“Why do you do that?” the resurrectionist said, looking over at me. “That does not stop me.”
The demon inside him had taken on the voice of a young boy.
“What is with the demented children’s voices?” I asked, stopping my chant. “Do you creatures want to scare me off from ever having kids of my own one day?”
The resurrectionist turned his head to one side with an unearthly calm.
Almost time. “Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the presence of God!” I said.
He just looked confused.
“The protection spell is for me, dumb-ass. It might not be able to stop you, but this can.” Holding the crystal out in the flat of my hand, I said, “Return to the center of the circle, from whence you came. No man shall come upon you, until the end of time. So mote it be!”
I waited just long enough for the demon to start separating from the man he’d possessed. The room filled with an angry swirl of black haze, and I couldn’t see. I had to time it just right, or he wouldn’t be captured in the crystal. And I wouldn’t be going home at all tonight.
“So mote it be!” I screamed, as the black smoke was sucked into the center of the stone. I smashed the crystal down onto the wooden floor as hard as I could.
It shattered to pieces.
The empty shell of the man that the resurrectionist had been possessing fell over, long dead generations ago. His skin was molting off of him in little flakes, and his eyes were a filmy blue. The boy on the floor just lay there, quivering under the hulk of rotten flesh.
“It’s all fun and games,” David said suddenly, hysterically. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a leg. He took it! He took my leg!”
I glanced over at the crude chop job that had severed his right limb just below the knee. Luckily, one of the side effects of being a vampire was that they bled very slowly. What should have been a torrential stream from opened veins and arteries was only a slow trickle. The leg in question, however, was nowhere to be seen. And I wasn’t going to stick around to find it. Resurrectionists usually traveled in pairs.
“You’ll be fine,” I told him. “Now you’ll have a story to tell all the other vamps at the convention.” I leaned over to give the boy on the floor a hand up. “Since you didn’t take my advice and get out while you could, you’re going to help me carry this whiny bloodsucker all the way back to the car.”
The boy didn’t say anything, but moved when I pushed the body of the former resurrectionist off of him. I rigged David in between us, and a loud whimper came from the cabinets to my left.
“What . . . ?” I turned to glance at it.
The door swung open slowly and Joe came crawling out, his fishnets torn and holey. “I hid when he went after David,” he admitted sheepishly. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, casting David a baleful look.
David groaned loudly.
“Where’s Dickson and Kelly?” Joe asked.
“Already out. You want to go find them?”
He nodded, and David groaned again. Joe led the way to the front door. “Well, this has been the best night of my life,” I said, as we limped toward it. “I think I’m in the mood to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show now. Maybe I’ll even go to next year’s convention. You guys want to go with me?”
Joe started to say something, but as he opened the door, we were greeted by a new sight. And a new sound.
Ten little Girl Scouts in perfect green sashes and perfect green bows with bared teeth and raised hands lunged at us, growling in unison.
Troop 409.
I looked back and forth between Joe and the boy, calculating my chances of getting out of here with the least number of flesh wounds. Wondering who was going to get the worst of it.
It was David who surprised me.
“You little bitches,” he said, almost growling.
“Ready to do this thing?” I asked Joe. “We’re going to have to make a run for it and if you’re going to leave us behind, tell me now.”
Joe stood taller and straightened his shoulders, eyes turning completely black. Another neat vampire side effect. Impressive. Apparently, he’d decided to atone for his act of cowardly cupboardness.
“It’s only fair. You didn’t leave us behind, so we can’t leave you.”
The Girl Scouts snarled, moving closer, and I knew my night was far from over. “Okay,” I said, preparing to head into battle.
I knew my role. The one I played perfectly. And this time, I had backup.
“Bait me.”
IV League
by Margaret Stohl
I.
he thing I mostly care about,” I repeat, “is the food.” Hopper ignores the slick pamphlet in my hand. Instead, he pulls his hoodie closer around his face, digging his ratty sneakers into the ratty back of the green upholstered seat in front of him. “Yeah? You checkin’ out the eats up North? Thinkin’ of knockin’ back a six-pack of blue bloods, Wrennie?”
“Maybe,” I say, looking out the window. The sign says massachusetts avenue, which, if you think about it, is not the most original street name in the world, especially for a town that’s supposed to be so smart and all. “But I hear you eat like crap up here.” Our bus inches down the road, and a dirty city square comes into view. Long-haired street guitarists pull the crowd into distinct encampments. The lone juggler doesn’t stand a chance.
Miranda Cooper giggles in front of us. Natalie Anne Rutledge, one seat over, shoots Hop and me the same old look she’s been shooting us since the day we met, except now all you can see is eyeliner. She sighs because she’s the expert at pretty much everything, which I guess understandably calls for a whole lot of sighing.
“Don’t you know, Maynard Hopper Wilson? That’s Harvard Yard over there, behind that gate. Har-vard Yard.” She says it like it’s a hot guy or a hot car or something, which it isn’t. Still. Gyll-en-haal. Fer-arr-i. As far as I can tell, it’s just a gate, and not even as nice a gate as they have over in Charleston, where the iron’s all twisted up like pearls and ribbons around every window and every door.
“So?” Hopper shrugs under his hood.
“So, dumbucket, old money just tastes better.” First her tongue, then her teeth slide out over her Dr Pepper-Lip-Smackered lips, and I can tell the kill is coming. “But I guess y’all wouldn’t know much about that, would you?”
“You still talking to us, Natalie Anne? ’Cause you know we stopped listening about two hundred miles back.” I look past her, out the window, and she sighs. Again.
Hopper grunts, pulling the strings of his sweatshirt even tighter. Only in this conversation is Hopper suddenly Maynard Hopper Wilson, and me Wren Lola Lafayette. Natalie Anne Rutledge never calls a person by just one name. She’s called us plenty of other names, Hopper and me, but none of them are worth repeating. Hopper because he’s Hopper, poor as church dirt and dumb enough not to care. Me because all I got is a name, and that’s the most part of what you need to know about my no-good Breather parents, according to my Grandma Hoban. She’s not one for what she calls “reachin’.” Especially not when it comes to a stray like me, left behind on her doorstep seventeen years ago. Might as well be an empty bottle of O-Pos, from way back when the bloodmobile still came around.
She didn’t want me to go visiting colleges in the first place, not up North. “Bloom where you’re planted. That’s what my momma used to say.” Her momma also used to say things like “A woman’s work is not to work” and “Get U.S. out of the U.N.,” but I didn’t think pointing that out was going to change my Grandma Hoban’s mind anytime soon. So I did what any college-bound, twelfth-grade Drinker would do. Lied to the teacher. Forged my grandma’s name on my papers. Went out the back screen door while she was watching her shows and got on the bus with the rest of my class from Just Keep On Drivin’, There Ain’t Nothin’ to Look At ’Round Here High School. That’s what our sign says—at least, the graffiti on our sign by the freeway exit to our craphole little town. The one at the other
end of town says no tresspassin will shoot. Tresspassin’s the closest thing we have to a name anymore, now that there aren’t any Breathers left in town to do things like clean graffiti off the road signs. Nobody comes, nobody goes. We got nothing.
Which means, nothing to eat. Nothing like they got around here.
We did it to ourselves. We wanted Tresspassin to fall off the map; at least, the folks before us did. No matter what kind of Drinker you were—whether you were a Dirt or a Viral—you agreed to that. Breathers barely even knew we existed, except in the movies. They had no idea we weren’t all the same, not that it mattered. The less Breathers knew, the better. Soon as we figured out about the Blackouts, that Breathers couldn’t recall a thing we’d done to them after we’d done it—well, we just kept doing it. Things were better that way, at first. Better for them, better for us. Now, it’s just how things are, and that’s powerfully hard to change. Mainstreaming. I hear my Grandma Hoban snort every time Mr. Skrumbett, Tresspassin’s principal and mayor and owner of the gas station and, in a way, my college counselor says the word.
Not me. I think of Mainstreaming as living in a supermarket. The answer to my problems, all wrapped up nice in a college sweatshirt, like plastic wrap in the freezer section. Dinner on aisle seventeen, come back tomorrow now, y’all . . .
My stomach rumbles. Hopper answers back, digging his elbow into my side. “Shut up.”
But I know he’s as hungry as I am, and I guess that’s why the school approved this trip in the first place. It’s time. Mr. Skrumbett himself let us use the computer center, showed us how to fill out the online Common App, which Hopper calls the Common Slap, since the whole process makes you feel about that low. It’s not as easy for us as it is for the Breathers. There isn’t much to do in the way of extracurricular activities in Tresspassin, unless you count cow-tipping or maybe cow-sipping. I probably could have learned how to play a sport or something, but there’s no other school for us to play against, not within about two hundred miles. Hopper and I looked around on the Breathernet for something you could do with just two people, until we found an actual sport called woodcutting once. They have it at Dartmouth or somewhere. It’s where you cut wood with a big saw, one person on each end, like something you’d see in an old cartoon. We may not have woodcutting in Trespassin, but at least we have cartoons.
The SAT, that’s a whole other problem. It’s made for rich white Breathers, who live in cities and talk right and don’t worry about things like Drinker extinction. Some of the kids in my class, Dirts from old families who’d been alive for like, centuries, they did all right. Natalie Anne Rutledge says she was actually in the French Revolution, so she completely nailed that passage in the Reading Comprehension section. I didn’t think it was fair, but Hopper pointed out that she’d also had to live with herself for going on two hundred and fifty years, so things had a way of evening out in the wash. The rest of us Virals who hadn’t dug our way up out of the grave like the Dirts had, those of us who still had things like growing up to do, we weren’t so lucky. At least when it came to standardized testing.
The rest of us were going to have to rely on our grades. I have great grades; Hopper and I worked really hard on our transcripts. We had to make them up based on Wikipedia, which is helpful like that. Once we figured out what an AP was, I put that I’d taken a million of them. My favorite class was AP Human Geography. I still don’t know what that means, but the words are really beautiful together. Hopper says it’s a map of the human body. I think it means all the human bodies on the map. Either way, as soon as I get into a real school, I’m going to take it just to find out.
The Common Slap hurts. It’s like they speak a whole different language, the Admissions Breathers. Normally, I’m okay with Breathers, but I feel sick to my stomach when I think or talk about the Admissions kind. Sort of like how my Grandma Hoban used to sound when she talked about the people who came around collecting taxes. I did the best I could. Mr. Skrumbett says my teacher recommendations are really strong. I couldn’t find any good ones on the Breathernet, so I pretended to myself that Atticus Finch was writing it. He’s a character from a movie in the old Breather library and everything he says sounds pretty smart, especially when he’s talking to his daughter. Sometimes I like to imagine I’m her. I stole my second letter from this other messed-up Breather movie, where an old guy named George Clooney plays some kind of big jerk who flies around the world firing people until he feels so bad he writes a letter to help some other super-annoying girl get a job. I keep a copy of both letters in my backpack, single-spaced, folded up all small inside my wallet where the money’s supposed to go. I don’t know why, but I sort of like knowing Atticus Clooney and George Finch have my back. That was Hopper’s idea, to switch the last names in case anyone besides me had seen the movies. Then he signed them.
I signed Hopper’s. All he wrote was M. Hopper Wilson is the smartist kid in the hole school. Respectibly, Lola Lafayette. The way I signed, you couldn’t read the signature. Just in case. Seeing as he’s not all that smart and I’m not all that respectable.
The essays were harder. Mr. Skrumbett passed around a book that was supposed to help you write them. It wasn’t that helpful, though, because the book mostly told you what you weren’t supposed to do. Like, you’re not supposed to write about the time you scored the winning touchdown in the big game, but I never did that anyway. I didn’t even know what kind of game we were talking about, to tell you the truth. I also never had a dog that died, took a trip that changed me, fed the homeless, or built a latrine. Which was sort of sad, because the bad essay examples were still better than anything that ever happened to me. Eventually I gave up and wrote about being the first person in my family to go to college. I didn’t tell the truth.
I didn’t say it was because most of my family was dead or gone, or at least my Grandma Hoban talked about them same as if they were. That I fell asleep hungry and woke up that way in the morning. That if I didn’t get out of Tresspassin soon, folks were going to find Natalie Anne Rutledge lying in her bed with an ax handle whittled to a point and sticking straight up out of her chest. That Hopper and me, we’d been making plans to leave since we were old enough to walk as far as the highway.
This trip, it’s the last thing.
Four days.
Four days and twelve universities, and I’m starting to think Grandma Hoban was right. If I can’t manage four days, how will I spend four whole years around here? I haven’t had a decent night of sleep, or what passes for sleep. Haven’t had myself a decent meal. Haven’t even talked to one. Mr. Skrumbett says we can’t draw attention to ourselves, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.
In fact, I’m starving.
Now the engine sighs louder than Natalie Anne Rutledge, and the whole bus jerks forward and back. My backpack falls off the seat, and a week’s worth of college brochures go sliding and skidding across the floor. UNC and SC State. Tufts and Georgetown and Penn and Penn State—blue skies and fall leaves and a fat-faced, warm-blooded freshman on the front of each one. The bus is still shuddering, bad as if it has some kind of whooping cough, and I don’t try to pick them up. Probably going to stall out again, like it has only about three times a day since we left Tresspassin. I look down through the high window I cracked open somewhere between BC and BU—I forget which is which.
Breather schools. They all look the same.
A tour group of chubby children tumbles past, an uneven line centipeding down the brick pavement beneath me. I can smell them baking in the late fall afternoon, sort of like a pie resting and sweating in my Grandma Hoban’s kitchen window. My stomach turns over, and now all I can think about is a plate piled high with pudgy-sweet little arms, arms like spaghetti, arms laced with salty veins. My grandma always says my eyes are ten times bigger than my stomach, which makes no sense at all. Right about now I feel like my stomach is ten times bigger than this bus.
“Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.” Hopper barely angles h
is head toward me. I can see the spread of blue veins underneath his Hopper-white skin. His voice is a pin in a balloon; it always is. Soon as he starts talking, the spaghetti-arms disappear and the kids become kids again.
“What I won’t be is hungry.”
“You talk big, but you know you got a bigger heart for Breathers than the rest of us.” His voice is quiet, for only me to hear, so I don’t punch him. It’s an insult, but he doesn’t mean it that way.
“You’re one to talk, Maynard.” He hasn’t said anything, but we all know Hop has a problem. He’s soft as a boiled egg, which is one reason I keep him around all the time. Somebody has to. I wonder how skinny he actually is these days, under that hood of his. He never takes it off, not even for me.
“Get your eatin’ disorder under control, Wrennie. Skrumbett’ll kill you himself if you step outta line up here.”
“Just thinking about some Tater Tots.” I keep my eyes on the youngest stragglers, the strays at the end of the class. Safety in numbers, I think. Catch up. Or don’t. I’m hungry.
We lurch to a stop, and I hear Mr. Skrumbett’s voice up front. “We’re here. Off the bus. Try not to make a scene. You know, blend.”
Right.
II.
So there’s this statue of a guy sitting in some kind of chair in front of a building where the grass is. He’s got a shoe, well two, actually, but only one is shiny and brass-colored. You’re supposed to rub it; it gives you some kind of luck. It smells like pee.
“Where do they come up with this garbage? Every school has some old dead Breather statue to rub.”
“Shut it, Hopper. Just rub the stupid shoe already.”
“I’m not rubbing it. I don’t want Breather luck. Good Breather luck is bad Drinker luck. They’ve been lucky enough already.”
He’s got a point.
III.
I’m late. I’m lost. I can’t read the small print on the campus map. And here’s the funny thing—I’m afraid to talk to any of them. Me, Wren Lola Lafayette. Afraid of Breathers.