“That was pretty sweet!” Alice says as a few more of Bianca’s identically pretty friends gather around her. “I never knew skinny-dipping could be so fun.”
“Mmmmmm. It’s much more fun when you invite the boys along.”
Cara and I look at each other and mouth the words, Skinny-dipping? and Invite the boys along? We’re far from prudes, but this is too much.
We slam our lockers and bound out to the gym floor, where a short, paunchy man in too-snug coaching shorts and a too-baggy golf shirt holds a clipboard.
“Names?” he says.
“Lily Fielding.” I spot Zander and Grover lurking on the sidelines, Grover practically spilling out of and over his ginormous gym shorts while Zander basically floats in his.
”Cara Sierra,” she says proudly.
Grover drags Zander to us. “Hello, Lily.” Grover extends a warm, meaty hand. “And who is this delectable creature you’ve brought with you to class today?”
Never one to discriminate, she extends her long fingers and says, “Cara, and you are?”
“This is Grover,” I say, since the man himself seems to be particularly tongue-tied at the moment, “and this fellow with the scowly expression and mismatched tube socks is Zander. I met them yesterday.”
Zander shakes Cara’s hand brusquely, looks to see if I’m right about his socks, and groans.
A burst of laughter comes from the girls’ locker room as the door opens and Bianca, Alice, and several beautiful drones stream out, looking as if they’ve just heard Dane Cook’s new album at a private prerelease party or something.
Tristan stands aloof among a group of bigger, dopier guys.
Like magnets, Bianca and Alice steer toward them. Alice fits in perfectly.
I nudge Cara, but she’s already scoping the scene.
“I’ve got to admit,” she says, “that girl’s good.”
I nod begrudgingly. “Well, she’s not First Sister for nothing.”
Cara snorts and nudges me. “Nah, she ain’t that good. She’s only First Sister because she’s been here the longest. You and me, we’ll get our day.” She smiles.
I smile back.
But what I’m really thinking is, Yeah, but when?
The guy with the clipboard and Coach Wan-namaker monogrammed on his red polyester shirt blows his whistle, and we all stand at attention (funny how some things never change). From a plastic cart at his side, he drags out a mesh bag full of multicolored balls.
Half the class (the pretty, chosen, Bianca clones) cheer.
The other half (everybody else) groan.
“That’s right. It’s the second Tuesday of the month, children, and that means …” He waits for us to respond.
I follow Grover and Zander’s lead as they say listlessly, “Dodgeball derby.”
Simultaneously, Tristan, Bianca and her crew, and of course Alice cheer, “Dodgeball derby!”
I nudge Zander, leaning close to his warm, pink ear. “How come they’re all so happy and we’re so sad?”
He smirks. “You’ll see.”
Coach Wannamaker reaches into the bag and tosses a ball at a random student.
“You know the drill,” he grumps, tossing balls willy-nilly with his hairy, beefy arms. “If you get a red ball, report to the visitors’ side of the gym. If you get a black ball, report to the home side.”
Turns out I was wrong. He’s not tossing out the balls randomly at all.
A pattern emerges. The red balls land on our side of the gym, first to Grover, then Zander, then me, then Cara, and then to an odd assortment of freaks, geeks, misfits, and losers.
Meanwhile the black balls zip over to Tristan, Bianca, Alice, and the like.
By the time all the balls have been tossed, the home side of the court looks like a photo shoot for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog while the poor visitors’ side looks like two short busses pulled up and dumped us off after a somber visit to the local cemetery.
“This sucks major.” Grover stomps once like a disgruntled third grader whose brother dumped his ice cream cone in the sandbox.
“What’d we do wrong?” I say.
”You?” He looks Cara and me up and down but not in a salacious way. “You two belong over there.”
“Yeah,” Zander says, “you two made the mistake of talking to us while Coach Wannamaker was handing out the dodge balls. Guilt by association, I’m afraid.”
“What’s wrong with these balls?” Cara squeezes hers like an overripe cantaloupe.
“Oh, nothing a few dozen pounds of air pressure wouldn’t cure.” Grover places his under one armpit and makes gaseous noises to the delight of our reject team and the obvious disgust of Bianca and her glamorous pals.
I squeeze mine, and he’s right. It’s like half the air has been let out. On purpose. The nerve!
I peer toward the home team side and watch Alice bouncing her big, fat, black ball on the basketball court like she’s preparing for liftoff or perhaps a tryout with the Harlem Globetrotters. “Well, that’s not fair at all.”
“Welcome to Nightshade,” Zander says.
“Welcome to high school.” Grover sighs.
Without warning, Coach Wannamaker blows his whistle twice. Suddenly the two dozen perfectly inflated balls launch. It’s like a scene out of one of those Japanese movies where an army of archers shoot so many arrows into the sky that they blot out the sun. You can almost hear the whoosh as the balls fill the air, advancing steadily toward our pitiful team.
Instinctively, Cara and I shove Zander and Grover behind us and catch two balls expertly, as if we’ve been trained to do this. Come to think of it, considering how many times we play this game every year, the Academy should absolutely have a Dodgeball Tactics for the PE Averse class.
On the opposite side of the court, two beautiful people slump to the side.
Cara and I look at each other, smile, and launch the balls back to the home side, nailing two pretty girls, who scream, rub their shoulders, and limp to the sidelines.
Zander and Grover guffaw and hand us their dodge balls.
“Sweet!” Grover says.
“Wicked!” Zander says. “It’s like Slam the Supermodels Day.”
Double-handed now, Cara and I take out four more hottie hopefuls, the half-inflated balls making thwap-sting-slap sounds as they land on human flesh, leaving big, fat red welts where once there was only flawless skin.
One girl falls so hard, her perfect derriere squeaks for several feet across the gym floor.
The other girl gets knocked back into the blue gym mats strapped to the wall behind the basket, where she lands in a heap on the floor. Whap.
“You’re outta the game,” Coach Wannamaker shouts.
Thwack-slap.
“Out.” Whap. Whap!
Whap!
“Out. All three of you, gone!”
I peek at Zander’s face. His mouth is wide open, his eyes nearly as big.
Meanwhile, Grover is simply drooling.
I sneer. I know it looks to humans as if we vampires are moving quickly and have catlike reflexes, but the fact is that the world moves slowly. Our metabolisms are so fast that it’s like our senses are always on red alert. Running to stand still is what I call it.
So when a ball comes flying at us, it’s not that we move so fast; it’s that the ball goes so slowly we have extra time to avoid it. To mortals the world is going in fast-forward, but to us it feels like the pause button is always on.
“Oh, this is awesome!” Grover pats his gym shorts. “Where is my cell phone video camera when I need it?”
Eventually only Bianca, Tristan, and Alice are left standing after our full frontal assault. Cara and I march steadily toward the half-court line, picking up ripe black dodge balls along the way and launching them with expert precision.
Bianca evades them surprisingly well for a mere mortal, but then half the time she’s either hiding behind Tristan or Alice, alternately shrieking and protecting her precious hair.
Alice fights hard, though. Ball after ball zips by my head, and I want to shout, “We’re Sisters, remember?”
Her eyes have an almost religious zeal when she targets us again and again.
“Who gave this witch a vendetta?” Cara says as a ball narrowly misses her left ear and nails Grover in the belly.
“Ummphfuzzlesnot,” he mumbles, falling to the floor and rolling on his side in exquisite agony.
Like any good soldier, Zander sacrifices himself to drag his friend safely off the court, but Bianca and Alice show no mercy, peppering him with dodge balls the entire way. They land with deadly accuracy, thwacking against his pale skin and leaving instant bruises.
To silence them, I take careful aim and nail Bianca in the arm.
“Hey!” She steps forward as if she’s going to launch a ball-free attack with her fists.
Forgetting myself, I walk to greet her.
“Now, now, dear,” Tristan says calmly with that snooty voice of his, expertly dodging the balls Cara and I throw. “Where are your manners? No one likes a sore loser.”
“Too right,” Bianca says, rubbing her arm and staring daggers at me. “Where would I be without you, my love?” She curtsies and exits the game to the cheers of her adoring fans, er, friends.
Alice, Tristan, Cara, and I square off, mere feet from each other, dodge balls flying rapidly from one to the other in an endless dizzying cycle. It’s like our arms don’t even pause, zipping and zapping and finding balls and flinging them like human—well, almost human—tennis ball machines.
With every near miss on our side, their side roars—and vice versa.
Balls are whizzing so fast, our sneakers squeaking so loudly on the gym floor, it’s like a cacophony of jungle noises in the middle of the gym.
At one point Tristan trips, their side gasps, and Cara uses the opportunity to launch an aerial assault straight at his face. (Hey, all’s fair in love and dodgeball, pretty boy.)
Alice manages to deflect one projectile just in time but has to dive for the second ball to do so.
I see the gap, heave two more right away, and take Tristan out with a sound pounding on each shoulder.
Whack-slam!
Thwack-slap!
He falls, laughing.
Several beautiful girls, Alice included, rush to help him off the court.
“Dang,” Cara says, “this dude’s good.”
“I know, right?”
“You think,” she says, eyebrows arching, “he could be our man?” “You tell me.”
We watch him limp off, either acting like he thinks a human would to throw us off the scent or actually feeling pain.
“Well,” she grumbles, picking up a few balls for our last assault, “he’s either really good or really bad, you know?”
“I do.” I juggle a few balls to stay loose.
Alice takes to the court, standing defiantly, but the wind has left her sails.
Despite the cheers from the beautiful people’s side, she lobs two easy balls at us. When we catch them, Alice waves in defeat, turning her back to us without a word and retreating to her side.
Cara and I exchange questioning glances, but too soon we are deluged by our team. They’re hugging us, cheering, Grover and Zander at the head of the pack.
Zander hugs me amidst the furor, and it’s so warm, so soft, so good I never want to let him go.
“Ahem.” Grover squeezes in closer. “Group hug!”
Is that disappointment I see in Zander’s eyes? Or relief?
Chapter 12
“What is up with that girl?” Cara says later as we lounge in our dorm suite, nursing our dodgeball wounds and getting group dissed by one Sister. Cara’s done for the night but looks ready to party in her tight red jeans and sporty white pullover.
“I dunno,” I say around a straw full of fresh O negative from the care package we found on our doorstep, return addressed Afterlife Academy and containing a short good-luck note from Dr. Haskins. “I’ve seen her go undercover before, but this is deep undercover. Even for her.”
Cara shakes her head, reaching for a second bag of A positive. She drinks it carefully, almost daintily, to avoid spilling any of the red stuff on her jersey-style white top. “If we’re right, if Tristan is the Vamplayer and Bianca is his most obvious target, then I can understand Alice’s enthusiasm for infiltrating the beautiful people here at Nightshade. But it’s the Sisterhood of Dangerous Girlfriends, plural, not the Dangerous Girlfriend, singular. Am I right?”
I nod. She’s so fired up, I’m tempted to give her a fist bump across the coffee table. “Maybe she’s so eager to stay First Sister, she’s just trying to show us both up.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. Remember that school last year in Kentucky, or was it Nebraska, where she thought she had the Vamplayer identified in our first week, only she didn’t tell us and ended up calling the Saviors on some poor goth punk wannabe?”
“Was he the guy who peed his pants when they busted through the boys’ locker room ceiling?”
“No, girl, that was in Florida last year. Where you been?”
I shrug. “Or how about that time she thought she saw fangs on a guy, called the Saviors, and they came crashing in on a dramatic reading of Laurel and Hardy Meet Dracula?”
She snickers, finishes her last bag of blood, and sighs. Her long legs stretch over the armrest and dangle, crossed at the ankles. She fidgets slowly, steadily, stirring dust bunnies on the dark, rich, almost ancient hardwood floor beneath her feet.
It’s dusk, the day mostly done, but soft white light from the wrought iron sconces sift shadows through the common area.
Cara stands and walks two bags of blood toward Alice’s empty, still-made bed to place there like the vampire equivalent of mints on her pillow.
There is a soft knock at our door, two quick raps. Alice herself swoops in, a manic and almost unwelcome ball of energy in our formerly peaceful scene.
“Girl,” Cara says, tossing the bags of blood at her, “where you been, who are you, and what did you do with our First Sister? Inquiring minds want to know.” She says it as a joke, but there is half a bite to it.
Alice ignores it. Her clothes are askew and a little dirty, her hair a mess, her eyes dull and glassy, her skin extra pale—and not the cool, healthy vampire kind of pale.
Cara and I exchange What the—? looks and continue to quietly judge her.
She seems hard, tough, like she’s been burning the candle at both ends again.
Cara and I treat every mission like a campaign: a careful, considered, weeks-long journey toward a final destination. Alice sees everything as a sprint: get in, get the Vamplayer, get out. It’s rarely that easy, but every time Alice forgets and thinks she can crack the case in seventy-two hours or less. I guess some Sisters never learn.
She ignores the straw that comes with every bag of blood, snaps her head back, releases her fangs, and drains it the old-fashioned way or, as Dr. Haskins would say, the rude way.
Watching Alice suck crudely at the plump plastic bag, siphoning off the platelets, the red rush, the slow burn, is a little like watching a hungry dog gnaw on a bone, growling a little, sniffing, snuffling, drooling, greedy: both are best left to their privacy.
I try to give her that privacy (and myself a break), but there’s something different about the way Alice goes to town on the first bag and then, very quickly, the second. I just can’t look away.
It happens so fast, and it’s hard to tell anyway from this angle, but I could swear Alice’s fangs look longer all of a sudden. I mean, okay, maybe it’s an optical illusion, but they look twice as long as usual.
She seems greedier too, hungrier somehow than Cara and me combined. We’ve both gone without blood as long as she has, and Cara managed to suck lazily on her bags looking, if anything, elegant. And me? Well, I could have gone another day or two before getting really, truly blood hungry.
But here Alice is going to town like she hasn’t been fed in week
s. Months, maybe. She finishes her bags, drops them to the floor—another no-no they teach us the first day at the Academy—and flops in the recliner with a satisfied belch. “Now that hit the spot.”
I nudge her dirty bare feet off the coffee table. “What’s gotten into you? You’re not with your stupid friends anymore, so quit showing us how bad you can be. You’re with your Sisters, remember? Drop the frat boy act, will ya?”
“Someone got up on the wrong side of the grave this morning, huh, Cara?” Alice says, avoiding eye contact with me and seeking support from her Second Sister.
She doesn’t get it. “Make that two graves, Alice. Lily’s right. Why are you suddenly acting the fool?”
Alice twirls around in her chair like a two-year-old full of sugar sitting on her first big girl barstool. “It’s called acting, ladies, and maybe if you two did a little more of it, Bianca would accept you into her fold as well.”
“Okay, fine,” I say. “We applaud your ability to cozy up to Bianca so quickly, but let us know what’s going on, all right? You staying out all night and dodging us all day is not okay.”
“Yeah,” Cara says, “where were you anyway?”
Alice smirks. “Nowhere special. The rugby team had a pool party, and Bianca thought it would be fun if I tagged along. That’s all.”
“A pool party?” I know I sound like a den mother but can’t help myself. Does a gothic castle like Nightshade even have a pool, let alone parties? “An all-night pool party?”
“An all-night, naked pool party. Only it wasn’t a pool. There’s this lake out behind the school. Unfortunately you couldn’t see much in the murky waters, but I saw enough to know I can’t wait for another all-night naked rugby team pool party.”
“Fine, great,” Cara says, and I can’t tell if she’s mad because Alice is being her usual reckless self or because she wasn’t invited to skinny-dip with a bunch of thick necks. “We’re really glad you’ve been accepted so quickly, but protocol states you need to check in every two hours or—”
”Protocol-schmotocol.” Alice leaps out of the chair like a long-legged gymnast and disappears into her room. We hear her rifling through her drawers and closet, apparently for her third outfit of the day. “How am I supposed to check in every two hours when my phone is with the rest of my clothes a hundred yards away? This isn’t about protocol, Cara. It’s about politics, plain and simple.”
Vamplayers Page 6
