The curtains on both sides of me pull back immediately: one to reveal the school’s sexy headmistress, Dr. Haskins, the other to display her large but simple and well-lit office.
Dr. Haskins doesn’t look like a regular doctor but more like a soap opera doctor, with her long blonde hair in an updo, black chopsticks holding it in place, her rectangular glasses black and sleek in front of her deep blue eyes, her lips red and thick, and her shimmering silver jacket open and just barely covering a likewise revealing white silk blouse.
Her short gray skirt whispers as she crosses the room on long legs, her black heels clunky but fashionable. In her hand is her ever present clipboard, which she is currently ticking off fast and furious.
“Lily, Lily, Lily,” she says, voice officious and clipped. She stops to stand in front of me. She’s about five feet eight but still has to look up to school me (okay, only an inch or two, but still). “What did I tell you about clearing the front door first, not last?”
“I know, I know.” I’m aware my whiny voice is pitiful but can’t stop myself. “I guess I saw how little time I had left and just panicked.”
She hears me out, then scribbles something incriminating (probably) on her Lucite clipboard. “The best way to add more time on the back end of your Simulation is to take less time at the front.”
I nod, biting my lip helplessly.
She takes a step out of the simulated bedroom and the clear door to her office slides open automatically.
I follow her inside.
The guts of her office are all shimmery and shiny and absolutely see-through, like something Willy Wonka might design for his chocolate factory. She has clear furnishings: desk, chair, and filing cabinets. I wonder for the first time if her employee bathroom has a clear toilet. I’ll have to ask the other Sisters when my evaluation is over.
“I’m sorry.” She extends a hand across the desk.
I unstrap the light but awkward Simulation Shield from around my chest and hand it over.
“I can’t pass you this time. I’m certain you understand.”
I make a clicking sound with my tongue. “No, frankly I don’t understand. How many times can I run the Simulation before we both say enough is enough? I mean, how can I be good enough to be a Sister but not good enough to be a Savior? I just don’t understand.”
“No,” she says, sounding severe. “You don’t understand. Being a Sister is about preventing infestations. Being a Savior is about stopping them once they’ve started. It’s an entirely different psychology, and mastering this Simulation is your first step toward mastering the psychology.”
Oh great. Now in addition to kicking butt and taking names, I have to be a psychologist. I slump in my clear plastic seat, wondering what my butt looks like from beneath. Stop, Lily. Focus. “This bites.”
She finally sighs, licking the thick lips that hide her veteran fangs. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.” She smiles.
I almost smile, to be polite, but it stops halfway to my lips.
She sets down the clipboard, pushes herself back just a smidge from her big, intimidating desk, and crosses those long, luxurious legs. “You know I have nothing but respect for you and the other Sisters. But I’m sensing a certain, shall we say, reluctance to pass this Simulation. It’s like, I don’t know, all three of you are afraid to take the next step. As you know, there is no place for fear as a Savior.”
“How can you say that?” I whine. “Every month we get dropped into some new high school and have to sniff out some dirty, sneaky, dangerous Vamplayer. Once he finds out our true identity, we have to battle him and anyone he may have turned. It’s exactly like being a Savior.”
She shakes her head firmly. “That’s where you’re wrong, Lily. It’s but a taste of being a Savior. That’s all this Simulation is as well: a small taste.”
I let her words sink in.
Could she be right?
Are Cara, Alice, and I too comfortable as Sisters to ever be Saviors? But how can that be when all we want is to wear those hip-hugging leather jumpsuits and carry around personal-sized crossbows?
Dr. Haskins stands, signaling the abrupt end of our meeting.
“I’m sorry.” I sigh, just like I have after failing the Simulation countless times before. “I’ll try harder next time. I promise.”
”I have no doubt you will. But Saviors don’t try, Lily. They do. They don’t promise. They achieve. Think about that as you train this week, and you’ll be better prepared when next we meet.”
Chapter 2
Okay, seriously, this place now officially sucks.” Alice pushes away her plate of sautéed blood clots, her pale and pristine face a not-so-subtle mask of disgust. “Why ask me how I want them prepared if you’re going to overcook them anyway?”
From across the table for four, Cara shoots me a here we go again look.
I bite back a smile. “Why don’t you take them back if you don’t like them?”
Alice sighs loudly, preferring to suffer out loud rather than be happy in silence. “No. They might spit in my food for spite.”
Cara and I snicker.
I scoop up the last of my blood consommé, my spoon clinking against the nearly empty bowl.
Cara wraps her long, mocha-colored fingers around her plastic tumbler and finishes off the last of her type B smoothie. She smacks her lips and sets the empty cup on the faux wood cafeteria table. “My lunch was absolutely fantastic, as usual.”
Alice looks at Cara’s empty plate. “Well, anyone who shoves down their blood clots any old way hardly has a discriminating palate.”
Cara slides a thin cornrow behind her ear and glares at Alice. “Who are you discriminating against now, Alice?”
“W-what? Who, me? Nobody. Wait, what?”
Cara smiles.
I tidy my tray and watch the would-be Saviors slowly leaving the cafeteria in their tight little groups.
They ignore us for the most part, like seniors with freshmen, lettermen with geeks, hot girls with chicks in Weight Watchers.
I watch them saunter, laughing, big and strong, vampires through and through, off to another aikido or judo or fencing class, off to study the grand vampiric languages or the history of Transylvania, off to save lives, chew gum, and kick some bloodsucking booty.
I frown, thinking of Dr. Haskins and her theory that the girls and I are just too comfortable being Sisters trapped in high school forever to ever be Saviors on our own.
I can’t believe that. I refuse to believe that. I mean, everyone at the Academy wants to be a Savior. That’s why we’re here in the first place.
The Saviors are, in a word, badass. When a city gets infested—when the cops, the feds, even the army can’t handle it—who do they call? The Saviors. When one, two, or three hundred screaming vampires rampage a town looking for fresh victims in the middle of the street, who do they call? The Saviors.
Like some kind of vampire superheroes on steroids, they swoop into town wearing their red leather jumpsuits and sleek motorcycle boots, wielding their monogrammed stakes and personal-sized crossbows, cutting down vampires left and right.
Who wouldn’t want to do that for a living, right?
And what do we do? The Sisterhood of Dangerous Girlfriends? We get dropped into schools where officials or the occasional anonymous tipster suspect a verifiable vampire sighting. We rout him out, identify the girl he’s trying to neck with (literally), become her girlfriends, and stop an infestation before it happens.
Bor-ing.
And not just boring but seriously?
High school?
In the six years I’ve been a Sister, I have lived in nearly every state and attended over seventy high schools.
It. Is. Terrifying.
Imagine being trapped in high school.
For.
Ev. Er.
Just … gross.
It’s like that ancient Greek myth, the one about the guy who tricked the gods into letting him out of the underworld, th
en refused to go back. You know, Sisyphus, or what’s his name? And as punishment they sentenced him to roll a great big rock up a hill every day only for it to roll down just before he reached the top so that the next day he had to roll it right back up. For eternity.
Except our ball is a great big spit wad.
So Dr. Haskins is wrong.
I don’t want to stay a Sister forever. Nobody does.
I do want to be a Savior. In the worst possible way. I just haven’t gotten the hang of Simulation House ye—
The cafeteria is silent, which means one of two things. Either Alice and Cara have left the building (because, seriously, those two never stop talking) or they have stopped talking, if only momentarily, and they’re waiting for me to answer a question so they can go back to talking as soon as I open my mouth.
I look up and see their mouths shut, their eyes staring at me expectantly.
We’re alone now. The cafeteria is completely and suddenly empty. “Huh? What? Why? How? When?”
Cara smiles. “Why so down, Lily?”
I shrug.
Alice figures it out right away. “She had her Simulation today. It must not have gone very well, huh?” She tries to hide her pretty obvious pleasure at my misfortune, but we all know Alice loves being First Sister and hates the thought of giving up her title. As Third Sister, I’m no direct threat to her—yet.
And that’s exactly how she likes to keep it.
“Not really,” I grumble.
Cara reaches across the table and pats the top of my hand. “Let me guess: the bedroom tripped you up again?”
I nod. “I just don’t get it. I mean, how many times have we trained, all of us, to clear the bedroom door first? And every time I forget.”
Cara frowns, pulling her hand away to stack dishes on her tray. “I don’t think Dr. Haskins wants us to pass the Simulation.”
Alice groans.
Cara goes on. “Think about it. If we move up to Savior status, where will Dr. Haskins find some new Sisters? You know nobody here respects us, so why would they want to be us?”
Alice shrugs. “You could have a point.” She snaps her collar. “We are pretty badass. Am I right?”
We high-five, but my heart’s not in it.
“What does that mean then?” I say. “We’re doomed to be Sisters forever?”
“Dang,” Alice says, leaning back in her chair. “I thought you enjoyed our company. Would it be that bad hanging with us forever? Even if it does mean being Third Sister for all eternity?”
I smirk.
She smirks.
We get it, Alice. We get it: you’re First Sister.
“It’s not you I want to get away from,” I kinda lie. “When I started this job, I thought it would be temporary, you know? ‘It’s only for a year or two, Lily.’ That’s what Dr. Haskins told me on my first day, remember? And now, six years and who knows how many schools later, I’m no closer to being a Savior.”
“I know I’m ready to move up.” Cara rubs her hands against her narrow, tapered waist. “Not for nothin’, but this body was made for one of those red leather jumpsuits, feel me?”
We share a laugh, even Alice, who would be the first to dive into a pool full of holy water if Cara ever became First Sister.
I smile, picturing Cara, Alice, all of us in matching jumpsuits, those precious crossbows dangling from our black leather belts.
We grow silent, strutting through the halls in our fantasies, until Alice says, “What’s a few more years of being a Sister anyway, Lily? Look how long it took you to become a Sister. Twentysomething years? That’s got to be some kind of record.”
“Hush, Alice,” Cara says, offering me a sympathetic look.
But it’s nothing I haven’t heard before. “So I’m a slow learner. What can I say? I mean, it’s not like—” My pager goes off, and I groan.
Cara and Alice instinctively flinch as their pagers go off as well.
We look at each other before quickly cleaning up our trays.
Pagers can mean only one thing: a new assignment.
If only I’d held on to one of those stakes from my Simulation, I’d impale myself right now.
Chapter 3
Cara and I stand apprehensively at the door to our dorm suite, but Alice is absolutely brimming with excitement.
She rushes ahead of us to open the door as if she might find a fully decked out Christmas tree and dozens of presents waiting. “Finding out where we’re going is the best part, you guys,” she says cheerleader-style and dashes into the room first. She grabs the leather dossier resting just so on our coffee table.
“Am I the only one who thinks it’s creepy the way they always deliver those things while we’re out of the room?” I say.
“What?” Alice flops onto the couch and luxuriates in opening the file first. “Would you rather they hunt us down in the cafeteria and hand it over in front of all those would-be Saviors?”
“I guess not.”
It’s not that I’m embarrassed to be a Sister, let alone Third Sister, ie the puniest, least respected student on campus. It’s just that everyone at the Academy treats us differently.
Like when we get an assignment, it’s all cloaks and daggers, hush-hush, super spy Jason Bourne stuff, you know? All of a sudden, without any warning, someone drops off a file in our room and we pack up and ship out without any fanfare or hoopla.
But when the Saviors get sent out on a mission, look out! It’s all bells and whistles and practically a ticker tape parade. Most of the school empties out to watch the elite of the elite get into their rock star tour bus and head off to parts unknown.
Cara hauls out her old-school, faded army-green duffel bag and fills it with panties and bras.
“Has anyone seen my curling iron?” Annoyed, I stare daggers at Alice, who buries her nose in the dull-as-dirt dossier.
I stalk into her room, and on her cluttered vanity is the evidence—still plugged in!
I unplug it and scan Alice’s room while I wait for it to cool off. This girl is whack, seriously, end of story. Although it’s strictly forbidden and against all kinds of Academy protocol to bring souvenirs from any of our assignments, Alice’s room is crammed full of knickknacks, pennants, ribbons, and trophies from her years of endless high school exploits. I guess rank does have its privileges after all.
Then there are the yearbooks lined row after row in three custom bookshelves across from her bed, one for each of her nearly three hundred assignments by now. One more reason Alice is so proud to be First Sister: she’s been doing it decades longer than I have.
The yearbooks date back to the early seventies, when Dr. Haskins herself started the Sisterhood; hence, the retro Simulation House, which has never been updated. She wasn’t a doctor back then, of course, but since it was her idea to start the Sisterhood and the program has been so successful, Dr. Haskins was given opportunities to rise through the ranks and, eventually, headmistress status at the Academy.
I pick up a yearbook, open it to a random page, and see Alice’s loopy handwriting circling an awkward-looking boy with a feathery eighties haircut. She’s written Super Dreamy in a bubble around his head.
I groan, grab the warm curling iron, and pack it in my bag.
At my closet, I look for my favorite gray scarf. “Uh, Cara?” I knock on her doorjamb.
There’s no need. She holds out the scarf, head down, murmuring apologies, and shoves another pair of yoga pants deep into her skuzzy green duffel.
“Thanks,” I say, wrapping it around my throat dramatically. “Why do you use that ratty old thing? You know you get an expense account on each assignment. Surely you’ve saved enough to buy a few dozen designer bags by now.”
She looks at the bag ruefully. “I know, but this was my dad’s before the infestation that … ended him. When the Saviors came and found me, I packed up some stuff in this. It’s all I have left, you know? Of him.”
I try to hug her.
She smiles instead,
shrugging off my display of emotion. “I’m fine, girl. That was ages ago. I’m over it.”
Ah, but we’re never really over it, are we?
I pretend to buy the lie because it’s easier—for her—and stare at her clean yellow walls covered in framed prints of pristine cottages, herb gardens, and white picket fences. Cara’s dream: the simple, nonvampire, non-Sister life.
I look at the single bed, cozy white comforter, floral throw pillows, her hat rack in the corner holding Easter Sunday straw hats from her childhood (when church services and crosses didn’t make her skin actually boil), and scarves, most of them mine.
I smile and return to my room. It’s bare by comparison, almost sterile. It used to be covered with old eighties posters, things from before I became a vampire and after. Things that made me feel human and alive and reminded me of a simpler, more innocent time.
I would have brought the posters from my own walls, the ones I stared at every night before bed and every morning while I was getting ready for school, but when the Saviors came to rescue me that day, they weren’t exactly worried about saving my posters. Just my hide.
I bought them online at some great retro sites using my Academy expense accounts: old Rick Springfield and The Breakfast Club posters, album covers from the Go-Go’s and Madonna (“Like a Virgin” era). But I took them all down years ago.
When you become a Savior, they move you to the single dorms. No sharing a bathroom, no one borrowing your scarves or curling irons and never returning them.
Every Simulation Day I expect to come back to my room, grab my bags, and stroll on over to the Savior side of the dorms, never looking back. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
I’ve had bare walls for two years. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to unroll Rick Springfield again. If I can’t even make it through Simulation House after all this time, I might be here awhile.
“Ooohh,” Alice says from the living room, nose still in the leather dossier. “Check it out, kiddies. We’re headed to scenic Ravens Roost, North Carolina, and a joint called the Nightshade Conservatory for Exceptional Boys and Girls.”
“That doesn’t sound right.” Cara abandons her packing to log on to our standard-issue circa 1992 computer. “Do they mean, like, short bus exceptional or gifted exceptional?”
Vamplayers Page 2
