That wasn’t at all what I meant. Still, if that was the strangest behavior Vic could mention, probably Lucas had kept his thoughts about vampires to himself. Vic wasn’t the kind of guy who could bluff his way through something like that. With a sting, I realized that Vic was more honest than I was.
“Cheetos?” Vic offered me a half-empty, orange-powdery bag. I shook my head and tried very hard to pretend that I didn’t feel a whole lot like being sick. “He’s gonna regret it. Wait and see. Me and my family—we’re going to be having the time of our lives. And what’s he going to be doing? Minding his table manners somewhere.” Through a mouthful of Cheetos, Vic predicted, “It’s gonna be a long month.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “It really is.”
I suppose most people would assume that vampires don’t really get into Christmas. Most people would be wrong.
The religious part was uncomfortable. Crosses didn’t set us on fire or turn us to smoke, like in horror movies, but being in a chapel or church felt all wrong—sort of a strange creepy-crawly sensation as if someone unseen were watching. So no midnight mass, no crèche, nothing like that. However, vampires like getting presents as much as anybody. Add some time off from school, and you’ve got a holiday even the undead can enjoy.
Most of the undead, anyway. I was more miserable that Christmas than I’d ever been before in my life.
The stifling atmosphere eased up when the other kids left, so that only the vampires remained behind. People stopped putting on so much attitude; nobody remained for them to pick on or impress. A few departed, including Patrice, who insisted that the skiing in Switzerland this time of year was not to be missed. The rest of us, teachers and students alike, remained at Evernight because it was our home, or as close to a home as some people had.
“We’re the exception, Bianca.” My mother hung holly garlands over our doorway as I stood beneath her, steadying the ladder. She and Dad had picked up on my black mood and were trying extra hard to get me into the holiday spirit. “We’re the only family at Evernight, do you realize that? None of the others here now have had a family since—well, since they were alive, I guess.”
“It’s just weird to me that they don’t have homes to go to.” I handed up a thumbtack for her to secure the garland in place. “We had a house. How do people get by without houses?”
“We had a house for sixteen years,” Dad corrected me from his place on the couch, where he was busily going through his old records, trying to find Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. “That’s your whole life, but to your mother and me, it seems like—”
“The blink of an eye.” Mom sighed.
Dad smiled at her, and something about his smile reminded me that he was about six hundred years older than her—that even the centuries they’d spent together might be, to him, the blink of an eye. “There’s no such thing as permanence. People drift from place to place, getting lost in pleasure or luxury or anything else with the power to divert you from the occasional boredom of immortality. Life moves on, and those of us who aren’t alive have trouble catching up.”
“Which is why there’s an Evernight,” I said, thinking of Modern Technology and how confused people got when Mr. Yee introduced the concept of e-mail. Many of them had heard of it, and several even knew how to use it—but I was the only one who understood how it actually worked before Mr. Yee explained. It was one thing to bluff your way through twenty-first-century life, another to really comprehend what was going on. “What about the ones who look too old to be in school?”
“Well, this isn’t the only place we’ve got, you know.” Mom reached down for another garland. “There are spas and hotels, places like that where people are expected to be somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, and where you can control who gets in. Back in the day, we used to have a lot of monasteries and convents, but it’s difficult to establish new ones now. The Protestant Reformation took out quite a few—Huguenot mobs, fires, stuff like that. The residents couldn’t exactly explain they weren’t Catholics without making things a whole lot worse. These days we mostly stick to schools and clubs.”
Dad added, “They’re opening up a fake rehab center in Arizona next year.”
I imagined all of us, scattered throughout the world, brought together only here and there, and only once every century or so. Was that the way I would lead my entire existence?
It sounded unbearably lonely. What was the point of having unending life if that life was without love? Mom and Dad had been lucky enough to find each other and be together for hundreds of years. I’d found Lucas and lost him within just a few months. I tried to tell myself that someday it would seem like nothing—that the time I’d spent with Lucas would be “the blink of an eye”—but I couldn’t believe that.
So, for the first week of vacation, I mostly stayed in my room. A lot of the time, I just stayed in bed. Once in a while, I’d check my e-mail in the now-deserted computer lab, hoping against hope for a note from Lucas. Instead, all I got were various joke photos of Vic on the beach, wearing sunglasses and a Santa hat. I wondered if I should write Lucas instead of waiting for him to write to me, but what could I possibly say?
My parents drew me out for holiday activities whenever they could, and I tried to go along with them. Just my luck, to be born to the only vampires in the history of the world who baked fruitcake. Every once in a while, I’d catch them exchanging glances. Obviously they realized that I was miserable and were on the verge of asking me what was wrong.
In some ways, I wanted to tell them. At times I wanted nothing more than to blurt out the whole story and cry in their arms—and if that was immature of me, I didn’t care. What I did care about was the fact that, if I told my parents the truth, they’d have to report it to Mrs. Bethany, and I didn’t trust Mrs. Bethany not to go after Lucas and make his life miserable.
For Lucas’s sake, I had to keep my unhappiness to myself.
I might have carried on that way for the whole holiday break if it hadn’t been for the next snowfall, two days before Christmas. This was more generous than the first, blanketing the grounds with silence, softness, and blue-white glitter. I’d always loved snow, and the sight of it, shining and perfect across the landscape, nudged me out of my depression. I tugged on jeans and boots and my heaviest cable-knit green sweater. My brooch safely pinned to the lapel of my gray coat, I trudged downstairs for a walk. I knew I’d get chilled to the bone, but it would be worth it if mine were the first footprints on the grounds and in the woods. When I reached the door, I saw that I wasn’t the only one who liked that idea.
Balthazar smiled at me sheepishly above his red muffler. “Hundreds of years in New England, and I still get excited about snow.”
“I know how you feel.” Things between us were still awkward, but it was only polite to say, “We should walk together.”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
We didn’t say much at first. It wasn’t strained, though. The snowfall and the pinkish-gold early morning light asked for silence, and neither of us wanted to hear anything louder than the muffled crunching of our boots in the snow. Our path took us across the grounds and into the woods—like the walk we’d taken the evening of the Autumn Ball. I breathed in and out, a soft gray puff of warmth in the winter sky.