Jane Jones (6 page)

I took the sandwich.

It had been so long since I’d actually held regular food in my hand. Even before I’d become a vampire, food was something that had become scarce and unfamiliar, and since then, I hadn’t really had much excuse to think about it.

Still, sometimes I
did
think about it. Mostly when I saw television commercials for tiny frozen dinners that were supposed to make people thin, or yogurt in tubes that was supposed to give kids energy. It all seemed kind of dumb to me. If you could eat, why not do it right? Why not use the professional knives on your granite countertop to chop some fresh vegetables to simmer on your six-burner stove? Why not peel and slice a single perfect
aromatic and sweet orange or shell some salted peanuts, if you could?

I felt my fingertips sinking into the moist wheat bread. I couldn’t just sit there holding it. While Eli was looking down at another of his Dust Bowl books, I surreptitiously sniffed at the filling. Vampires have a good sense of smell. In fact, it’s so good that the whole world sort of smells like a mixture of all the aromas surrounding us. So we’ve become adept at zeroing in on particular scents while ignoring others. You could say we’re almost like bloodhounds. For the most part, we’re able to block out the smell of food because it’s useless to us. I say “for the most part” because we really do hate garlic, but only because the strong smell is so hard to ignore. That’s why not many pizza lovers fall prey to random crazed vamp attacks. But I had been turning my nose up at food for so long now that I was the tiniest bit curious, so I inhaled.

And oh, God.

It was not good. Not good at all.

My father never complained about his job at the plant, but I recognized that it was kind of unusual for a man who doesn’t eat to spend night after night producing snack foods for people who never seem to stop eating. I also knew that when he came home in the morning, his clothes gave off a faint odor of something I didn’t love, the way I
imagine an auto mechanic might smell a little motor-oily to his family. But I had no idea just how rank and vile food could smell when you took a great big whiff of it on purpose. I made a mental note to thank my father for his sacrifice as I blinked my stinging eyes. When Eli looked up at me expectantly, I panicked.

“It’s got celery in it,” he said. “My mom—I mean, the lady who makes my lunch,” he deadpanned, “she always puts that in there. It’s good.”

At that moment, I realized that if I didn’t do something, he was just going to keep talking about the damn sandwich his mother made and asking me questions and looking at me. I’m positive my eyes were as wide as saucers as I took a deep breath and bit into the soggy bread. Satisfied, Eli went back to scanning the book in front of him. I think he started talking again about what a great idea Ms. Smithburg had, but I was no longer listening.

Once, when I was very small, we’d traded some of the wheat my father managed to grow for some fresh eggs, which my mother cooked for us. Even though I’d been famished, when I bit into a little piece of shell, I wasn’t able to eat any more. You know what I’m talking about. Or maybe at some point you’ve found a hair in your food? Well, imagine a similar feeling, but rather than a shell it’s a little beak and instead of just hair, it’s hair with dandruff
stuck to it and still attached to a piece of human scalp. Either of those scenarios would be a little more pleasant than how I felt with this small piece of sandwich in my mouth. Every chew triggered the same refrain inside my head:
This is wrong! This is wrong! This is wrong! This is wrong!

The lunch bell interrupted the ringing in my ears.

“So, are you on board?” I heard Eli ask. My cheeks were lined with sticky tuna sandwich pulp, which was apparently poison to me. I had to answer, and in order to answer, I had to swallow. It was excruciatingly foul. If there was any way my white skin could have gone paler, I’m sure it had.

“Whatever you think,” I croaked. “I gotta go.”

I snatched my books and sprinted out of the cafeteria, flinging the remainder of the sandwich in a garbage can outside the door. I made it down the hall in time to bang through the girls’-room door and into the nearest stall. On my knees, I leaned over the toilet and heaved. Repeatedly. The sandwich I’d swallowed was long gone, but it was obvious that my body was trying to teach me a very important lesson about experimenting with people food. When it was over, I leaned my cool cheek against the metal wall, which felt warm by comparison. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper, wiped my mouth, and stood up. I was considering
my chances of sneaking into my last-period geometry class late when I stepped out of the stall and saw Mrs. Rosebush, the assistant principal, leaning against the sinks. She was evidently waiting for me.

Her long, wavy brown hair was threaded with silvery gray and tied up in a loose knot. Her clothes were just as loose and long. In all my years in schools, I’d seen her type time and time again, even before there was a word for it: the aging hippie, devoting her life to Nurturing Young Minds. I didn’t know for sure, but I guessed she drove some type of Volkswagen. She clearly wanted to “rap.”

“It’s Jane, right?”

I nodded, not sure I was able to speak normally just yet.

“Are you feeling all right, Jane?” She stepped closer to me, presumably to touch my forehead for any sign of fever, but maybe to see if I reeked of booze. I ducked her hand and backed away.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I just ate something that didn’t agree with me, but I’m fine now. I’m late for geometry.”

“I think if you’re ill, you shouldn’t go to class. I think you need to see the nurse.”

Uh, the
last
thing I needed was to see the nurse, because the
last
thing I needed to do today was have someone take my temperature and then watch her eyes pop
out when it was 26.6 degrees lower than normal. I’d had it happen thirty-something years ago, and that time I convinced the woman her thermometer was broken. But right now, I just didn’t feel up to it.

“Seriously, I’m fine. I swear. I mean, it’s incredibly tempting to get out of geometry—who wouldn’t want that? But I’m not sick, so it wouldn’t be right. I
want
to go to geometry. That’s how fine I am.” I realized I was blathering and abruptly shut up.

I got lucky. Mrs. Rosebush was the kind of educator who liked to believe that she was developing a special relationship with every kid who passed through her halls. She thought she understood me better than any other teacher here ever could.

She had no idea.

“Well, if you won’t go to the nurse, I want you to go to the library and read quietly until the end of the day. I’ll give you a pass.” She took a pink pad of hallway passes out of the pocket of her long duster and scrawled on one before tearing it off and handing it to me. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a little smile as I took it.

“Jane, I know you’re new in town and being in a new place isn’t easy. But this is a good place. We take care of each other here. So, I’m around if you ever need to talk. Okay?”

I figured I needed to play along if I was ever going to get out of there. I looked down at the tile floor.

“Okay. Thanks.” I managed a small, grateful, fake-yet-convincing smile as I turned and left the bathroom.

I headed toward the library, fully intending to do as I had been told. Then I realized: if I just held on to my pass and said I’d forgotten to turn it in, I probably wouldn’t get into any trouble. If anybody even asked at all. I decided my day had already been long enough. I tucked the pass into my notebook, and when I reached the library, I just walked past the door and out the north exit of the school. The air, I noticed, was colder than I was.

“Honey, I’m home!” I yelled as I banged through the back door of my house into the empty kitchen.
When you’re a teen vampire stuck in a suburban wasteland, it’s the little things like being a smart-ass that really keep you going.

My mother appeared in the doorway, finger to her lips. “Jane, your father is sleeping!” she hissed. “What are you doing home? I thought you were spending the last period of school reading quietly in the library.”

I get it that mothers come equipped with some kind of sixth sense that tingles when something is up with their offspring, but this was a little ridiculous. Had decades of mom experience allowed her to actually start reading my thoughts? “How did you—”

“Mrs. Rosebush from the school called.”

“Oh, God …”

“She said she was concerned because she heard you
vomiting in the bathroom after lunch. I’m sure there must be some kind of mistake.”

“No, I was in the bathroom. And there was puke.”

“Jane, those kids didn’t goad you into drinking blood again, did they?”

Logically, due to my being conscious, my mother must have known that wasn’t the case, but why not take an already embarrassing situation and compound it by bringing up another recently embarrassing situation, right?

“No, Ma. They didn’t.”

“Then why on earth were you sick?”

I knew she wasn’t going to drop it until I gave her an answer, yet I still tried to avoid it. “It’s a long story, Ma.”

She folded her arms. “Well, I’ve got all the time in eternity to hear it, so go ahead.”

I sighed heavily. Scientists theorize that people sigh when they have low oxygen levels in their bodies. I theorize that teenagers, both human and vampire alike, have low oxygen in their bodies due to parental smothering.

“I took a bite of a sandwich and I threw up. That’s it.”

“A sandwich? Jane, you see your father come home from work feeling sick just from the smell of human food. What would possess you to take a bite of a sandwich?”

I had been trying to keep my voice low so I wouldn’t wake my father, but frustration overwhelmed me. I said,
louder than I should have, “
Ma!
I was working on a project with a boy over lunch. Just like you’re always pushing me to do. He’s a regular boy who brought a sandwich from home, made by
his
pushy mother. When he noticed I wasn’t eating anything, he pushily insisted that I share it. He wouldn’t drop it, so I had to take a bite. End of story!”

Her face softened a bit, almost imperceptibly. She resumed speaking in a low tone.

“I’m just very concerned. I know you’re almost a century old and it seems like you’ve been through everything. But because of who you are, and what you are, you still think like a child thinks—an intelligent and gifted girl, but still just a girl nonetheless. It worries me that you could be so easily pushed into doing things that you know will be bad for you.”

I didn’t raise my voice again. There was no need to shout what I was about to say. “Well, you know what, Ma? It worries me that you can’t see the truth of the situation I’m in. You don’t want me to be pushed into anything unless it’s you doing the pushing. You want to have absolute control over my life and you’re constantly telling me what I should and shouldn’t do,
but
it’s the very things you tell me I should be doing that are getting me into trouble. Sometimes I wish you weren’t in my life at all.”

The instant I said it, I wanted to take it back. I assumed
that my words would reignite her anger, but the way her forehead crinkled and her eyes fluttered, I could tell she was feeling the sting of phantom tears that probably couldn’t appear so many hours after she’d fed. She knew I was telling the truth. I may not have used my fangs to draw blood, but my mouth could be dangerous in other ways.

“Ma, I know you worry. But you don’t need to. I’m basically unkillable except for a couple very unlikely scenarios, right? So any mistake I make is just a mistake. Unless it involves accidentally walking into a track-and-field practice and getting javelined through the chest, I’ll be okay.”

“You’re right, Jo.” She cringed at her little slip of the tongue. “I meant to say ‘Jane.’ I could stand to trust you more and to give you more space than I have been.” Now it was her turn to sigh. “Unfortunately, your vice principal wants to have a meeting with your father and me about this vomiting incident.”

“A meeting? Why?”

“Well, she didn’t want to alarm me, but she’s convinced that you’re displaying the classic symptoms of a teenage girl with an eating disorder.”

Oh, crap. Of course. A touchy-feely former guidance counselor eavesdrops on a ninety-two-pound, pale sophomore retching in a stall after lunch and what else is she supposed to think? Her extensive experience with adolescents
would no doubt lead her to one obvious conclusion. If Mrs. Rosebush only had an inkling of what she’d actually stumbled upon, she might have sped off in her earthy-crunchy mobile and never looked back.

“What did you tell her?”

“What
could
I tell her? I said we would come in tomorrow. She wants you to be there too.”

“Oh, that’ll be lots of fun. I’m sure she’ll have a team of doctors ready to whisk me away to a treatment facility.”

“Jane, stop. This isn’t one of those depressing reality shows. But we do have to think of something we can tell her that will get this idea that you have an eating disorder out of her mind.”

“Oh, I know! Let’s tell her I was hurling because I’m pregnant! That will totally distract her from my bulimia.”

“Jane, that’s not even funny.” Even as she tried to frown, the corners of her mouth turned up involuntarily. It was at least a little funny. After all, I was in my nineties and still a total virgin. Not to mention the fact that vampires tend to reproduce in a we-bite-you-then-feed-you-our-blood kind of way, rather than in the mainstream sex-resulting-in-a-cuddly-baby way that humans seem to favor. There were times when I’d been overcome by sadness at the idea that I would never be a mother myself, but I’ve gotten used to it. And right now, the mental image of
my own mother telling Mrs. Rosebush that I was with child was absolutely hilarious to me. Ma’s snorting told me that she agreed.

Our moment of shared laughter was interrupted by knocking at the front door. My mother and I stared at each other for a second. Visitors to our household were a rarity, and even though she possessed the strength and ability to overpower any intruder, after all these years Ma was still understandably paranoid about inviting anyone into our home. Ever. Still, it wouldn’t do to let whomever it was just stand there, lest he start ringing the doorbell, which could wake my father.