Henry grabbed his English and science books and closed his locker. His forehead was creased, as if he was troubled. “Don’t worry about it, Vlad. We’ll figure something out. After all, it’s just Eddie Poe. He’s nothing. He’s empty space.”
Vlad nodded, unsure if he agreed with Henry’s assessment of the situation. Eddie might be a nobody, but a determined nobody could find his way into being a somebody if the right opportunity presented itself. Trying to push those troubling thoughts from his mind, he frowned down at his schedule. He didn’t share any classes with Henry or Meredith this year, which didn’t exactly give him a lot to look forward to. After receiving a friendly slug in the shoulder from Henry, he grabbed the teal book with a picture of what looked like a brain holding hands with a piece of broccoli on the cover and headed down the hall to first period.
Health class. Whoever had decided that forcing kids to sit in a room together while a teacher blushes and stumbles over the ins and outs of sex and drugs and puberty was a good idea should have realized that kids already know most of the stuff by the time they hit high school, and the stuff they don’t know, they really, really don’t want to hear from an old windbag like Mr. Cartel.
Mr. Cartel was born before the beginning of time, and he seemed to look fondly on those pre-dinosaur years, as he couldn’t help but comment on how things had been when he was a kid. Vlad had heard the horror stories about health class with Mr. Cartel. He’d been warned about the weird wheezing noise he made when he breathed, and about the fact that every time he was forced to say the word gonads he would stutter. But Vlad hadn’t been prepared for the life-size posters of two naked people and all their naked bits. Nor had he been prepared for the desktop models of the human reproductive systems.
Oh. My. God.
Vlad’s face flushed as he did a quick head count on the way to his desk. Twelve girls, eight guys, one very old teacher, and way too many naked parts at the front of the class. It was like a scene out of his worst nightmare.
Suddenly he was relieved that Meredith didn’t share first hour with him.
He took a desk in the back, as far away from all the nakedness as he could possibly get. No one, of course, was sitting in the front row. Mr. Cartel waited quietly until the bell rang, then leaned back in his chair and regarded the class with a somber expression. “Welcome to health. In this class, we will discuss physiological changes in a body as it ages, the reproductive process, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and we will spend an entire month discussing how smoking cigarettes damages the human body.”
Vlad sank further down in his seat with each item the teacher had listed until he got to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco-he already knew those were things to be avoided if he planned on living past twenty. And not just because of the way they harmed his body-if he touched any of them, Nelly would kill him for sure.
Mr. Cartel cleared his throat and shifted in his seat a little before standing up. He picked up a long, wooden pointer and, much to Vlad’s horror, smacked the pointer against the nether regions of the man on the poster. “ The human reproductive system is a complicated and fascinating subject. We will study each part thoroughly, from glands to g-g-g-gonads…”
Vlad felt his face grow so hot that he was fairly certain he was glowing. He sank even further down in his seat and waited for the nightmare to be over.
After napping through geometry and accidentally freezing Mrs. Patterson’s beaker to the lab table in chemistry, Vlad stumbled into a lunchtime oasis. Meredith had saved a seat for him and Henry sat across from her, making moon eyes at Melissa Hart as she made her way through the lunch line. Vlad slid in beside Meredith and managed a smile. “Is it graduation time yet?”
Meredith laughed, sweet and giggly, making Vlad’s insides all gooey. “Is it that bad so far?”
Henry snorted. “Not all of us lucked out with challenging courses like art and Sucking Up to the Teacher 101, Meredith.”
Meredith wrinkled her nose in that cute way she did whenever she was irritated, and brushed a stray hair from her eyes. “It’s called teacher’s assistant, and maybe if you worked harder at your grades, you’d get to do it for a semester, too. Besides, art isn’t exactly easy.”
Henry shrugged and Vlad changed the subject-he wasn’t in the mood for another tiff between those two. “Cartel’s going to make this the longest year yet.”
A grin spread across Henry’s face. “Only if he keeps talking about gonads. Man, that guy can stutter. In second period we kept asking him questions, knowing the answer involved gonads, just to hear him rattle through the word a couple dozen times. It was funny.”
Vlad chuckled, but Meredith didn’t. In fact, she looked a little repulsed. Apparently, a girl’s idea of funny was very different from a guy’s.
Melissa sat down on the other side of Meredith, much to Henry’s dismay. The two girls were deep in conversation when Henry leaned across the table and raised his eyebrows with a smirk. “So… did you get a look at the woman on that poster?”
Vlad laughed aloud, shaking his head. “Dude, did you see the date on that poster? She’s way too old for you.”
4 A LONG GOOD BYE
THAT AFTERNOON, AS VLAD MADE HIS WAY from the school to his house sans Henry, he had the unsettling, unshakable feeling that he was being followed. He turned around several times, but found no one. Finally, as he was crossing the street, he whipped around fast enough to spot a head ducking behind a tree. With a sigh, he approached the tree and ducked around it to find Eddie and his new camera. “What are you doing, Eddie?”
Eddie forced a smile. “Just walking. What about you?”
Vlad knew he was lying-they both knew it. He shook his head, weary of Eddie’s antics already. “Nothing. That’s all I’m doing, Eddie. And that’s all you’ll ever catch me doing by following me. So why don’t you get another hobby?”
He turned and crossed the street. As his foot touched pavement, he heard the click of a camera behind him. The sound made the corner of his mouth twitch in irritation.
By the time Vlad got back to the house, he was completely annoyed with Eddie, but overshadowing his annoyance was the fact that he dreaded the conversation that he knew was waiting for him there. He slipped through the front gate as quietly as he could, moved up the path to the front steps, made his way across the porch, and opened the door an inch. Then he paused, tilting his head to see if he could hear his uncle Otis moving around in the house.
Nothing. Not so much as a footstep. Maybe Otis had given up the argument in light of his coming departure.
With a relieved exhale, Vlad counted his blessings, stepped inside, and headed for the stairs.
“I believe an apology is in order, Vladimir.”
Vlad cursed himself for not using his vampire honing skills. What good were talents like these if he couldn’t remember to use them? He stopped in his tracks and turned to face Otis, who’d been leaning against the wall to the left of the front door, waiting.
Apparently, he wasn’t about to skip town without finishing his rant on Vlad’s growing hunger.
Vlad’s stomach grumbled its agreement, and he couldn’t help but wonder whose side it was on. “I’m not apologizing, Otis. Not for disagreeing with you. I mean, okay, maybe I shouldn’t have walked out like that, but I-”
Otis held up his hand, silencing Vlad. “I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m apologizing to you. No one knows better than you how in control of your hunger you are, and if you say that you can resist harming those around you, I have no choice but to trust you.”