Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm) (5 page)

Chapter 6

Haley

I didn’t mind working. Most of the people who came into Darlene’s were older and usually pretty polite. You might have to hear about their gout or look at a photo of their grandson, but I didn’t have a problem with that.

What I dreaded was when a group of kids my age decided it was cool to hang out at the diner. There was some kind of weird chemical reaction that seemed to take place in teenagers’ brains when they saw that their waitress was a classmate. They always started being really obnoxious. I mean, even more obnoxious than they usually were in everyday life. It seemed to be a little titillating for the guys in some Freudian way, being able to command me to do their bidding. The girls always became instantly condescending, as if I was Cinderella but with no chance of a fairy godmother sending me to the ball. I guess it was pretty easy to understand why I didn’t enjoy high school.

I started my shift and things were going okay. I would have been happier if we were busier. That would mean more money and less time to obsess over my phone. Still no word from Tommy. By two o’clock, it had become pretty obvious that he was awake and just not texting me back. I didn’t know if that meant he was busy or that he had just been using me for sex and was now blowing me off. I tried not to think about it, but that was impossible.

I needed to know if we were going to Blossom Coster’s party. Because if we were, then I needed to find someone to cover the end of my second shift so I would have time to go home, feed Uncle Kevin so he would be in a good mood, get cleaned up, and come up with an acceptable excuse to tell Uncle Kevin so he didn’t fly into some type of tirade about me slutting around with the football team or something. I found it amazing that he had me constantly under scrutiny, but it never occurred to him that his own daughter was anything but a perfect little angel.

So that led my thoughts back to Tommy. He’d told me he loved me. He’d told me that we were going to be together. He’d told me that we were going to start telling people that we were together. He’d told me to take off my pants. I had the sinking feeling that either he’d had an abrupt change of heart or was in a coma, or I had just been used.

By two-fifteen I cracked and sent him a text. I tried to keep it light and breezy, but I had to know what was going on. “Hey, are we going to Blossom’s tonight?”

And then there was nothing. Radio silence. It was maddening. I wanted to scream at my phone, “Why won’t you call me, you stupid jerk?” But that would only earn me some concerned looks from the seniors who were enjoying a late afternoon snack in the big booth.

The bell over the door chimed as the door flew open. I could tell by the noise that it was a pack of girls even before I turned around. When I did finally look to see who had come in, my stomach clenched. It was Ashley plus her friend Erika and two more girls whose names I didn’t know but whose faces I recognized.

Ashley never came into the diner. In fact, that was one of the perks of working there. I knew she found it embarrassing to have a cousin that worked as a waitress. The absolutely only reason Ashley would walk into Darlene’s Diner was to ask me for a favor, and I knew what that favor was. She obviously hadn’t talked anyone else into lending her their car.

“Hi, Haley,” my cousin said with a crocodile smile as I brought menus over to the booth in the corner that the girls had selected. We usually had seat-yourself until the dinner rush. “I didn’t know you were working today.”

When she saw me at the house, I was wearing the red button-down shirt with black piping that was the Darlene’s Diner uniform. Did she think I wore it on my off days just for fun? Wasn’t the name tag a clue? I decided to just ignore her chatter and try to pretend like they were any other patrons. “I’ll give you a few minutes with the menus but can take your drink order now if you’ve decided.”

They all ordered water, which didn’t surprise me. They weren’t there for the Salisbury steak. I had a strong suspicion they were going to get an order of fries to share and then not leave me a tip. I didn’t know why people thought that if they knew their server, they didn’t have to leave a tip. The person was still doing a job, and tipping was expected in America. You were still taking up their time and their table that they could have been using to make money by serving somebody else. If I had a friend that worked at The Gap, I wouldn’t expect to not have to pay for my jeans just because she waited on me. But Ashley and her friends probably didn’t tip anywhere they went, so I decided not to take it personally.

As I brought over a stack of plastic glasses and a pitcher of water, I felt my cell phone buzz in my pocket. I instantly became tense. That had to be Tommy texting me back. Finally! My instinct was to grab the phone, but my hands were full, and I really wasn’t supposed to take my phone out in front of the customers. Even so, the urge was very hard to resist. It was like a painful itch that you knew you shouldn’t scratch.

“So, Haley,” Ashley began as I passed out the cups. “Are you going to Blossom’s big Christmas Eve party tonight?”

One of her friends let out a burst of laughter and tried to cover it with a cough. I guess the thought that I might be invited to a party with the cool kids was pretty hilarious to her.

“Are you all right?” I said in a sharp voice.

“Fine,” she said, clearing her throat. “I just need a little water.” They all snickered as she held her hand out for a glass in a very expectant you-may-serve-me-now sort of way. I considered dumping the entire pitcher over her head.

“So are you going?” Ashley pressed, not to be deterred from her mission. “Do you even have any plans tonight?” She made a fake compassionate face. “Because if you don’t …”

“I haven’t decided if I’m going,” I said, cutting her off. “Have you decided what you want to order?”

Ashley looked down at the menu like she was still deciding. “We’re just going to share an order of
 …”

“Fries. Got it,” I said before spinning on my heel and walking quickly away.

“Why didn’t you ask her?” I heard one of the girls say in what she thought was a quiet voice, but it actually carried halfway across the restaurant.

“If I just come out and ask her then she’s going to say no,” was Ashley’s reply. “I have to be subtle about it.”

I wondered if my half-cousin knew the definition of subtle. I doubted it.

“Fries,” I said to Dino, the Darlene cook, as I wrote down the order on my pad and slapped it on the counter. Not that he couldn’t remember such a simple order, but Debbie compared all the orders with the receipts at the end of the night. Then I hurried into the break area and dug my phone out of my apron. There was a text waiting for me. And it was from Tommy. My heart started beating out a fast tempo in my chest.

He’d written three words. Not the three words he’d used to get into my pants the previous night. That would have been too much to hope for. He’d simply texted, “See you there.”

I stared at the screen. See you there? So he was going to Blossom’s party and he was meeting me there? Or was he going to Blossom’s party and he would nod at me from across the room? I had thought that he would come to pick me up, and we would go to the party together. That obviously wasn’t what he had in mind.

I felt hurt and disappointed and angry all at the same time. He was trying to blow me off. I could feel it. We’d had sex, and now he was trying to act like it never happened. I had to fight back tears and resisted the urge to throw my phone against the wall. I felt like such an idiot. He’d told me he loved me, and I’d fallen for it.

I kept shaking my head back and forth. It just didn’t make sense. Tommy was the one who had pursued me. We had Spanish together, and the teacher made us sit in alphabetical order. Both our last names started with “S,” so that meant we were pretty much at the back of the class. He’d asked if he could get the vocab words from me after he’d been sick for a few days, and things kind of blossomed from there. But it had always been him pushing the relationship. He was the one that had started passing me notes. He was the one that had asked for my number. It wasn’t like I was chasing after him.

Tommy had recently broken up with some girl, so he said he wanted to keep things on the down low for a while. He’d said he didn’t want to hurt her feelings by having the entire school know that he’d immediately started falling for somebody else. I had actually thought he was being sweet. It wasn’t that often that a guy tried to be considerate after a breakup, as far as I could tell.

The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. I’d been completely suckered by Tommy, and the guy wasn’t even that bright. But I guess he knew enough to say the things I wanted to hear. I’d been so wrapped up in the idea that I was dating a popular boy that I hadn’t really paid attention to anything else. I had thought being with Tommy was going to make my life a whole lot better, but I suddenly realized there was a good chance he was actually going to make it a whole lot worse.

A noise penetrated my brain. It was the sound of a bell being rung. In fact, it was a small bell like they used to use at the front desk of a hotel. Dino always rang it when a food order was ready and he wanted me to come and pick it up. I must have not heard it the first two or three times he’d smacked at it because he was ringing it over and over again.

I hurried to the kitchen window where Dino lined up the orders with their tickets. “What’s wrong with you today?” he asked as I grabbed the fries. “I thought I was going to have to deliver them myself.”

“Sorry,” I told him, grabbing the fries. “I’m just …” I took a breath to swallow down my emotions, which were threatening to spill over into my voice. “I’m just having a bad day.”

I stood up straight and held my head high as I walked back to Ashley’s table. “Here’s your fries,” I said, plunking them on the table along with ketchup, salt, and their bill. I didn’t want them calling me back a dozen times to play fetch.

I was turning to speed walk away from their table when Erika called after me. “Haley, if you’re going to Blossom’s party anyway, we might as well all go together. Don’t you think?”

I paused. Me showing up to the party all by myself made me look pathetic and desperate. But me showing up with a group of popular girls was a different story. Then I had an excuse to be there. If Tommy was actually blowing me off, then at least I didn’t look like a desperate freak showing up all by myself. “Okay,” I said, turning back toward the table slowly—but quick enough to see my cousin making a what-the-hell face at her friend. “But do you mind if I drive?” I figured if they were going to be my cover story, then I might as well cut to the chase as to why they were actually in the diner.

“Sure, that’d be great,” Erika said, all smiles. Then her eyes flicked up and down as she took in my appearance. Her smile faded a little, and I could almost hear what was going on in her brain. Showing up to a party with a loser like me had the potential to damage her reputation. “You know what?” she said. “Why don’t you come over to my place early? I have a sweater that I bet would look great on you. And while we’re at it, I’ve been practicing to be a beauty guru for YouTube.”

“You are?” one of the other girls said, scrunching her eyebrows. “Since when?”

“Yes,” Erika told her. “And since forever. It turns out I don’t tell you everything.” Directing her attention back to me, she added, “So anyway, I would love to try some different makeup looks on you. If you don’t mind.” She gave me her best attempt at an encouraging smile.

I was a little stunned. I had no idea if she was concealing being a jerk or actually was attempting to be nice. “Um …” I thought about it. What was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t like she was offering to cut my hair. If I hated what she did, I could always wash my face. “Sure. Sounds fun. Where do you live?”

Just then the door chimed as more customers came in. It was two moms with toddlers, so that was definitely a call to action. Toddlers needed things to immediately keep them occupied so they wouldn’t trash the place. I had to get them crayons and papers. Stat.

“I’ll text you my address,” Erika said, realizing I had to get back to work. “Ashley can give me your number.”

Ashley made a face. “I don’t have it,” she said, as if assuming cousins who lived in the same small town would have each other’s contact information was an outrageous thing to do.

I quickly scribbled my number on a sheet from my order pad and thrust it at Erika. “What time do you want me to be there?” I asked.