I flung my hand over my mouth.
He bent forward again, breathing hard. “Ari, Ari, no one on this earth can kiss the way you do.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d managed to scare myself.
The next morning he slipped a letter under the door of my room. In it, he wrote a poem about kissing. He ended by saying that he would love me forever. I felt elated, frightened, and grateful that the letter didn’t use the word “eternity.”
In my dorm room that Sunday—a long brown day that pretended Saturday had never been—I used my cell phone to call Dashay. I didn’t dare call the cottage, in case the call might be traced. As arranged, we didn’t say a word about my father in case someone was listening in.
“How are things?” I asked.
“Things are about the same.” Her voice sounded so cold, so detached that it didn’t seem hers. “How are you?”
I still felt numb from the picnic, the kissing, the urge to bite. I said, “I am perfectly fine, ma’am.”
THREE
Blue Moon Rising
Chapter Fourteen
I wanted to talk to Dashay about hormones. I wanted to talk to Dr. Cho about Revité.
But I couldn’t use the phone to talk freely, and I couldn’t get away. On the Internet I found some posts about Revité. Apparently the clinical trials were over, and the drug was now available through Vunderworld.
One posting, from the drug’s manufacturer, featured a photo of a woman running in a meadow, captioned with a line from a Beatles song: “Get back to where you once belonged.” And while part of me did want to go back—to being Ari, the home-schooled girl who cared only about learning and pleasing her father—more of me wanted to go forward. But to what?
Someone wrote: “Revité saved my marriage.” The poster said she’d been vamped “against my will, forced into a hideous dependence on human blood and foul-tasting supplements, unable to have a normal life, missing holiday celebrations, regular meals, safe relations with my mortal husband.”
I would have blushed, if I could.
“Those soulless nights, lying awake craving blood while he snored,” the post went on, “I thought about suicide.”
Did vampires commit suicide? I’d never thought of it until now.
“Then I found Revité.” The anonymous poster changed tone. “Now I can cook, and shop, and make love like a real woman! And someday soon, I may be a mother.”
It all sounded soppy, horribly wrong. Why, then, did I keep reading?
Professor Hogan was envious of me. So was Bernadette, and so were four or five other female students whose thoughts I heard. They could tell Walker was in love with me, and it made them feel unloved by contrast, and bitter.
Walker was not one to hide his feelings. One day he walked into class juggling paper roses, which he laid on the arm of my chair. Another, he sang a silly song he’d made up in which he rhymed Ari with sorry, tamari, and Ferrari. The song made Bernadette and Professor Hogan laugh, after which their envy only grew.
I tried to understand their feelings, but failed. At that point in my life, envy was something I’d experienced rarely, and only in the abstract: I’d envied other girls’ normal family lives, for instance. But what Professor Hogan and Bernadette felt went deeper, and it expressed itself in hostility toward me.
When Professor Hogan wrote “Wrong!” in red ink on one of my essays, next to a statement that I knew was true, I tried not to take it to heart. After all, she was in a relationship with a married man who would never be able to publicly acknowledge his feelings as Walker did. She had reason to be envious.
But when Bernadette began telling lies about me, it hurt. In spite of her moving out of the room, some part of me had thought we still were friends. (It embarrasses me now to recall how naïve I was. Is there anything more fickle than friendship among teenage girls?)
Walker was the one who told me about Bernadette. We were sitting under a tree one afternoon; I was reading our politics textbook, and Walker lay with his head on my lap, playing with my hair. He pulled it all forward, so it hung like a curtain over his face; then he separated it into strands, peering through them at me.
“Is it true that you slept around in high school?” he said suddenly.
“What?” I let the book snap shut.
“Bernadette told me that.” All I could see was one of his eyes, and it had a strange, hard brightness.
“First of all, I didn’t go to high school—I was home-schooled.” My voice sounded less indignant than I felt. “And second, I happen to be a virgin.” There—I’d said something I’d never imagined saying to anyone.
“Are you really?” He reached up, through my hair, and stroked my cheek.
“That tickles.” I brushed his hand away. “Why would she say something like that?”
“She’s jealous, I guess.” Walker sighed. “You know, she and I, we hung out a few times our first year. I thought it was no big deal, but maybe she still has some feelings for me.”
“Maybe she does.” Why hadn’t I picked up on that sooner? And what did he mean by “hung out”?
“What else did she say?” I asked.
“Just, you know, that I should be careful when I’m around you. That bad things have been happening. You know.”