“That’s not why you passed out,” I suggested, pretending that I really wanted to go back to reading the gardening book I’d found; the only reason I’d picked it up in the first place was some lingering curiosity about what the flower was that I’d glimpsed in my dream months before. “You passed out because this huge iron bar whacked you in the head. Hello.”
“That doesn’t explain why you don’t remember.”
“You know I have some problems with anxiety, right? I freak out sometimes. When we first met, I was in the middle of a huge freak-out. Huge! There are parts of my great escape that I don’t remember very well either. When you got hit in the head, I probably freaked out again. I mean, you could’ve been killed.” That part, at least, was close to the truth. “No wonder I was scared.”
“There’s no bump on my head. Just a bruise, like I fell or something.”
“We put an ice pack on it. We took care of you.”
Unconvinced, Lucas said, “Still doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t know why you’re still thinking about this.” Even saying that made me a liar again, and worse than before. Sticking to the story was something that I had to do for Lucas’s own protection, because if Mrs. Bethany ever realized that he knew something was up, she might—might—oh, I didn’t know what she might do, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. But telling Lucas that he was wrong to have doubts, that the good and sensible questions he had about Evernight and his memory lapse that night were just foolishness—that was worse. That was asking Lucas to doubt himself, and I didn’t want to do that. I now knew how bad it felt, doubting yourself. “Please, Lucas, let it go.”
Lucas slowly nodded. “We’ll talk about it some other time.”
When he dropped the subject and stopped worrying about the night of the Autumn Ball, our time together was wonderful. Almost perfect. We studied together in the library or in my mother’s classroom, sometimes with Vic or Raquel along. We ate lunch together on the grounds, sandwiches wrapped in brown bags and stuffed into our coat pockets. I daydreamed about him during class, rousing myself from my happy stupor only as often as I had to in order to keep from flunking out. On the days when we had chemistry together, we walked to and from Iwerebon’s room, side by side. Other days, he found me as soon as classes were over, as if he’d been thinking about me even more than I’d been thinking about him.
“Face it,” Lucas whispered to me one Sunday afternoon when I’d invited him up to my parents’ apartment. (They had tactfully greeted us, then let us hang out in my room for the rest of the day.) We lay together on the floor, not touching but close beside each other, staring up at the Klimt print. “I don’t know anything about art.”
“You don’t have to know anything about it. You just have to look at it and say what you feel.”
“I’m not so great at saying what I feel.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Just give it a try, okay?”
“Well, okay.” He thought about it long and hard, staring up at The Kiss all the while. “I guess—I guess I like the way he’s holding her face in his hands. Like she’s the one thing in the world that makes him happy, that really belongs to him.”
“Do you really see that in the painting? To me he looks—strong, I guess.” The man in The Kiss certainly looked in control of the situation to me; the swooning woman seemed to like it that way, at least for the moment.
Lucas turned to me, and I let my head loll to one side so that we were face-to-face. The way that he looked at me—intent, serious, filled with longing—made me hold my breath. He said only, “Trust me. I know I got that one right.”
We kissed each other, and then Dad picked the perfect moment to call us for our dinner. Parental timing is uncanny. They made the most of dinner, even eating food and acting like they enjoyed it.
Being close to Lucas meant that I had less time to be with my other friends, though I wished it didn’t. Balthazar was still as kind as ever, always greeting me in the hallway and nodding to Lucas, as though Lucas were his pal and not someone who had nearly tackled him the night of the Autumn Ball. But his eyes were sad, and I knew that I’d hurt Balthazar by not giving him a chance.
Raquel was lonely, too. Even though we invited her along for study nights sometimes, she and I never shared lunch anymore. She hadn’t made any other friends that I knew of. Lucas and I had a half-baked idea of setting her up with Vic, but the two of them simply didn’t click. They hung out together with us and had fun, but that was that.
I apologized to her once for spending less time with her, but she blew it off. “You’re in love. That makes you actually kind of boring to people who aren’t in love. You know, the sane ones.”
“I’m not boring,” I protested. “At least not more than I was before.”
Raquel responded by clasping her hands together and looking up at the library ceiling with her eyes slightly unfocused. “Did you know that Lucas likes sunshine? He does! Flowers and bunny rabbits, too. Now let me tell you all about the fascinating laces in Lucas’s fascinating shoes.”
“Shut up.” I swatted her shoulder, and she laughed. Still, I felt the odd distance between us. “I don’t mean to leave you alone.”
“You don’t. We’re cool.” Raquel opened her biology textbook, obviously ready to drop the subject.
Carefully, I said, “You seem okay with Lucas.”
She shrugged and didn’t look up from her book. “Sure. Shouldn’t I be?”
“Just—some of the stuff we talked about before—it’s not a problem. Really.” Raquel had been so sure that Lucas might attack me, never realizing that it was the other way around. “I want you to see him for who he is.”
“A fabulous, wonderful guy who loves sunshine and barfs roses.” Raquel was joking but not quite joking. When she met my eyes at last, she sighed. “He seems okay.”
I knew I wouldn’t get any further with her that day, so I changed the subject.
While my best friend at Evernight wasn’t thrilled that I was with Lucas, a lot of my worst enemies thought it was a great idea. They were actually glad I’d bitten him.
“I knew you’d get with the program eventually,” Courtney said to me in Modern Technology, the one class no human students had been enrolled in. “You’re a born vampire. That’s, like, super-rare and powerful and stuff. There was no way you could stay an enormous loser forever.”
“Wow, thanks, Courtney,” I said flatly. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Don’t see why you’re all weird about it.” Erich gave me a smarmy grin while he fiddled with the day’s assignment, an iPod. “I mean, I figure any guy as greasy as Lucas Ross has an aftertaste, but hey, fresh blood is fresh blood.”
“We should all get to snack sometimes,” Gwen insisted. “Hello, this school now comes complete with a walking buffet, and nobody gets to take a bite?” A few people mumbled agreement.
“Everyone pay attention,” demanded Mr. Yee, our teacher. Like all other teachers at Evernight, he was an extremely powerful vampire—one who had remained part of the world for a very long time and yet retained his edge. Mr. Yee wasn’t especially old; he’d told us that he’d died in the 1880s. But his strength and authority radiated from him almost as powerfully as they did from Mrs. Bethany. That was why each of the students, even those centuries older than him, gave him respect. At his command, we all fell silent. “You’ve had a few minutes with the iPods now. Your first questions?”
