Jane Jones (11 page)

“Missed homework? How unlike you,” she cooed. Something didn’t seem right. Astrid wasn’t in my American history class and now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall her being one of Ms. Smithburg’s students at all.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked, trying to turn the tables and regain the bravado I’d been feeling when I decided to go through the desk.

“Ms. Smithburg sent me to pick up some papers she’d
left. So, if you’re done there, I’d like to grab them. She’s waiting for me to bring them to her in the teachers’ lounge.”

Well, I knew that was a lie, but did Astrid know I knew it was a lie? Since I’d said I was here to drop something off, I couldn’t walk out with the folder. Besides, I had a feeling my file was what Astrid had come to collect, and she’d caught me looking through it. Even if my file being there
was
an innocent mix-up and Astrid was there on an innocent errand, I knew she wouldn’t miss an opportunity to share what she’d seen with the proper authorities, aka Ms. Smithburg. Soon I’d be known as a school-skipping breaker-and-enterer. As calmly as I could, which was not very, I put the folder back in the drawer and softly slid it closed. I wanted to relock the drawer, but I wanted to get out of there more, so I decided to just do that. I stood and came out from behind the desk.

“We’ll be seeing you around, Jane,” said Astrid, tossing her heavy hair over her shoulder. I walked quickly past her, out the door and down the stairs, never stopping until I was back inside Mrs. Rosebush’s office. Mrs. Rosebush and my parents all looked up at me, puzzled, probably wondering what had taken me so long and why I’d come back alone.

“She wasn’t there,” I said. “I looked everywhere.”

No matter how many times I would ever walk into that stupid cafeteria, I knew my stomach would never fail to do a sickening flip.
When you’re not considered hot or popular or … normal … the classrooms and hallways at school can be difficult enough, but for some reason, when kids are let loose in the cafeteria, they behave like monsters. Don’t think I don’t know how ironic that is, coming from me. I cautiously navigated between a tableful of lacrosse jocks playing keep-away with one poor mathlete’s soup thermos and a gaggle of student-council girls selling red-and-white PLHS buttons. Between the boys and the girls, I was more intimidated by the girls. They looked like if they didn’t raise enough money
and
school spirit, they’d take all of us down somehow.

Truthfully, even though I hated the caf, I was looking forward to seeing Eli. After the roller-coaster day I’d had so far, I would be happy to just sit and work for a little
while with someone who, I was realizing more and more, was always utterly dependable even if he was probably still mad at me. I scanned the tables looking for Eli’s broad shoulders and the top of his gingery brush cut bent over some books. At first, I didn’t see him, but when I looked around again, I spotted him in a far corner of the room, sitting down, looking up into the face of a girl, smiling and chatting. That flip my stomach had done just a minute ago was only a warm-up. Now it was going for a round-off–back handspring with a full dismount. Even at this distance it only took one flick of her gleaming chestnut waves for me to realize the girl he was talking to was Astrid.

We learned in biology about the fight-or-flight response that’s triggered in animals when they are threatened. Right then, I wanted to get the first flight to anywhere else like you wouldn’t believe. I certainly didn’t feel up for a fight. Maybe in vampires, a third reaction exists in which you stare daggers at another vampire and see if they get the hint to go the hell away. I guess I was about to find out. I smoothed my own dull brown bangs down over my eyes as I walked reluctantly toward them.

“Hi, Eli. Thanks for meeting me,” I said.

“It’s lunch. I would have been here no matter what,” Eli responded in a monotone voice, without ever taking his eyes off Astrid. I could tell right away that she’d been
trancing him a little because although she had a coat draped casually over one arm, she was touching his shoulder with her free hand.

I pulled out a chair and sat down. I had to get him to look at me, so I picked up his hand and held it in both of mine. It was really big for a kid’s hand. I wondered if he was still growing or whether he’d just stay the same size from now on. Feeling the coolness of my skin, Eli seemed to finally become conscious of the fact that someone besides Astrid was talking to him. What
I
felt was my own power to glamour a human flowing through Eli and slamming into Astrid’s energy. “Still, I’m glad I can count on you,” I said to him, smiling softly as his eyes adjusted to my face. Astrid looked shocked, and pissed. I’m sure she assumed that because I was blood-intolerant that I wasn’t like normal vampires in mostly every other way. Well, when you assume, Astrid, you make an
a-s-s
out of
u
,
u
,
u
! I’ll give her credit, though—she was able to recover almost instantly.

“Jane,” she cooed, jerking her hand away from Eli like he was a hot stovetop, “I was just here talking to Eli because I was looking for you! I wanted to make sure you were okay.” She paused for dramatic effect. “I know you had that big … meeting … in the vice principal’s office today.” She scrunched her perfect eyebrows in an ex
pression of affected concern. “I think you are so
brave
to admit you have this disorder and that you want to get help. Are they going to send you to, like, a psychiatric hospital or something?” Eli looked from Astrid to me, obviously confused.

“How did you know about that meeting?” I snapped.

“Oh, Jane,” she said, “there isn’t much that happens inside the walls of this school that I don’t know about. Or outside the walls, for that matter.” She laughed before leveling her cold green gaze at me. “I work in the office during my study period. In fact, if you play your cards right, today’s attendance sheet from your English class could wind up missing. You’d like that, right? Since you were too busy having a little rendezvous to make it to class?” She winked slyly at Eli, who reddened and lowered his eyes to his notebook.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to owe you anything.”

Astrid shrugged and unrolled the coat she’d been carrying over her arm, throwing it over her shoulders. It was a man’s navy cashmere blazer that I’d last seen when Timothy had slipped Dr. Erdos’s article into the inner pocket. “Have it your way,” she said, making a big show of turning up the collar around her face. She was enjoying this.

“Nice jacket,” I said, not at all sincerely.

“Oh, this? It’s Tim’s. I was freezing, so I grabbed it out of his locker,” she prattled. Then, to Eli, she said, “Timothy and I used to sort of be together, so we shared a locker. It was totally casual, but now it’s over and we’re just friends.” Again, Eli reddened and averted his eyes. “Anyway, I was looking for a sweater or something and was surprised to see he left this coat in there. Kind of careless, if you ask me. I’m not sure you can exactly trust everyone at this school.” As she spoke, she looked at me and patted her side where I knew the jacket’s inner pocket was, the pocket that held the article I’d given to Timothy.

My breath became very shallow and panicky. If sweating had been something I did much, my palms would have been slick. Instead, I felt a painful shock in both of my hands as Astrid put her fingers up to Eli’s cheek, caressing it. “See how cold I am? I can never get warm! That’s why I was saying, before Jane got here, that maybe instead of a football game, you could take me to a movie. How’s Friday?”

“Friday. Friday … is good. Okay,” droned Eli. The second Astrid removed her hand, the current between the three of us stopped humming. Clearly, she’d wanted to show me that maybe
I’d
made an assumption about exactly how powerful she was. Point taken.

“Then I’ll see you Friday,” she purred, turning on the
heel of her premium-leather boot. She began to walk away before tossing one last remark over her shoulder at me. “And about your … disorder … Jane? I might know of this Hungarian doctor who’s come up with a cure.”

We both watched her walk away, before Eli turned to me, the fogginess slowly disappearing from his eyes. If he had still been upset with me, his annoyance seemed now to be outweighed by concern. For me. After a moment, he said, “What disorder? What was she talking about, Jane? Are you okay?”

I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay at all. Between our earlier run-in in Ms. Smithburg’s room and her showing up here with Timothy’s jacket, throwing around words like
doctor
and
cure
, Astrid had delivered her message loud and clear. Though she couldn’t know everything, she knew at least something about Timothy’s plan and my involvement and she was not going to just go away. “I … I … um,” I faltered, trying to come up with something, anything, to say to Eli.

“You’re crying,” Eli whispered.

Astonished, my hand flew up to my face. For the first time in I couldn’t remember how long, a lone fat, salty teardrop was rolling down my cheek. I wiped at it and looked at my fingers, relieved to see just a glistening, clear wetness. Obviously, my huge meal from the morning had
been enough to help produce a one-tear meltdown. It was when Eli squeezed my other hand that I realized we were still attached. I also realized that, much like I had been sending these weird psychic vampire waves into Eli to help interrupt Astrid’s vampiric whammy, he was now sending these weird psychic Eli waves into me, giving me the little bit of strength I needed to pull myself together. I looked up into his eyes. “I’m sorry. I have a lot of … personal … stuff going on right now. I don’t think I’ll be able to work on our project today,” I said.

“I totally get it,” Eli said, shaking his head. “I totally understand. You gotta do what you gotta do. Don’t worry about the project right now. We’ve still got plenty of time.”

Plenty of time. What a crazy concept. Up until now, my life had been nothing but roaming around and killing time. Now I had about forty-eight hours to figure out if I was brave enough to leave my family behind and start an entirely new life with someone I barely knew. Oh, and during the next two days of weighing my eternal fate, maybe I could use my spare time to figure out exactly why a teacher seemed to be dogging me, possibly with the help of her evil assistant, Astrid! Also, I had a French quiz that I was definitely not going to ace unless I studied. It was time to prioritize.

“Thanks,” I said, slowly withdrawing my hand from
Eli’s. He curled his freckled fingers closed on his empty palm like he was trying to trap the feeling of my hand inside his. I added another priority to my list: make sure Eli didn’t wind up dazed and drained on a movie-theater floor come Friday night. Not if I could help it. I gathered my backpack and walked out the cafeteria door just as the warning bell rang to let everyone know that time was almost up.

Out in the hallway, I walked through the swelling crowd of students to my locker to unload my books and pick up my gym clothes. I looked at myself in the magnetic mirror stuck to the inside of my locker door. Even though I felt shaky and scared, my face looked cool and calm. I was formulating a plan that was so crazy, it just might get me close-to-killed. Or suspended! There was also a slight chance it might work, if I didn’t screw anything up.

In the girls’ locker room, I chose a bench near the back corner, where I quickly changed out of my jeans and into my sweatpants. I wasn’t trying to be extra-inconspicuous just because I was on a mission, I was trying to be extra-inconspicuous because my bra was tiny and my underwear was eleven years old and I didn’t want anyone to see me almost naked. I stuffed my jeans into my backpack and walked upstairs to take a seat on the bleachers.

My gym teacher was Mrs. J. I don’t know what
J
stood for. I don’t think anybody had ever dared to ask. Just as puzzling as the mysterious
J
part of her name was the
Mrs.
part. She wore no wedding ring on her thick, tan fingers and try as hard as I might, I could not imagine any person of any kind agreeing to live with her and watch TV with her and share a bathroom with her. I pictured her wearing her huge sneakers to bed after drinking raw eggs for dinner. She was tough and prickly, and I’m not even making a joke about her numerous chin hairs, which were not her fault but which also didn’t help matters.

I had hoped to step up and speak with Mrs. J before class began, but I could see through her office window that she was leaning back, talking on the phone, with her blinding white size tens up on the desk. She didn’t look like she was going to move anytime soon.

The bell rang and the bleachers filled with other girls as we all sat waiting for Mrs. J to emerge. When she did, an ear-splitting tweet from her silver whistle signaled us to stand. “All right, everybody. Get in five rows of five, five feet apart. We’re going to stretch and warm up for indoor soccer.” There were a few groans, but very quiet ones, as everybody walked out onto the court. I hung back and slowly sidled up to Mrs. J.

“Mrs. J,” I said weakly, “I don’t think I’ll be able to play
soccer today.” Mrs. J looked at me through the brown lenses of her glasses, which were the kind that magically darkened depending on how bright the light you were in. They weren’t dark enough that I couldn’t see her glaring at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“It’s my stomach. I’m having really bad cramps,” I lied. Actually, it wasn’t an enormous lie. My stomach was churning, but it was mostly out of fear. Still, it was kind of like method acting.

“Oh, you’ve got your friend?” asked Mrs. J.

I looked around to see who she was talking about. “No, it’s just me,” I replied stupidly. One girl on the gym floor overheard and stopped her lazy stretching to elbow her neighbor. They both guffawed.

“No,” Mrs. J said impatiently, “is your
aunt
visiting?” A little too late, I realized she was asking if I had my period. Of course, by now, every other girl in class was occupied with eavesdropping on our conversation while convulsing with silent laughter at my stupidity.