Never Bite a Boy on the First Date (16 page)

“I prefer it that way,” I said, tilting my head to look up at him. “I figure, if you like someone, you should—”

And then he kissed me.

I
f it turns out that heaven is getting to relive the best moment of your life over and over again, that kiss with Milo is currently my top pick. I mean, not that I’m likely to get
there
anytime soon, being the undead and all.

I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to be a normal girl and spend the rest of the day with Milo. I wanted to go to the movies and out to dinner, and then cuddle (or, you know…something along those lines) in his car at the end of the night.

But I couldn’t. I had to go home, drink my daily recommended dosage of cold animal blood, and then lie in the dark for hours recovering from too much sunshine. Oh, and I also had to solve a murder in the next two days so that my dad wouldn’t lock me in a coffin for the next
three hundred years. Literally.

My head was pounding by the time Milo dropped me off. I drank two glasses of blood and went straight up to my room, turned off all the lights, and crawled under the covers.

“Serves you right,” said a voice from the doorway.

“Go stake yourself,” I said, keeping the pillow over my head.

“I don’t know what you see in that guy,” Zach grumbled.

“Yeah,” I said. “Funny, smart, sexy, good-looking, sweet, and a baker. Nothing appealing about that at all.”

“But maybe a murderer, right?” Zach said. “That’s why you’re really dating him, isn’t it?”

“I’ve decided he’s not a murderer,” I said, peeking out from under the pillow. The light from the hallway spilled into my room around Zach’s beefy shape, and I had to cover my eyes again.

“Oh, really?” Zach said. “What brought you to that conclusion all of a sudden?”

Well, for one thing, I highly doubt a murderer could
be that good a kisser
. “I’ve decided it’s someone else,” I said.

“Yeah? Who?”

I sighed. “That Rowan guy you were talking about. There are too many clues pointing in his direction. Plus he’s freaky.”
And NOT a good kisser
.

Zach let out a sharp, barking laugh. “Wow,” he said. “You really are dumb.”

I wriggled deeper into the covers. “I do not have the energy for you right now, Zach.”

“Well, I know something you don’t know,” he said. “And I think maybe you should.”

“I’ve got a good idea,” I said. “Why don’t you just tell me, instead of acting like a six-year-old? Or else go away and let me sleep.”

“There’s a reason we’re here,” Zach said. “In this town, I mean, here and now. I heard Olympia and Wilhelm talking about it. It’s because of you.”

I shoved the covers back and sat up. Immediately a five-siren alarm went off in my head, like a jackhammer trying to blast through my skull. I clutched my head and tried to glare at Zach.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know anything, do you?” he said in that snide way of his. “You don’t even know how you really died.”

I stopped breathing. Admittedly, this wasn’t a huge problem, since I was dead and didn’t actually need to. But still, without meaning to, I literally stopped breathing.

“I died in a car accident,” I said. “Everyone knows that.”

“That’s not the whole story,” he said. His face was backlit so I couldn’t see his expression, but I could practically feel the waves of smugness coming off him. “But you don’t know the truth. That’s why you have so many issues.”

“I do
not
have
issues
,” I snapped.

“Olympia and Wilhelm think you do,” Zach pointed out. “They think the fact that you turned me is a sign that you still have a lot of your own death issues to work through. That’s why they brought you here. Now Wilhelm thinks you killed Tex, and maybe you need to work out your issues inside a padded coffin for a while. I, for one, think he might be right.”

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.