I got out of bed, forced myself over to Zach through the blinding pain, and shoved him out the door so hard he flew across the hall and crashed into the linen closet.
“Hey!” he shouted, staggering to his feet. “I’m just telling the truth; you don’t have to be such a—”
I slammed the door in his face. And locked it, and stacked my heaviest pieces of furniture in front of it.
He didn’t know what he was talking about. He was just trying to mess with my head.
I should ignore him…right?
I sat down at my desk and turned on my computer.
I died about a year and a half ago. It’s true that I don’t actually remember it. I know—how lame is that? It’s like forgetting the name of your first boyfriend, or your own birthday. Those things, I remember. I remember Jeremy Cabot kissing me in the library when we were thirteen. I remember that I accidentally knocked a stack of books onto his feet and broke one of his toes, and that we didn’t talk to each other again for a year after that. I remember kissing him again at my fifteenth birthday party, in the closet in my parents’ basement. The walls smelled like cedar; his lips tasted like chocolate cupcakes. I remember thinking a year later that maybe we’d be those rare high school sweethearts who really grow up and marry each other.
I’ll never see Jeremy again. He thinks I’m dead. He went to my funeral. Olympia saw him there; she says he couldn’t stop crying. She said he looked very handsome in a suit.
Olympia watched the funeral from a distance, waiting to collect me later when I woke up in my grave.
That I remember. I still have nightmares about it. I hear vampires are supposed to feel comfortable in confined spaces (like, say, coffins), but it freaked me out like nobody’s business when I woke up in the dark with only an inch of space around me on either side.
Or maybe what really traumatized me was realizing that Mom had decided to bury me in this hideous white ruffled dress I once had to wear as a junior bridesmaid. I hated that dress, and she knew it. Plus I wonder how the bride (my second cousin, Nicola) felt about that—although she lives in Canada, so maybe she didn’t even come to the funeral. Maybe she didn’t even know that the dress she picked out so carefully for her special day was now moldering along with me, six feet under.
I really wish my mom had buried me in my favorite jeans and sneakers, maybe with one of my T-shirts ironically advertising a band that doesn’t exist. For one thing, it would have been much easier to bust out of a coffin in something like that. I practically had to rip off the dress just to move. Thank God only Olympia was waiting for me when I climbed out. You know that dream you have where you’re suddenly a vampire and you have to dig your way out of your own grave—oh, and also, you’re naked?
Okay, possibly that’s just me.
It also would have been nice to have some clothes from my former life that I actually wanted to take with me into my new un-life. Do you know how hard it is to find the perfect jeans? I was half tempted to sneak into my house and steal my favorite pair before we left town, but Olympia put her foot down. Vampires are strictly forbidden to risk any interaction with our living families. If Mom had caught me there, or if she’d noticed the jeans were missing—well, I don’t know what would have happened, but Olympia made it sound awfully dire. Something about hosts of bloodthirsty vampire hunters coming after all of us, which sounds like kind of an overreaction to a pair of stolen jeans, if you ask me.
I think perhaps she’s making up the vampire hunter story, but I can see that it would have been a pretty awkward conversation if Mom did walk in. “Um…I am the ghoooooost of your dauuuuuuuughter! My spirit haunts the earthly realm! I shall never be at peace…unless I have these jeans. Don’t ask questions! Toodle-oooooooooooo.” Hurl myself out the window, et cetera.
So, the point is, rebuilding your wardrobe from scratch is just one of the many un-fun things about becoming a vampire. Especially in our family, since Olympia is fairly keen on avoiding lawbreaking of any sort—such as, say, using one’s vampire strength to rip off the doors of a mall late at night, when mirrors don’t matter, and rampaging through the nearest Old Navy. Doesn’t that sound awesome? I told her that might help make up for the being-a-vampire bit, but all I got back is that it would also attract “unwanted attention.” For someone who’s already lived, like, seven hundred years, Olympia is not very adventurous.
Here’s what I do remember about the night I died.
Mom and I were fighting, as usual. No, you can’t get your belly button pierced. No, you can’t go camping with Jeremy. No, you can’t stay out one second past your curfew. I’d finally dragged Dad into the argument, and he said he thought it would be fine if I went to this one party, as long as he drove me and Jeremy (neither of us had our licenses yet) and I came home on time.
I was like, OMG, so embarrassing, but on the other hand, convenient. I didn’t really want to get a ride from one of the senior girls, who were always flirting with Jeremy, or the senior boys, who drove like lunatics anyway.
And then it turned out the party was only a few blocks away, so perhaps I could have skipped the indignity of the parental ride after all. Of course, as we got out of the car, Dad said, “All right, hon, you give me a call and I’ll come get you whenever you’re ready.”
“Okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Thanks, Dad.”
That was my last conversation with him.
The party is kind of a blur. Not because I drank; I’ve always hated the taste of beer. Mostly Jeremy and I used parties like that as an excuse to dance with each other a lot and then find a dark corner for smooching as long as we could. Yeah, we were one of those couples, the kind everyone else veers around all night.
I don’t remember much about that particular party, except that I think Jeremy wasn’t feeling well. So I think we decided to leave early…but I’m not sure when we left, or whose car I got into.
The next thing I do remember is lying in the road and thinking, Why am I in the road? This doesn’t seem like a very safe place to lie down. I got the impression I was on a quiet suburban street, with hardly any traffic and dim, distantly spaced streetlights barely competing with the moon. I couldn’t move my head to look around; I didn’t know if there was anyone else near me. And then I felt a wild spasm of pain in my head and my legs, and I realized that there was blood all over me and under me and all around me.
And I couldn’t move.
Oh, I thought. I’m dying. That is really not okay with me. The rest of my brain rejected the whole idea. No, someone will come for you. Someone is coming to help. Just hang on…someone will be here soon.
Minutes ticked away as I felt fainter and fainter and the pain grew worse. There must have been a crash, I thought fuzzily. I must have been thrown out of the car. So where’s the car? Where are the other people in the car? I blinked up at the stars. Who was I with? Who am I waiting for? I’m waiting for someone. Someone specific. Someone has gone to bring help.
And then they came.
They came to save me, but not quite in the way I’d been hoping for.
Olympia and Wilhelm. Bert and Crystal. They must have smelled the blood. They hadn’t added anyone to their family in a long time. I could hear them arguing about me as they got closer, although I had no idea what any of it meant.
My head was really fuzzy by the time they arrived, so it didn’t seem odd to me that pale people with fangs were suddenly holding my hands and brushing back my hair.
“Do you want to die?” Olympia whispered.
I’m not sure if I actually spoke, but she could see the no in my eyes.
“You don’t have to…not exactly. We can save you. You can be one of us,” she said. “But it won’t be the same. You have to understand.”
“Just do it,” Wilhelm snapped. “We don’t have time to mollycoddle her about it.”
Bert and Crystal nodded. The moonlight reflected off Bert’s glasses, making his face blank and inscrutable. My first, silvery impression of Crystal
was of long fangs and orange tie-dye and an expression that was compassionate and hungry at the same time.
“She has to agree,” Olympia said. Her long, dark hair hung down, brushing against my face. “That’s our rule.”
This time I did speak. Somehow I found enough breath to whisper, “Yes.”
Olympia bent down toward my neck. Crystal took my wrist in her small, pale hands. Tiny explosions of pain in both places, and then a weird rush of ecstasy, and then Bert’s voice saying, “You’ll die for a little while. We’ll be there when you wake up. Don’t be afraid.”
And then blackness.
Of course it was a car accident. It must have been. Whoever was driving had hit something—or been hit—and I’d been thrown out of the car. What I didn’t know was what had happened to everyone else. As soon as I crawled out of my grave, I asked Olympia if Jeremy was all right.
“He is fine,” she said. “Nobody else was hurt in the accident.”
There, you see? Accident. I remembered those words exactly. That was all I wanted to know about my own death. I figured if I tried to find out more, it would only make me miss my old life. Plus, talk about depressing.
But now I sat at my computer, took a deep breath, and typed Phoebe Tanaka into Google.
I don’t recommend this—Googling yourself, I mean. I especially don’t recommend it if you’re dead, and if reading mournful memorial tributes to yourself will make you cry for hours, and if then discovering that there aren’t nearly as many mournful memorial tributes as you were hoping for will make you disgruntled and cranky.
But I did find out what happened to me, thanks to all the news articles.
LOCAL GIRL KILLED
IN HIT AND RUN
POLICE SAY DYING TEEN
COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED
NO TRACE OF
HIT-AND-RUN
KILLER
QUESTIONS LINGER
IN TEEN’S DEATH
There were interviews with Jeremy’s parents; they wouldn’t let the reporters near him, though, because some of them were sniffing for more scandal—like maybe Jeremy was the one who’d killed me. Mr. Cabot told the police that Jeremy had gotten a ride and I had decided to walk home from the party. It was only nine thirty at night, after all. It wasn’t far. I’d be home in no time; no need to bother my dad.
And then a car had come out of the night, as I walked along those quiet suburban streets, and hit me.
“She could have lived,” said the doctor interviewed for the article. “If the driver had stopped and called for help—she’d still be alive today.”
But by the time someone finally found me, it was too late.
My hands were so numb, I could hardly move the mouse. I clicked on the photo that went with the article, blowing it up to fill the screen. It was a shot of my funeral. There were Mom and Dad and Apolla, standing close to the grave and crying. More people were there than I’d have expected…classmates, teachers, relatives…
As I scanned the crowd around the hole in the ground, a face jumped out at me.
I leaned forward, wiping away my tears, and peered at it more closely.
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I knew that face. But it didn’t make any sense.
Rowan Cantor was at my funeral.
Chapter 18
I decided I was well within my rights to skip school on Monday. It isn’t every day that you experience horrifying revelations about your own death, after all. It seemed like the perfect time to spend an entire day in bed, sleeping off my sun headache and trying not to think about what I was going to say when I saw Rowan again.
By the time I woke up Monday night, I wasn’t sad anymore. I was angry. Like, seriously, wholeheartedly furious.
“Where are you going?” Olympia called from the den as I marched into the kitchen.
“To take care of my issues,” I called back.
She appeared in the doorway with a concerned look as I choked down a glass of blood. I didn’t plan to get faint during this encounter, no, sir.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I put the glass in the sink and stormed out the door without answering her.
Her expression was nothing compared to the look on Albert Cantor’s face when he opened the door and found out it was me pounding on the other side. He went pale and sweaty and looked freaked out, as if he was facing a ghost—which, I realized, he basically was.
I didn’t say anything to him. I needed answers from Rowan. I went right past him and down the hall into Rowan’s room.
Rowan was lying on his mattress with one pale arm flung across his eyes. He sat up, blinking, as I slammed the door behind me.
“You lied to me,” I said. That was not the most terrible thing he’d done, but it seemed like a good place to start.
“What?” He rubbed his face and squinted at me.
I tugged the page I’d printed out of my pocket and dropped it on the mattress beside him. “You didn’t move here from San Francisco.”
All the blood seemed to drain out of his face as he stared at the photograph.
“I was just—” he stammered, climbing to his feet. “No, we just happened to be—”
“Don’t lie to me!” I yelled. I crossed the room and pulled his locked metal box out of his desk. Before he could move, I ripped the top off, breaking the lock and the hinges. Most of the papers inside were articles about my death. I’d expected that, but it was still kind of a shock to see proof. I grabbed the papers and turned around, brandishing them at him. “It was you, wasn’t it? You’re the driver who killed Phoebe.”
Rowan’s shocked, terrified eyes met mine, and suddenly a memory came flooding back: of those same eyes looking down at me, framed by moonlight and bright headlights.
“You said you’d get help,” I said, pointing at him. “You said you’d come back to save her. Instead you let her bleed to death all alone in the middle of the road.” Alone until the vampires came, anyway.
Rowan reached out his arms like he was looking for something to hold him up. Finding nothing, he fell to his knees in front of me. “How—how do you know that?” he croaked in terror.
“Is that why you’re so keen to talk about death all the time?” I asked. “Because you’re a killer?”
“It was an accident,” he whispered. “I didn’t see her.”
“But you just left her there,” I said. “You drove away.”
“There was so much blood.” He clawed at his face like he was trying to rip the memories out of his head. “I thought she would die before I got back. I was scared—I was scared—I was so scared—”
“You were scared?” I said. “How do you think she felt?”
“Oh, God,” Rowan said in a horrible, wretched voice.
I’ll admit it. I kind of wanted to bite him. Or rather, I kind of wanted to kill him, and then bite him, because I definitely didn’t want creepy vampire Rowan hanging around in addition to lecherous vampire Zach. I wanted him gone.
But that wouldn’t solve any of my problems, most especially the one where Wilhelm and Olympia thought I was the murdering type.
“You’re going to confess,” I said, grabbing Rowan’s T-shirt and yanking him to his feet. I didn’t care if my strength startled him. “You’re going to turn yourself in so they know what happened. Jeremy and”—I’d nearly said Mom and Dad—“everyone else.”
“No,” Rowan said, struggling. He tried to pry my hands off his shirt, but he couldn’t. “I can’t. I won’t. Dad won’t let me anyway. Besides it was two years ago—it’s over now—”
“It’s not over for some people,” I said, taking a step toward the door.
Rowan started flailing. He threw a punch at my face, which I dodged, and then tried to knock me down with a sudden lunge. I flipped him over so he landed on his back with a thud. With a yelp of anger, he seized my foot and jerked hard. I caught myself on my hands as I fell and pushed myself back up, then kicked his hands aside and planted my boot fir
mly in the middle of his chest.
Have I mentioned there are some benefits to being a vampire?
“You didn’t have anything to do with Tex, did you?” I asked.
“Of course not!” he cried. “Dad won’t even let me out of the house after dark anymore.” He rolled suddenly sideways, jumped to his feet, and tackled me. I threw him over my head and he smashed into the opposite wall.
“It’s not going to be so easy to kill me this time,” I said.
Rowan’s blue eyes went wide. “It is you,” he whispered. He dove for his desk drawer, grabbed something out of it, and spun around to point it at me.
A gun, small and black and gleaming.
“Are you kidding?” I said, putting my hands on my hips.
“I will shoot you,” he said.
“That,” I said, “would make me really mad.”
“Go away,” he said. “Stop haunting me. Leave me alone!”
“You need help, Rowan,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Look at this house. Look at this room. Look at you, and your incredibly creepy corpse photos. Your guilt is destroying your whole life, and either you need to deal with it, or you need to be locked up so it doesn’t explode into something like, say, shooting a girl in your bedroom.”
Oh, I thought at the same time, I guess that’s kind of what Wilhelm and Olympia were going for, too. It all made sense to me now. They’d known about Rowan; they’d brought me here and even pointed him out expressly to make sure I confronted my old demons so I could move on and become a well-integrated member of vampire society. Or something like that.
Well, they didn’t have to be so vague and mysterious about it. They really could have saved me a lot of time by just telling me a few things, since I didn’t even know I had death issues to deal with in the first place.
Never Bite a Boy on the First Date Page 12