Still Sucks to Be Me: More All-True Confessions of Mina Hamilton, Teen Vampire

by Kimberly Pauley

  “So,” I say, again trying for the casual voice. “Why did Ernie call you anyway?”

  “He didn’t call me specifically. He called Lowell’s and I happened to get the phone.” He doesn’t look all that happy about it either.

  “Okay, so why did Ernie call Lowell?” I have to admit I feel a little better that he didn’t call Cameron directly. And it does explain how he got there so fast. Lowell’s is really close to Ernie’s.

  “Mina, I—” he stops talking as Grady heads straight at us. Oh, cheese. Just what I need. Grady might think he’s all Romeo to my Juliet, but I’m no Juliet. Heck, he’s no Romeo. And who’d want to be either one of them anyway? How about some characters that stay alive for love for a change? Or undead, at least. Not that I’d do any one of those things for Grady. If only he would understand that.

  “Hi y’all!” Grady plunks himself down beside me and does his annoying over-the-shoulder arm thing. He steals one of Cameron’s dwindling supply of fries with the other hand. “Mina, I hear there’s some guy staying with y’all now. Don’t tell me that he’s that boyfriend you keep claiming you have?”

  I grit my teeth as Serena kicks me under the table. “No,” I say, “he’s an intern with Dr. Jonas, that guy my Dad works for. We’re just giving him a place to stay.” Grady grins even bigger than normal. Cameron looks quizzical. Serena bites her tongue. I feel like biting mine.

  “Good! So, what time should I pick you up for the homecoming dance? Did you want to go early to watch the game and bet on Baby, or just go for the dance? I’m okay either way. Lonnie’s running the off-the-books pool this year on Baby so I can get my bet in anytime.”

  Oh holy cheese. This is the last thing I need. I can feel Kacie’s eyes burning into me from across the cafeteria. Why can’t the boy just go out with Ms. Hot Pants? Then all would be right with the world. Not that he deserves that kind of evil, but still.

  “I’m afraid that will be rather inconvenient,” says Cameron. “Since Mina’s going with me to the dance.”

  We all do a double take at that and Grady gets this wounded puppy dog look on his face. “Really? When did that happen? Why didn’t you say something, Mina?” Okay, yeah, right, like he gave me any kind of opportunity to do that.

  “I told you I had a boyfriend,” I say.

  Wait. Crap! Why did I say that? Cameron’s going to think I’m talking about him. And I promised Dr. Musty I wouldn’t bring up George.

  “And it’s always a lady’s prerogative to keep her love life private, don’t you think?” says Cameron sweetly, but with a little bit of an edge to it and a kind of steely glint in his icy eyes. Grady takes the hint and gets up.

  “Sure,” he says. “Well, I—”

  “Will just be going now,” Cameron intones.

  Grady just nods and leaves.

  Du-u-u-u-de. I wish I knew for sure whether or not Cameron is on my side, ’cause that kind of power should only be used for good.

  “Uh, thanks, I guess?” I say. I feel kind of bad for Grady, but I am kind of glad to not have to put up with him hounding me anymore.

  “Like I said before,” says Cameron, standing up and taking the plate of fries (what’s left of it) and putting it down in front of Serena, “I guess I’ve just gotten into the habit of saving you, haven’t I?” Then he takes his tray and leaves.

  “Well,” says Serena. “I guess you’ve got a date, huh?”

  Serena and I are walking back home after school when I hear a car rev its engine and come barreling toward us.

  I knew Raven wasn’t all pacified!

  I tackle Serena and we both wind up in a bush—a very prickly bush—as the car skids to a stop right next to us.

  The driver rolls down the window and a very non-Goth, very pointy-chinned face pokes out.

  Great. Ms. Hot Pants has moved up her game a notch. Just what we need, another homicidal wench in town.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve turning Grady down that way in front of the whole school. No one treats him like that. You’d just better watch out, that’s all I have to say.” Then Kacie guns it and speeds off, kicking up some gravel.

  Serena looks at me and pushes a branch out of her face. “You’re just all about the drama now, aren’t you?”

  “Me?” I say and stand up and then haul her out of the bush after me. We both look like we’ve seen better days. “I’m so not about the drama. It just keeps finding me.”

  I hope we can make it home before someone else decides they want to kill one of us.

  31

  George insists that we both escort Serena to her next vampire session because

  (a) she needs protection,

  (b) this is our only chance to hang out together without any adults around (we’re doing the stakeout thing and sitting in the car), and

  (c) did you notice (b)?

  I’m a bit worried that George is planning something hot and heavy. But I’m not really in the mood. We just need to talk. Alone. I have to find a way to break it to him that I’ve apparently got a date who isn’t him.

  I twist around in the passenger seat of the Death Beetle so that I can face him. “How’s work?” Might as well start off with something neutral. And, as Lorelai drilled into me, you should always show interest in the stuff your boyfriend is interested in. It’s part of her twenty-step plan to true love.

  “Oh, Dr. Jonas is all that I thought he’d be and more.” Great, Dad and George should start a fan club or something. I just don’t get it. He’s just a nosy old vampire guy. With a secret mission. “We started excavating the records today. It looks like they were stashed back in the 1800s from the newspapers that some things were wrapped in. But some of it looks much older. It might be one of the Carter’s original stashes when they first came over.”

  “Mm-hmmm.” I can’t help it. I’m zoning a little here.

  “This stash is in a large reinforced metal locker buried under a cryptomeria tree. We never would have found it without some hints from the angry Carters Dr. Jonas has been talking to.”

  Cryptomeria? Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah! “Just like Ernie’s!”

  “What?”

  “The local blood bar. It’s underground too and the tunnel to it is marked by a cryptomeria tree.” I leave off the part that it was Cameron who told me about it. I’m not quite ready to tackle that topic yet.

  “Hmmmm, that’s interesting. I’m surprised Dr. Jonas didn’t mention that. Hey, do you remember my sponsor? The museum guy?”

  “Yeah …” I think. I don’t know that we were actually introduced, since we wound up ducking out early at George’s turning because of his absentee parents showing up and acting all we-didn’t-do-anything-wrong.

  “Well, this is exactly the kind of stuff he taught me about. A lot of the Old World vampires created stashes of things they’d picked up that they couldn’t keep where people could find them. And the Carters are definitely old school. They even used some old-fashioned booby traps on the stash.”

  “Booby traps? Like what?” Dad sure hadn’t mentioned that. I bet Mom would freak if she knew.

  “Well, most of them were obviously intended for humans, not vampires, since they were just minor annoyances. Stuff like spike boards buried in the pit, spring-loaded stuff, some trip-wired alarms … but Dr. Jonas is a master. He’s seen everything. It was really amazing to watch him deactivate everything. I learned so much.”

  “You said most of them were for people? What about the rest?” A spike board sounds bad enough to me. Dad better not be going all gung ho and getting himself in trouble. I know how excited and distracted he can get when he’s going all historical.

  “Oh, a few were dangerous. A decapitation trap, a UV beam … stuff like that. But Dr. Jonas took care of all of it.”

  Huh. A decapitation trap? George sounds way too blasé about this. I mean, Dr. Musty is ancient. What if he forgets something? I don’t want to lose my dad over the Carters. Or a boyfriend, for that matter.

 
Which reminds me … “George, I need to tell you something.”

  “What? You missed me desperately and can’t stop thinking about me in my loincloth?” He leans over to kiss me.

  “No. I mean, yes! Wait, I mean …” Now that he mentions it, I do kind of wonder what he looked like in a loincloth. We kiss for a second and then I pull away. “That’s not what I was talking about. I’m being serious. I need to tell you something about Cameron.”

  “The Carter guy you’ve been hanging around with?”

  “Uh, no. I mean, yes.” Gah. I’m making no sense at all today! “That’s the guy, but I haven’t been hanging around with him. I mean, not like all the time or anything. Just every now and then. Before Serena got here.” When will I learn to practice what I’m going to say before I say it?

  George laughs, but it sounds a little forced to me. And there’s not even the flicker of a smile. “Well, you didn’t do anything with him while I was away other than hang out, right?”

  “Of course not!” Just the staring into the eyes thing and trying not to breathe. But I had to since it was part of the whole Jedi mind trick training. The staring, that is. Not the not breathing part. And there were candles involved, but …

  Okay, I’m just not going to mention any of the practice sessions to George. That might be best.

  George grips the wheel of the Beetle. “We’re fine. I’m not jealous.” Huh. His eyes have gone all stormy looking. He may say he’s not jealous, but his eyes say differently.

  “Okay,” I say. I guess I’ve got to just go ahead and say the bad news. “Um, good. ’Cause, you know, we kind of have a date. Me and Cameron. But it wasn’t on purpose or anything.”

  George looks at me like I’m speaking gibberish. “What do you mean, exactly?”

  I sigh. My life is a soap opera. Maybe Serena is right. Maybe I am all about the drama now. Not that I want to be. “Okay, see, Grady was basically demanding I go to the dance with him. The homecoming dance.”

  Now George looks completely confused. “Who’s Grady? I thought you were talking about Cameron.”

  “Grady is this local jock boy who has a crush on me. Well, he acts like he does, but I think it’s more like he just can’t believe I’d turn him down.” I decide to leave out the whole singing choir thing and the shower of wildflowers. Don’t want to panic George even more. It’s bad enough I’m telling him about a date with one other guy. “So he’s been bugging me about this dance forever and I keep telling him I have a boyfriend but he doesn’t believe me. And then he asked me about you being here, but I couldn’t tell him that you are my boyfriend, I had to tell him you were Dr. Jonas’s intern like we said, so Cameron saved me by telling Grady he was taking me to the dance and to back off.”

  “Hmmmm,” says George. I can’t tell if that’s a good hmmmmm or a bad one, but his eyes are almost purple. That doesn’t look good for me.

  “You can ask Serena,” I say meekly. “She was there.”

  “Mina, are you still mad at me for not writing you while I was in Brazil?”

  “I wasn’t mad …” Not at first, anyway.

  “I finished reading through all of your e-mails last night. You sure sounded mad to me.”

  Oh. I was hoping he wouldn’t read all of those. Especially the last ones I sent.

  “Well, you did just drop off the face of the Earth. I was ready to give up on you.” I pretty much had given up, actually. But I don’t say that. I look out my window. “My whole life turned to major suckage and you were just totally gone. Did you even think about me or how I was doing?”

  “It’s not like I was out there dating,” he says. “Or hanging out with evil vampire clans. I was with my parents.”

  Huh. Tell me he isn’t jealous. “I didn’t know what you were doing. You were gone for months. With no word at all. Not one.” I turn back to look at him. Right in the eye. “I mean, do you have any idea at all what I’ve been through since we moved? I was so worried about Serena and I had no one to talk to. Dad’s, like, off the deep end and the people here either completely hate me or love me, but none of them know me. And you said you’d do your best to keep in touch.”

  “I did.” He leans over and takes my hand. “I told you, there was no Internet there, no cell phones, no nothing.”

  “How long did it take you to get to Eirunepé?”

  “What?” He pulls back his hand and his eyes go a little green in the center.

  “Isn’t that the name of the town you said you went to for supplies? When you finally read my messages? How long did it take you to get there?”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Is it?” I looked up Eirunepé. It’s not that big, but it looks like it wouldn’t be that far, mapwise, from where the indigenous whatchacallit tribes his parents are studying are.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Why can’t you just say you’re sorry? Admit that you could have called me if you really wanted to. You just didn’t try.”

  George just stares at me. Nice.

  I turn away from him and look out the front windshield so I don’t have to see that blank look on his face and then my day gets even better. Not.

  My least favorite Goth girl is striding toward us with a grim look on her face. (Well, even grimmer than normal. Not like it’s hard to look grim when you’re all Gothed up.)

  “Crap,” I say.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks George, but then he looks up and sees her too.

  Raven leans her head in the open window on George’s side of the car. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have driven Serena’s Death Beetle after all. It does kind of stick out in Pickup Truck Land.

  “Well, if it isn’t Curious George,” she sneers.

  I sneer right back. “Is that supposed to be an insult? ’Cause everyone I know loves that little monkey.”

  “I suppose you’re the intern, then, huh?” She glares at George. “Figures. All my favorite people in one place. And aren’t you two just all adorkable sitting out here in the car waiting on wittle-ittle Serena to get out of class.”

  Hey, I only told Grady and Cameron about the intern thing. And only Cameron knows about Serena taking the orientation classes. That can only mean one thing: Cameron must be talking to Raven.

  “So, Raven, what brings you here?” I try to sound nice and sincere, but it falls a little flat.

  “What do you think?” She’s all sneering again. She better watch it or her face is going to stick that way. Not that it would make a difference.

  “You know,” says George, “I’ve been wondering something since I heard what you were out here for: what’s taking you so long?”

  Say what? Is he on her side or something here?

  “What do you mean by that, little boy?”

  “I mean why didn’t you kill Serena on her way out here? She was alone in her car for a week. Or what about before that? Before she even left California. It’s been a few months since you got kicked to the curb by The Council and the Talons helped you avoid getting your brain wiped. So you’re running out of time, aren’t you?”

  Now I’m confused too. “What do you mean, she’s running out of time?”

  “The Black Talons aren’t interested in wannabes. They want results. They’ve usually got a deadline for new recruits. If you don’t kill your target within a certain time frame, then they’ll kill you instead, won’t they Raven? How much more time do you have on the clock before you’re Talon bait?”

  Raven gets a funny look on her face that at first I can’t identify, and then I figure out what it is. Fear. I can see her try to play it off like she’s just barking angry instead, but there’s definitely something else back there. Heck, I can smell it on her. Raw, naked, nasty, sweaty fear.

  “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself, George. I suggest you start worrying about little Miss Serena instead.” She starts waving her finger in his face.

  “Not to mention,” I add, “when Serena tu
rns, she’s not exactly going to be a legitimate target for you anymore, is she?” That’s two deadlines she’s got to worry about, not just one. Of course, I suppose she could just kill someone else. Like some random person on the street, right? Or do you have to kill the target you tell them about? Like calling a shot in pool?

  Raven is literally shaking now, about equal parts fear and anger. This girl could seriously use some therapy. Someone needs to 9-1-1 Dr. Phil.

  She finally just spits out, “You. Will. See. Me. Later,” turns around, and stalks off the way she came.

  Not sure if that was a promise or a threat. Probably both.

  “Well,” I say. “I guess Little Miss Blackheart is under some serious pressure.”

  “Yeah, I was talking with Dr. Jonas about it. She’s probably only got a week or two at best before it’s too late and then”—he makes a slicing sound and draws his finger across his neck. “I do wonder why she didn’t do it before. Do you think she’s got some doubt or remorse?”

  “I’ve always thought she was all talk and eyeliner.” Though now she’s got her own life on the line. Who knows what she’ll do?

  The idea of a desperate wannabe vampire Goth girl is not something I’m happy about. Not even remotely.

  “We need to wrap this up quick and get whatever proof Dr. Jonas needs,” I say. “If Raven suddenly develops some guts, I don’t want anything to happen to Serena.”

  I will not let anything happen to her. No way, no how.

  32

  George and Serena and I are still discussing—okay, arguing—about the best way to get Raven or Cameron to give up John and Wayne and the whole Carter-Talon thing when we get home. Serena (of course) favors the direct approach, basically just ask Cameron or pound it out of Raven (which, okay, does have some merit). George thinks we can trick it out of Raven or even get her to turn on the Talons if we promise her some kind of amnesty in return (he’s way too nice).

  Me, I’m really not sure. On the one hand, I don’t think Raven really has the guts to go through with killing anyone. Sure, she’s a total idiot and she tries to talk a good game, but I think she’s a coward at heart. And I really don’t think there’s any appealing to her better side since I don’t think she actually has one.