No one offered to remind him.
"And you don’t…mind it?" asked Sejal.
"It’s just a nickname," Ophelia reassured her, "it doesn’t mean anything. Like Dutch or Lefty or whatever. It’s not mean." Her smile was peaceful and blameless. Most of the group nodded faintly, as if they’d needed reassuring, too. Even Doug.
"Ah! He’s blushing!" said Troy, pointing at Doug. "You’re so pink right now."
"Oh, he’s not blushing," Sejal said, and turned to Doug. "Right? You told me this morning."
"Yeah. Yeah, over the summer I developed this sun allergy. It comes and goes."
"I have that!" shouted Abby. "I totally know what you’re talking about. It’s, like, sometimes, when I’m out in the sun awhile my skin gets this very fine layer of ash."
"Really?" said Sejal.
"Really?" said Doug. Behind him, the other boy glanced up from his book.
"And now you have an aversion to crosses, too, right?" Ophelia asked Abby. "And it all started — lemme guess — it all started when that emo boy gave you a hickey at Stacy’s pool party?"
Now Abby blushed. "Maybe."
Ophelia pulled a compact mirror out of her purse. "Ooh, let’s see if you have a reflection. Whoop, you’re still in there. Not a vampire."
"Did this emo boy break the skin?" asked Troy. "Maybe she’s just turning into a vampire really slowly."
"That reflection thing doesn’t work anyway," Doug’s friend said suddenly. All eyes turned to him, and time stopped. There was a great black hole where his head should have been, sucking all light and heat and conversation. He hid behind his book again.
Doug rose, then, and strode off without warning, as if he’d seen someone or something he wanted. The other boy glanced over the edge of his paperback in surprise. Then his eyes returned to the group, his possum face flashing "flee or play dead?"
"Your name’s…Jay," said Cat. "Right?"
"What?" said Jay.
Doug crossed the quad to the boys’ locker room and pulled his poncho back over his angry skin. The day was actually looking up. This new Indian girl continued to be nice to him. And he thought he might start working on Abby now, too. She was obviously dying to be made a vampire. So to speak. He wouldn’t have wished to leave the drama tree just then but for two things: one, the almost subconscious knowledge that the longer he stayed, the more likely he was to screw everything up. And two: he’d just spied Victor Bradley, walking alone. Not surrounded by sycophants or anxious girls, but alone.
And now Doug was, of his own free will, walking into the locker room. He hadn’t been required to take phys. ed. after freshman year, and since then this entire section of campus had been an ecological dead zone as far as he was concerned. This felt reckless and stupid. Not-ready-to-face-Lord-Vader stupid.
He was a vampire, sure, but the jocks were werewolves. They always had been, he understood that now. They had been bitten by something as kids and had changed in ways he hadn’t, and you needed a farmer’s almanac and a tent full of gypsies to foresee their sudden, savage benders.
He knew what happened when a vampire bit a person, and turned him. How much worse when a vampire turned a werewolf?
"Victor?" Doug said. His voice echoed through the stink. Was the locker room always this bad? No, of course not — it was his new heightened sense of smell. It always buzzed at human odors. Others, not so much. But this was even worse than he would have expected — it was sewage, rotten eggs, sulfur.
"Victor?"
Victor appeared then, from behind a locker bay. Half undressed. The star of the football team. The Boy Most Likely. He wrinkled his nose.
"Is that you?" Victor said.
"Yeah, if you mean…What do you mean?"
"Is it you that smells like that. It smells…"
"Dead," said Doug. "It’s us, isn’t it? We smell each other."
The locker room was cool and windowless, like a crypt. They stood silently, neither really looking at the other.
"I was out of my mind that night," said Victor.
"I know. I mean, I figured."
"I didn’t even know it was you. Not at first. I could barely remember what happened, so if you want to blame someone—"
They heard the locker room door open again. More boys approached, three more werewolves. Their barking voices went silent when they saw Doug.
"What’s this little faggot doing here?" said Reid, an enormous senior built like a stack of hamburgers. There wasn’t any laughter. The issue of the little faggot in the locker room was a very serious one that demanded answers.
"I think he came to get a look at Victor," said another guy just like Reid but larger. "I think he’s got a big faggot crush. Right, Victor?"
Victor rushed Doug then, half naked, white skinned, like that night in the forest. He pressed Doug back over a bench and against the lockers.
"I don’t have a crush on you, Victor, I swear—"
"Shut the fuck up. Jesus."
"I just need to talk to you about—"
Victor punched Doug right below the ribs. And so Doug would not be finishing that sentence or starting any new ones for two or three minutes.
Victor’s face was close.
"Four o’clock," he hissed quietly through his teeth before throwing Doug out. "The drainpipe behind the soccer fields. Alone."
13
Nocturnal admissions
DOUG COULDN’T concentrate for the rest of the day and did little more than watch the clock until three thirty. He didn’t know if he was going to a secret meeting or a fight. Maybe more than a fight. Maybe Victor was going to kill him. Maybe he enjoyed it so much the first time he wanted to do it again.
"Why…exactly…are you meeting Victor Bradley by the drainpipe?" asked Jay after last bell.
"We just have some business to talk about. Or he wants to beat me up. I’ll find out when I get there."
Jay was thinking hard. You could tell because he looked like he was cleaning his teeth with his tongue. "I’m going with you. Even though I’m still mad at you for ditching me. Although I think I really scored some points with the drama kids—"
"I’m supposed to go alone," said Doug.
"Yeah, right — so then Victor can show up with the whole football team?"
"Are you really suggesting he’s gonna need help kicking my ass?"
Jay shrugged. "You have vampire strength now."
"Not during the day I don’t. Look, thank you, but I’m going to go alone. If I don’t call you by five, then you can panic," Doug said. He was annoyed with Jay, annoyed with himself for even telling Jay about it. Plus people were making fun of his poncho.
He walked out past the bus bays and the throngs of people, across the parking lot and the soccer field, through a hole in the chain-link fence, and down an embankment. Victor was already there, alone. Victor who, if possible, was even better looking now that he was a vampire. It made his eyes smolder or something. It made Doug look like a blind cave fish.
The day was humid and close. The area around the pipe was rocky and lush green. Flies punctuated the air over something furry and dead. It smelled worse than Victor. Victor he was starting to get used to.
"I checked up on you," Victor said. "I did. After I figured out it was you that I attacked. I came by your family’s cabin and made sure you were okay."
"Thanks," Doug said, and wanted to slap himself. He was thanking him for this?
"And then when I saw you were okay," said Victor, "I knew I must have made you. I guess because I took too much?"
"I wonder if it’s because you were bleeding, and I got some of your blood in me. You haven’t made any other vampires?"