Kate and I both looked at her. She was peering up at the art tower.
“Stare much?” Claudia said. I twisted my body to look. I saw two almond eyes looking down at the lacrosse field from the art tower. Once I met Tony’s gaze, he turned into the darkness of the room behind him.
“He’s been watching you all week. Assembly, class, now here,” Kate said.
“I didn’t notice,” I said, and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I peeked at the lacrosse field again. Justin was about to run a play with the team.
“You shouldn’t even bother, Lenah. It’s leading him on,” Kate called after me and pushed up the sleeves of the black sweater she was wearing.
“I’ll be right back,” I said again, and peeked up at the art tower window. It was now empty. I didn’t know Tony had been watching me all week, though I wished I had known. Perhaps I could have told him that the Three-Piece were spending time with me and not the other way around. It was Justin I cared about, anyway, and I certainly wasn’t a member of their group.
I walked across the meadow, into Hopper, and up the winding metal stairs of the art tower.
“Hello?” I called while climbing up. There was no response. “Tony, I know you despise me now, but you shouldn’t stare and you shouldn’t blow me off.” Still no response, so I continued up the stairs. “You can come to my room, you know—” I gasped when I stepped into the doorway.
Across the room, in the direct eye line of the door, was the painting. I stopped where I was walking. I didn’t know what to think or say. Tony had finally done it. My portrait. The perspective was from behind, from the middle of my back and up. My head was turned to the right, to show my profile, and I was laughing, openmouthed and happy. The sky in the painting was blue, and my tattoo was etched on my left shoulder. Not in a horrid way but in an artistic way. I knew the painting was taken from a photo; I had seen it in Justin’s locker in Hopper just two stories down from where I stood. It was from the day we bungee jumped. Unlike the photo, where I was wearing a T-shirt, in the painting, my back was naked, exposing my shoulders. I could see the deep curve of my spine and the smooth slopes of my shoulders. Tony hadn’t just been practicing his art, he had been studying my body—my soul.
“You like it?” Tony asked.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the painting. How on earth could anyone see me this way? As though I were someone to admire because of her happiness. “That’s not me. It can’t be,” I said.
“That’s how I see you.”
“Smiling? Happy?” I asked, turning my head to the right to Tony. He was standing next to me.
“You make me happy.”
I looked back at the painting, unable to look away from the radiance of my smiling profile.
“Lenah…”
Tony reached out and took hold of my right hand. His brown eyes looked into mine and his thin mouth was in a straight line, not smiling, not laughing, just being still. Usually his smile would lighten my mood; something funny was always bound to come out.
Tony’s hands cupped my own and I saw that his fingers were not covered in paint. His baseball hat was backward and his button-down shirt was spotless. He must have finished the painting days ago.
“I want to tell you before it’s too late,” he said.
I looked at our hands, a sudden thought…realizing…
“Don’t—” I tried to say.
“I—”
“Don’t, Tony. Please.”
“I love you.” He said it quickly, like pulling a Band-Aid off. He checked my gaze for approval. There was a silence that followed, and I could tell from the way he looked at me that he wanted me to say something.
“Tony—” I started to say, but he jumped right in.
“I’ve loved you for, like, ever so there’s no use in, like, convincing me it’s not true. And I know that you think we’re friends, and we are, even though you’ve been hanging out with that idiot. But I want more. And I think you could, too. Maybe not right now, but—”
“I’m going to meet Justin’s parents. Tonight.”
Tony let go of my hands and backed away. He took his baseball hat off and ran a hand through his spiky black hair. “Oh, that’s cool. It’s no big deal.”
“Tony, wait—” I reached my hands out.
He was almost at the stairs. “Yeah. I gotta go.”
“Don’t go. The painting. It’s beautiful.”
He turned and walked down the stairs with a quick pace to his step that alerted me that I was in no way supposed to follow.
Chapter Eighteen
Justin’s family lived in…get this…Rhode Island. A small state between Massachusetts and Connecticut. I didn’t know what to expect for the weekend, so I brought way more clothes than I needed. When Justin pulled in front of Seeker, the sight of my suitcase was met with a brilliant smile.
“Do you really need all of this?” He opened the back hatch of the car. “You okay?” he asked, noticing that I wasn’t smiling as I normally did. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek.
“I had a fight with Tony.”
“About what? More portrait stuff? Is he ever going to finish it?”
“No idea,” I said. It wasn’t my place to tell Justin that Tony had finished his portrait.
“You’ll talk after the weekend,” Justin said. “He just needs to calm down.
” Curtis turned from the backseat. “Hey, lady.” That’s what he’d been calling me lately.
Then a hand smaller and thinner than Justin’s stuck up from the final seat row. He waved for an instant, and I realized Roy was lying down on his back. I got into the passenger seat, and we were off.
I rolled down the window as Lovers Bay’s Main Street became the entrance to Route 6, then Route 6 became the highway. We sped faster than any horse I’d ever owned, and the trees seemed like a blur of evergreen. I put the window down completely and I let the pressure of the wind push my hand back. Justin looked over at me, smiled, and squeezed my knee. I smiled back and lifted my chin to the dwindling sunlight.
Twilight lay over a long street flanked by oak trees with orange-tipped leaves. The houses had spacious lawns with pumpkins placed on white painted porches. Some were carved with jagged smiles, lit candles inside their mouths.
“Guess Halloween isn’t real pop u lar in England, huh?” Curtis asked, pulling a light jacket over his T-shirt. We were headed up a sloped driveway toward a gray Colonial mansion. “You’re looking at everything with your mouth open.”
Justin’s house was three stories, with a light blue front door and pumpkins lining a stone pathway.
“We get tons of trick-or-treaters,” he said as he hauled both my suitcase and his bag up toward the front door. Justin opened it up, letting me inside first, followed by Curtis and Roy.
“Mom!” Justin yelled. The front foyer was huge, filled with landscape paintings and mahogany furniture. Portraits and paintings lined the walls. Justin’s voice echoed in the high ceilings and over the shiny wood floor.
“We’re here!” Curtis yelled, and snuck past me. He headed to the right into a cushy living area. He plopped all of his bags onto the floor and clicked on the television. Roy did the same and found a spot at the other end of a long, leather couch.
I, on the other hand, had never seen a modern house before. It was filled with electronics, some of which I had seen at Wickham, and plenty of modern artwork. The living room was just off the side of the main foyer. A grand staircase led up to the second-floor landing.
A woman in her mid to late fifties with fabulous blond hair and laugh wrinkles came running down the staircase.
“Ah! You’re here!” she said. Her sandals made a clacking on the wooden steps as she raced toward us.
“Hey, Mom,” Justin said, and placed his bag down by the front door. His mother, Mrs. Enos, grabbed Justin into an embrace. Her hair fell about her face like feathers. She kissed his forehead and cheeks.
&nb
sp; “I don’t see you enough,” she said, squeezing his cheeks and kissing him again. Then she stepped back and looked at me.
“Wow,” she said, looking me up and down. “You are one beautiful girl,” she said to me and grabbed me into her arms. I hugged her in return and felt her palms press into my back. “You weren’t lying,” she said to Justin when she pulled away from me and walked into the living room.
Curtis and Roy got up from the couch and hugged their mother.
“Lenah, I want to hear everything, I mean everything, about England. Tell me all about you,” she said when she turned from Curtis and Roy. “Come watch me get the salad ready for dinner.”
Justin and I shared a glance and as I followed his mother into the kitchen, I fielded the questions with grace and told her only as much as she needed to know.
After dinner, I came out of the bathroom freshly showered in jeans and a T-shirt. I held my bag of toiletries in my hand and was making my way down the darkened hall toward the guest bedroom. I took a step, then hesitated. There was a shuffling behind me, but it stopped the same time I did. I spun around. Justin stood in the darkness.
Every human’s skin is different. I know this from the thousands of times I sunk my teeth into someone’s neck. Easy. Like a knife sliced through apple skin. But there in the dark, Justin’s skin glowed. He walked toward me very slowly. I watched the way the V-shape of his lower stomach muscles moved under his skin.
He had no shirt on and a pair of jeans that hardly hung on to the sides of his hips. I looked up and instead stared at the sculpted definition of his arms.
He grabbed my hand and in an instant the door was closed and I was on my back on the bed. I was fully clothed, but I wished I wasn’t. Justin’s hands were all over me. First they held my arms over my head so he could kiss my neck. Then he let me grasp him back and I held him close to me, wrapping my legs around his waist. He was groaning in my ear, almost a growl like he was going to devour me. I placed my lips right under his jawbone and licked him so I could taste the salt of his skin on my tongue. His palms ran up my thighs, his fingers fumbling to unbutton my jeans when—
“Justin!” his mother called from the base of the stairs.
“You have to walk around the neighborhood,” Mrs. Enos said to me as she took a sheet of cookies out of the oven. Justin and I shared a devious smile as we walked into the kitchen. I took a cookie that was offered to me and decided in that moment that chocolate chip cookies were the most amazing smell ever. “There are literally hundreds of kids in this neighborhood and every house decorates for the holiday.”
“It’s true,” Justin said. His cheeks were still red from our tryst in the guest bedroom.
Justin’s mother ruffled his hair and stole a smile at me as she walked out of the kitchen. The casual familiarity between them jolted a memory. The mornings in my father’s house smelled like fresh tilled earth and summer grass. As I rested my head on my pillow dreaming away, my father would whisper, “Lenah,” rousing me from sleep. We would walk through the orchards, discussing this and that, spending as much time together as we could before the day turned to work. Justin’s mother—her one look said it all. I had forgotten what it meant to be a daughter. I had been queen for so long.
I could almost taste the apples in my father’s orchard, feel the explosion of tart sweetness on my tongue, when Justin’s fingers gently grasped mine. The soft touch disrupted my thoughts and the images from my home blew away as all memories do, like smoke. We walked out of the house.
We strolled down the sloped driveway and then headed down the street. It was almost seven o’clock, so children dressed in costume ran from house to house up and down the long street.
“Do you ever dress up?” I asked him.
“I did when I was little,” he said.
“So why did you take me here? To your family?” I asked, smiling at a little girl dressed as a witch. The street was about a half-mile long and brimming with children in costumes. I looked at the many lights from front porches and the children running from house to house.
“Because I think you’re going to be part of my life for a long time,” Justin said. I wished we were back in the guest bedroom. We walked some more, hand in hand, munching on the cookies his mother had sent with us.
“I don’t know much about your family,” Justin said. “You never talk about them.”
A little boy with white fangs in his mouth ran by us toward a house nearby. I couldn’t help but stare.
“They died. A long time ago.”
“But you said you had a brother. That day in the rain.”
“I did. But he also died,” I said, continuing to look forward. I could feel Justin’s gaze on me. “Anyone that I could call family has died in some form or another.”
Justin’s cheeks reddened and his hands dropped from mine.
“Don’t pity me,” I said quietly.
“I don’t,” he said, showing me his palms in protest. Justin frowned, and his eyes were hesitant to meet mine. “I just think, I don’t know. I don’t know what I think. Everyone you love is dead. That must be lonely.”
“It is. But it’s not something that defines me. I don’t let it.” There was a pause. I listened to the children around us and the rustle of candy in pillow sacks. “I’m not lonely now,” I said, taking his hand back into mine.
Justin nodded, but it was an unsatisfied nod.
“Look,” I said. Now it was my turn to stop walking. “This isn’t something you can fix.”
“I want to.”
“I know. And if there was some way that it would be possible, I know you are the only person who could do it.”
Justin gripped my hand tightly.
We walked and when we ran out of cookies we headed back. The night had ended in a calm silence. Justin’s father came home, and we said hello, then good night, because it was late and I wanted to lay my head down. Justin’s shoulder would have been ideal, but his family was always around.
After I trudged up the stairs, full of cookies and Halloween candy, I closed the door to the guest bedroom and fell back on the bed. I thought about how I was accepted so easily into Justin’s family. The memories of my own family were so faded and so difficult to access that they were just vague impressions now. Family wasn’t something I had to create; I was admitted, warmly. As I took my clothes off, Justin’s mouth and green eyes seeped in and out of my thoughts. When my head hit the pillow, I thought back on what he’d said in the street—that if he could, he would fix my pain. No one could take back all of the horrendous things I had done. No one but me. But Justin Enos was a part of me now, and that eased the grief still hiding in my heart. Somewhere, almost near sleep, I imagined Justin, in his room, on his back, thinking about me, hoping that I was up and awake, thinking of him, too.
Chapter Nineteen
That next morning, I could feel the chill in the air even in the bundles of blankets on the guest bed. I turned over on my stomach and lifted myself onto my knees. There was a small window behind the head of the bed, and I lifted the curtains with the tips of my fingers. The sky was the color of baby’s breath, so I knew it was too early for the Enos family to be up and debating breakfast. I decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood alone. I pulled on my jeans, didn’t bother to brush my hair, and wore one of Justin’s Wickham sweatshirts.
I walked down the driveway and stepped onto the street. The sky was now a blue-gray, and a thin mist hung over the trees. Justin’s sweatshirt smelled like him. Sweet and woody, a comforting smell now.
I glanced back at Justin’s house once I had walked a few feet down the street. I wasn’t planning to walk very far—just enough to explore the neighborhood while his family was still sleeping.
My stomach did that lurching thing and I thought about eggs and coffee, something that I was sure Justin’s mother would make. I smiled. Rhode Island. Of course I had to be in Rhode Island. These days all I wanted was to stop thinking about Rhode and my vampire life. And I had
, in some respect. My ESP was gone, my vampire sight had started to wane, and I wanted more than ever to move forward and be the human I was always meant to be and perhaps was finally becoming. Without my ESP, I was able to forget how separate I once was and participate in my life without knowing everyone’s emotional intentions. Just when a glimmer of a smile spread across my face—
Something moved behind me.
There it was—the inherent feeling that I was being watched; no, let me make the distinction clear: the feeling that I was being followed. There is a sweeping realization when a vampire is present around another vampire. A hush of silence, like going deaf, and the sudden feeling of being covered in icicles. The hair on my arms rose, and I found it difficult to swallow. I spun around.
There, in the middle of suburbia, underneath a streetlamp, stood Suleen.
I gasped. The air whooshed into my lungs. I held it, and then there was silence. He was so still, unmoving. Suleen wore a white tunic, white pants, and gold leather sandals. A white turban covered his hair. He had a round face, and though his cheeks were full, he did not nor could he ever look nubile. He almost seemed like a ghost in that morning light. He was so holy, so untouched by everyday worry, that he didn’t have a wrinkle on his face. This is a man who existed before Christ’s birth.
How Suleen knew I was in Rhode Island, I would never know, but there he stood. Instantly I felt safe, protected, as though a great white light circled us on that quiet street. Suleen is known in the vampire world for transcending evil, for living a life without the need to feed off humans. “Only the weak,” Rhode once told me of Suleen’s life. “He only drinks the blood of the reprehensible.” Suleen walked toward me, both of us silent, and he cupped my right cheek with his hand. He had no smell, and his touch was perfectly lukewarm. His dark brown eyes gazed warmly into mine, and he smiled.
“I am pleased with your transformation,” he said. His voice was slow, like molasses. From his pocket he pulled out a single flower, thyme. Little, purple flowers smaller than the tip of a finger attached to a long, green stem. Thyme is used in rituals meant for the regeneration of the soul.