Vamplayers (8 page)

We walk off the track, following the sidewalk into the back entrance of the school.

Tristan opens the door for me, bowing slightly and making a courtly gesture. “Ladies first.”

I plunge ahead to tell the other Sisters as Tristan makes a quick exit down the opposite hallway.

I feel a vague presence at my side and turn quickly to see who it might be. Almost running into a tall, lanky figure, I gasp. “Zander?”

He barely sees me, watching instead as Tristan, looking every bit the Olympic type, jaunts toward the boys’ locker room.

“Lily?” Zander says, his apron over his shoulder, his eyes sleepy and, dare I say, disappointed?

Chapter 11

T
he first class I have with Tristan and Bianca is fifth period PE. Fortunately, Alice and Cara are in it as well. Unfortunately, Alice is acting like she barely knows us.

I’m still feeling limber from my run with Tristan, although I’m a little miffed at the way Zander blew me off during lunch when he and Grover shared a table for two. It looked like Grover was going to wave me over and ask me to join them, something I would have enjoyed after four straight hours of mind-numbing morning classes. (You can hear the Emancipation Proclamation only so many times before it loses its poetry, you know?)

But with a quick jab from Zander, Grover stared down at his tray, unblinking.

I huffed from the cafeteria a few minutes later, tossed my uneaten yogurt and fruit cup into the nearest trash can (sorry, starving kids in third world countries), and spent the period watching Cara practice cheers with her new BFFs out on the quad.

We’re in the locker room now, Cara and I slipping into our red shorts and black tank tops, Nightshade’s school colors.

A few minutes before class is supposed to start, Alice stumbles in and hustles over but only because her locker is right next to ours.

“Where have you been?” I whisper. “You never came in last night.”

Cara looks even more upset. “This is the first time I’ve seen you all day, Alice!”

“Relax.” Alice grabs her stuff and quickly slams her locker shut. “It’s called blending in, okay? Deal.”

“Blend in, fine,” Cara says as Alice drifts away, “but tell a Sister where you are, ‘kay?”

“‘Kay,” Alice mimics, rushing to Bianca and her crew, turning her back on us as soon and as often as she can.

Bianca looks at her, and Cara and I hold our nonexistent breath in case Alice is assuming too much too soon. But Bianca opens her arms and gives the First Sister a big, fat first order hug.

Cara and I share a
Do you believe that?
look before leaning to tie our shoes, attempting not to look quite so jealous.

“That was sooooo fun last night,” Bianca gushes.

Alice quickly slips into her PE uniform. “Wasn’t it?”

“That was pretty sweet!” Alice says as a few more of Bianca’s identically pretty friends gather around her. “I never knew skinny-dipping could be so fun.”

“Mmmmmm. It’s much more fun when you invite the boys along.”

Cara and I look at each other and mouth the words,
Skinny-dipping?
and
Invite the boys along?
We’re far from prudes, but this is too much.

We slam our lockers and bound out to the gym floor, where a short, paunchy man in too-snug coaching shorts and a too-baggy golf shirt holds a clipboard.

“Names?” he says.

“Lily Fielding.” I spot Zander and Grover lurking on the sidelines, Grover practically spilling out of and over his ginormous gym shorts while Zander basically floats in his.

”Cara Sierra,” she says proudly.

Grover drags Zander to us. “Hello, Lily.” Grover extends a warm, meaty hand. “And who is this delectable creature you’ve brought with you to class today?”

Never one to discriminate, she extends her long fingers and says, “Cara, and you are?”

“This is Grover,” I say, since the man himself seems to be particularly tongue-tied at the moment, “and this fellow with the scowly expression and mismatched tube socks is Zander. I met them yesterday.”

Zander shakes Cara’s hand brusquely, looks to see if I’m right about his socks, and groans.

A burst of laughter comes from the girls’ locker room as the door opens and Bianca, Alice, and several beautiful drones stream out, looking as if they’ve just heard Dane Cook’s new album at a private prerelease party or something.

Tristan stands aloof among a group of bigger, dopier guys.

Like magnets, Bianca and Alice steer toward them. Alice fits in perfectly.

I nudge Cara, but she’s already scoping the scene.

“I’ve got to admit,” she says, “that girl’s good.”

I nod begrudgingly. “Well, she’s not First Sister for nothing.”

Cara snorts and nudges me. “Nah, she ain’t
that
good. She’s only First Sister because she’s been here the longest. You and me, we’ll get our day.” She smiles.

I smile back.

But what I’m really thinking is,
Yeah, but when?

The guy with the clipboard and
Coach Wan-namaker
monogrammed on his red polyester shirt blows his whistle, and we all stand at attention (funny how some things never change). From a plastic cart at his side, he drags out a mesh bag full of multicolored balls.

Half the class (the pretty, chosen, Bianca clones) cheer.

The other half (everybody else) groan.

“That’s right. It’s the second Tuesday of the month, children, and that means …” He waits for us to respond.

I follow Grover and Zander’s lead as they say listlessly, “Dodgeball derby.”

Simultaneously, Tristan, Bianca and her crew, and of course Alice cheer, “Dodgeball
derby!”

I nudge Zander, leaning close to his warm, pink ear. “How come they’re all so happy and we’re so sad?”

He smirks. “You’ll see.”

Coach Wannamaker reaches into the bag and tosses a ball at a random student.

“You know the drill,” he grumps, tossing balls willy-nilly with his hairy, beefy arms. “If you get a red ball, report to the visitors’ side of the gym. If you get a black ball, report to the home side.”

Turns out I was wrong. He’s not tossing out the balls randomly at all.

A pattern emerges. The red balls land on our side of the gym, first to Grover, then Zander, then me, then Cara, and then to an odd assortment of freaks, geeks, misfits, and losers.

Meanwhile the black balls zip over to Tristan, Bianca, Alice, and the like.

By the time all the balls have been tossed, the home side of the court looks like a photo shoot for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog while the poor visitors’ side looks like two short busses pulled up and dumped us off after a somber visit to the local cemetery.

“This sucks major.” Grover stomps once like a disgruntled third grader whose brother dumped his ice cream cone in the sandbox.

“What’d we do wrong?” I say.

”You?” He looks Cara and me up and down but not in a salacious way. “You two belong over there.”

“Yeah,” Zander says, “you two made the mistake of talking to us while Coach Wannamaker was handing out the dodge balls. Guilt by association, I’m afraid.”

“What’s wrong with these balls?” Cara squeezes hers like an overripe cantaloupe.

“Oh, nothing a few dozen pounds of air pressure wouldn’t cure.” Grover places his under one armpit and makes gaseous noises to the delight of our reject team and the obvious disgust of Bianca and her glamorous pals.

I squeeze mine, and he’s right. It’s like half the air has been let out. On purpose. The nerve!

I peer toward the home team side and watch Alice bouncing her big, fat, black ball on the basketball court like she’s preparing for liftoff or perhaps a tryout with the Harlem Globetrotters. “Well, that’s not fair at all.”

“Welcome to Nightshade,” Zander says.

“Welcome to high school.” Grover sighs.

Without warning, Coach Wannamaker blows his whistle twice. Suddenly the two dozen perfectly inflated balls launch. It’s like a scene out of one of those Japanese movies where an army of archers shoot so many arrows into the sky that they blot out the sun. You can almost hear the whoosh as the balls fill the air, advancing steadily toward our pitiful team.

Instinctively, Cara and I shove Zander and Grover behind us and catch two balls expertly, as if we’ve been trained to do this. Come to think of it, considering how many times we play this game every year, the Academy should absolutely have a Dodgeball Tactics for the PE Averse class.

On the opposite side of the court, two beautiful people slump to the side.

Cara and I look at each other, smile, and launch the balls back to the home side, nailing two pretty girls, who scream, rub their shoulders, and limp to the sidelines.

Zander and Grover guffaw and hand us their dodge balls.

“Sweet!” Grover says.

“Wicked!” Zander says. “It’s like Slam the Supermodels Day.”

Double-handed now, Cara and I take out four more hottie hopefuls, the half-inflated balls making thwap-sting-slap sounds as they land on human flesh, leaving big, fat red welts where once there was only flawless skin.

One girl falls so hard, her perfect derriere squeaks for several feet across the gym floor.

The other girl gets knocked back into the blue gym mats strapped to the wall behind the basket, where she lands in a heap on the floor. Whap.

“You’re outta the game,” Coach Wannamaker shouts.

Thwack-slap.

“Out.” Whap. Whap!

Whap!

“Out. All three of you, gone!”

I peek at Zander’s face. His mouth is wide open, his eyes nearly as big.

Meanwhile, Grover is simply drooling.

I sneer. I know it looks to humans as if we vampires are moving quickly and have catlike reflexes, but the fact is that the world moves slowly. Our metabolisms are so fast that it’s like our senses are always on red alert.
Running to stand still
is what I call it.

So when a ball comes flying at us, it’s not that we move so fast; it’s that the ball goes so slowly we have extra time to avoid it. To mortals the world is going in fast-forward, but to us it feels like the pause button is always on.

“Oh, this is awesome!” Grover pats his gym shorts. “Where is my cell phone video camera when I need it?”

Eventually only Bianca, Tristan, and Alice are left standing after our full frontal assault. Cara and I march steadily toward the half-court line, picking up ripe black dodge balls along the way and launching them with expert precision.

Bianca evades them surprisingly well for a mere mortal, but then half the time she’s either hiding behind Tristan or Alice, alternately shrieking and protecting her precious hair.

Alice fights hard, though. Ball after ball zips by my head, and I want to shout, “We’re Sisters, remember?”

Her eyes have an almost religious zeal when she targets us again and again.

“Who gave this witch a vendetta?” Cara says as a ball narrowly misses her left ear and nails Grover in the belly.

“Ummphfuzzlesnot,” he mumbles, falling to the floor and rolling on his side in exquisite agony.

Like any good soldier, Zander sacrifices himself to drag his friend safely off the court, but Bianca and Alice show no mercy, peppering him with dodge balls the entire way. They land with deadly accuracy, thwacking against his pale skin and leaving instant bruises.

To silence them, I take careful aim and nail Bianca in the arm.

“Hey!” She steps forward as if she’s going to launch a ball-free attack with her fists.

Forgetting myself, I walk to greet her.

“Now, now, dear,” Tristan says calmly with that snooty voice of his, expertly dodging the balls Cara and I throw. “Where are your manners? No one likes a sore loser.”

“Too right,” Bianca says, rubbing her arm and staring daggers at me. “Where would I be without you, my love?” She curtsies and exits the game to the cheers of her adoring fans, er, friends.

Alice, Tristan, Cara, and I square off, mere feet from each other, dodge balls flying rapidly from one to the other in an endless dizzying cycle. It’s like our arms don’t even pause, zipping and zapping and finding balls and flinging them like human—well, almost human—tennis ball machines.

With every near miss on our side, their side roars—and vice versa.

Balls are whizzing so fast, our sneakers squeaking so loudly on the gym floor, it’s like a cacophony of jungle noises in the middle of the gym.

At one point Tristan trips, their side gasps, and Cara uses the opportunity to launch an aerial assault straight at his face. (Hey, all’s fair in love and dodgeball, pretty boy.)

Alice manages to deflect one projectile just in time but has to dive for the second ball to do so.