too many zombie pamphlets.

  Or it might have been the memory of Cathy’s face, distressed but still totally determined to do something that would destroy her.

  Or maybe Kit’s face, pale and sick, talking like he had no other choice.

  “I can’t believe Cathy didn’t take one stupid picture,” Lance continued. “She’s always said I was like her own little brother. What good is that, if it doesn’t score me one lousy picture of a zombie with its eyeball on its cheek?”

  “Lancelot!” Dad exclaimed. “We’re trying to have a nice meal and celebrate our heritage. Celebrate it now, or celebrate it at Cantonese classes over the summer. It’s your decision.”

  Lance planted his face in the honey-garlic spareribs.

  “You’ll be doing the dishes for that,” put in Mom, looking pleased. Any excuse to not do them herself.

  “But, seriously, how was the whole business down at the ZDU?” Mom asked, deploying her chopsticks to steal a massive wedge of the flowering chives stir-fry. “I hear it’s pretty rough on the younger ones who go down for the first time.”

  “Yeah. A boy I know got sick,” I said without thinking. “But Cathy was fine.”

  Mom clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I don’t know what Valerie is thinking.”

  I raised an eyebrow. My mom and Cathy’s mom weren’t exactly friends: They’re not each other’s kind of people.

  My parents used to have dinner with Anna’s, though.

  “Valerie was down by the courts investigating the laws related to vampire transitioning,” Mom said. “She told me Cathy had asked her to sign the permission forms for transition. The idea is crazy. Cathy’s got her whole life ahead of her. There’s no need to let her rush into a decision. I don’t think anyone should be allowed to transition before eighteen. Except the underage terminal patients, of course.”

  “In some states, you can’t transition until you’re twenty-one,” Dad said. “I think that’s fair, myself. Why should you be able to drink blood before you can drink alcohol?”

  “They’d never pass something like that in Maine,” Mom said, rolling her eyes. “Not in the vampire state.”

  Mom and Dad swung into a debate about the laws controlling vampirism. I passed the time by grabbing a hank of Lance’s hair and lifting him off the spareribs. He had honey-garlic sauce on his forehead.

  “Sōng, the fact of the matter is that vampires signed the Declaration of Independence as wel
l—”

  “Megan, I’m not disputing that—though I also don’t believe the rumor that Thomas Jefferson was a vampire—”

  Lance leaned toward me, one elbow on the table, and whispered: “Want to play soccer later?”

  “I have homework,” I whispered back.

  “Just for a little while,” he said, giving me a sweet, winning smile. The effect was spoiled by the honey-garlic sauce. “Besides, you’ve already gotten perfect SATs. Any college you want to go to will take you. Why do your homework?”

  “Almost perfect is not perfect. Plus there’s the little matter of my GPA, Lottie. Like you’d ever skip your homework.”

  He rolled his eyes at me yearningly. “Soccer’s good for your brain.”

  Because I am weak, I said, “Maybe,” which any little brat of a brother knows how to parlay into a “yes.”

  The whole Cathy situation had obviously totally demoralized me.

  “I still can’t believe Valerie,” Mom said, veering back to the original topic. “I know Cathy’s very romantic but I still can’t believe she’s considering it! She knows what a vampire did to the Saunderses.”

  That was a cue if I ever heard one.

  “Have you—talked much to Principal Saunders since Dr. Saunders, you know—” I said, laying down my chopsticks.

  “Leila won’t even return my calls,” Mom said. “I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. I couldn’t believe it of Chris Saunders. He was such a good doctor: Everyone said so, and you could tell, the way he talked about his patients. So much sympathy, but at the same time, the right distance. I would never in a million years have thought he’d do something like that.”

  I thought about Anna saying she didn’t think her dad could fall in love with someone like that. I thought about Francis asking me not to tell Principal Saunders what he was doing at school.

  “I’d have expected a vampire to attack him first,” Dad said, nodding in perfect agreement with Mom for a change. “Not that Chris ever spilled anything he shouldn’t have, but that secretary of his—Adam Wasserman—he used to tell stories that would scare you away from the Shade for life.”

  “Really?” I asked, and made an encouraging hmmm sound as Mom and Dad told a couple of stories about vampires who took breakups very badly—household pets were mentioned—and this one vampire who was sure she was Lord Byron, and not in a past life, either. “So the secretary still works at the Center for Extended Life Counseling, right?” I asked at last, as innocently as I could.

  “That’s right,” Mom said. “Honey, do you remember the one about the vampire with the drinking problem? He’d hang around bars and pay people to get drunk and then let him feed off them. …”

  When they had exhausted all the stories either of them could remember, Dad looked at me, frowning in that particular parental way, half worry and half love.

  “This whole Cathy business got you down, my melodious one?” he asked. “Don’t worry about it. She’s a smart girl. I’m sure she’ll think better of it.”

  I looked at the table so he wouldn’t see me planning.

  “I’m sure she will.”

  I’d make sure she would.

  Later, after I’d played penalty shootout with Lance until it was dark out and he’d scored four goals on me—little weasel!—I left the scene of my horrible defeat and bounded up the steps to the porch swing.

  “Oh, c’mon, Mel, just a bit longer.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Lottie!” I yelled.

  My T-shirt was stuck to me with sweat. I pulled the material free so I could feel the night air on my skin, plucked my phone out of my pocket with my other hand, and called Kit.

  He’d agreed with me about Cathy. He was an ally in the enemy camp. So I’d asked him for his number. It had nothing to do with any kissing incidents or the liking of them. Well, almost nothing.

  Kit answered on the third ring.

  “Hi!” he said. “Hey! Don’t go away, okay? I have to run outside with the phone because my shade have super hearing and they’re all incredibly nosy.”

  There was a sound I couldn’t quite hear on Kit’s end of the line.

  “Sorry,” said Kit, already sounding out of breath as he ran. “Except for my Uncle Francis, who wishes to inform us both that he would never dream of displaying unseemly curiosity or eavesdrop on any conversation, personal or otherwise.”

  “Oh, Francis,” I said, sighing dramatically. “What a man. If only Cathy hadn’t got there first.”

  Kit yelped with laughter, and then there was a series of bumps and rustling noises.

  “Hi, Kit?” I called out. “Kit?”

  “Sorry about that!” said Kit. “Jumped over a fence, dropped the phone. Don’t go away.”

  I smiled. “Okay.”

  Kit’s breathing came faster, and it sounded like he’d dropped the phone again. Finally, he said: “That should be far enough.”

  “I imagine so,” I said. “Since I imagine you’re now on Mars. You need to get your breath back?”

  “I’m good,” Kit gasped. “You sound a bit short of breath too.”

  “Mmm,” I said, and was tempted for an instant to tell him I’d been kissing some extremely handsome guy who hadn’t been raised by vampires and thus hadn’t presumed it was a prelude to monkey sex. “I was playing soccer with my baby brother.”

  “I’m not a baby!” screamed Lancelot, bouncing the soccer ball from his head to his foot and back again.

  “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Lottie?” I yelled back.

  “Don’t call me Lottie!”

  “You have a brother?” Kit asked.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting the other way on the swing to get away from Lancelot’s shrieks.

  “And you play soccer together?” Kit asked, as if I’d mentioned deep-sea diving instead of soccer. “That sounds nice.”

  “Your family’s not that into soccer?”

  “Well, no,” Kit said. “Not that we don’t do activities together. Francis taught me how to waltz.”

  I burst out laughing. “I’m sorry—what?”

  His voice warmed. I could imagine him being delighted he’d made someone laugh, even over the phone.

  Maybe not just someone. Maybe delighted he’d made me laugh.

  “Yes, well. At first he tried to instruct me and Mom together, but Mom said she’d never liked waltzing much herself, and Minty thought it was hilarious to go too fast deliberately so I felt sick, and in the end Francis said that we were all impossible and nobody was properly dedicated to the child’s education or ever thought about how I would conduct myself in society and how it would reflect on them all. So Francis ended up waltzing with me himself.”

  “Are you a credit to Francis?” I asked, solemnly.

  “Oh, I’m an excellent waltzer. Sadly, I don’t actually know how to lead …”

  I thought of several excellent jokes about Kit’s first ball gown and also his dance card, but I pulled myself back. This was not flirting time, especially not flirting time with someone who was determined to become a vampire. This was for Anna and Cathy: This was saving-friends time.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Uh,” Kit said. “Nothing! Nothing, I am free. What do you—do you want to do something? With me?”

  “I thought we could go down to the Center for Extended Life Counseling.”

  Maybe Dr. Saunders’s secretary, Adam Wasserman, would have something to say that would cast light on what was going on with Principal Saunders. It was worth a shot.

  And from what my parents had said, he’d have stories to tell about what went wrong with vampires even when the transition went right. I’d have Kit with me, someone Cathy couldn’t possibly think was biased against vampires. Someone who could tell Cathy exactly what he’d heard, and be believed.

  “Um, dunno,” Kit mumbled.

  “Kit—” I started, not actually above begging.

  “Sorry, Mel!” Kit said quickly. “I wasn’t talking to you. Yes, I�
��ll go with you to—uh, that sounds like an extremely strange date.”

  “Well, it’s not a date,” I said. “I just thought—that you’d maybe find it interesting. Er. We could get coffee afterward.”

  It was only polite! I didn’t want to seem like I was using him as nothing but an anti-vampirism mouthpiece.

  “Great,” said Kit.

  “So who were you talking to?”

  “Huh? Oh, Mrs. Appleby. You remember her?” Kit asked, and I did: the fourteen-year-old married vampire. “She, uh. She asked if I was talking to my sweetheart.”

  I had nothing to say to that. So I went with: “See you tomorrow, Kit, bye!” and hung up extremely fast.

  These saving-your-friends missions were turning out to be very complicated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Center for Extended Life Counseling

  “Hi,” I said. “I don’t have an appointment. I mean obviously I don’t, on account of I’m not a vampire.” Beside me, Kit squirmed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” I amended.

  Adam Wasserman, former secretary of Dr. Saunders, had kind eyes and looked as if he enjoyed a bit of a laugh. Unfortunately, right now I suspected he was quietly laughing at me.

  “Actually, the doctors here see many humans. Ones who are dating vampires, ones who are considering transitioning. Some who work with vampires and are struggling with it.”

  He nodded at the patients, and Kit and I turned slightly to look. Even though we’d arrived at the center not long after dusk, almost half were human.

  “Right,” I said.

  Now that I came to think of it, Anna had mentioned that Dr. Saunders had human patients, too. It was just that the vampire stories were the dramatic ones, and I’d assumed that human patients were pretty rare. I supposed it shouldn’t be a surprise that so many humans had vampire problems. Wasn’t I dealing with them myself?

  I decided the subtle approach was getting me nowhere, laid my hands flat on the desk, and leaned in.

  “Look,” I said quietly. “I’m friends with Anna Saunders, Dr. Saunders’s daughter, and—”

  “Excuse me,” Adam said, answering the phone. “Center for Extended Life Counseling.”