Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm) (7 page)

“You’re not being serious,” she told me, and I could tell she thought we were joking around. “You know that sounds pretty weird,” she said, focusing on my eyebrows. “What kind of high school student says, ‘My dream is to land a job in middle management’? I mean, seriously.”

Suddenly I felt like crying. I knew I was being stupid, but I couldn’t help it. I knew she wasn’t trying to be mean. In fact, she was treating me like we were almost friends. But she just didn’t understand how hard it was to be me. I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t have anyone that loved me. I didn’t have anyone who would catch me if I fell. I could have disappeared without a trace, and no one would have thought twice about me. I felt like I was clinging to the world by the very tips of my fingers, and it wasn’t easy to hang on. Middle management was my dream. To me that sounded like a good life. I had to blink several times to fight back the tears that were filling my eyes. I jerked my head out of her hands and ran my hand across my nose to keep it from running.

“I’m sorry,” Erika said, immediately handing me a tissue. “I just … I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

“No,” I said, blotting at my nose with the tissue. I didn’t want to rub off the light foundation she’d applied if I hadn’t ruined it already. “It’s just …” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. There didn’t seem to be any way to explain my life to this pretty girl who had loving parents and a modeling career and a nice place to live.

“No, I was being a jerk,” Erika insisted. “Here I was not wanting my friends to tease me about starting a blogcast, and then I make fun of you for your plans.” She looked down at her hands. “I suck.”

“No, you don’t,” I told her. “What you’re doing for me right now is the nicest thing anyone’s done for me since I moved to Tiburon.”

Erika frowned. “You’re kidding.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You mean your friends aren’t nice to you?” she asked, her black eyebrows forming a line across her perfect forehead.

“Well, if I had some, they might be nice to me, but I haven’t found any yet.”

“Oh.” Erika continued to frown. “Well, don’t you hang out with Ashley sometimes? I thought you were living with her dad.”

“I am, but Ashley and I don’t exactly hang out.” If I was being completely honest, Ashley didn’t even make eye contact with me when we passed each other in the halls at school. I knew that she sometimes referred to me as her “welfare cousin.”

“Huh,” Erika said, dabbing at my nose with a sponge she covered with more base. “So you don’t hang out with anyone?”

“Well …” I wanted to tell her about Tommy, but I felt a little reluctant. Then I remembered that Tommy did promise that we were going to start telling people we were together. “There is a guy that I’m kind of dating …”

“Who?” Erika said, looking excited.

“It’s kind of been a secret so far,” I told her. “But he just agreed that we’re going to start telling people.”

“Who?” Erika repeated, her voice even more insistent. When I still hesitated, she added, “You just said you were going to start telling people. And I’m people. So you might as well tell me.”

I wanted to tell her. I really did. But I was also a little scared. Tommy was kind of like an aberration that had appeared in my life. I was afraid that if I made any sudden moves he would disappear, and I’d be all alone again.

Erika squinted at me. “You know, if we’re going to be friends then you really need to tell me. Friends tell friends who they’re dating.” Then she added, “Or is he someone really embarrassing, like with a big hump and a hook for a hand or something and you don’t want to tell me.”

“No,” I said, laughing. “He’s not a freak. He’s actually kind of hot.”

“Who is he then?” she demanded.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Tommy Sherman,” I said in a small voice.

Her eyes widened for a moment, and then she said, “Oh.”

“Oh?” I repeated.

“Um …” Erika made a pained face. “Isn’t he dating Sheila Lavelle?”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Who?” I asked, trying to remember how to breathe.

“Sheila Lavelle. She’s in our class. About your height. Highlighted blonde hair. Talks kind of loud. She hangs out with Blossom Coster and Aurora Keys.”

I shook my head, at a loss. Tiburon High only had a couple hundred students total, but I hadn’t bothered to learn most of their names.

“Well, I guess as long as he’s not dating either one of you exclusively then it’s not that big of a deal,” Erika said, but the tone of her voice let me know she was just trying to be nice.

“We are dating exclusively,” I said, my own voice sounding strained. “He just told me he loved me.”

Erika laughed. “Tommy?” she exclaimed. “Was he trying to get into your pants or something?” The frozen look of horror on my face must have let her know that she’d guessed correctly. “I’m sorry,” she said, digging through her makeup trays and not meeting my eyes. “I really don’t know what’s going on. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

I was frantically searching my brain for a face to match the name Sheila Lavelle. I’d been to so many high schools in the last three and a half years that people had started just blending together for me. Then I suddenly remembered something that had happened the last day of school before break. I was leaving the bathroom, and a couple of girls were talking at the sink. I thought maybe they were looking at me and smirking a little, but I wasn’t sure. I’d checked to make sure I didn’t have a booger hanging out of my nose or toilet paper stuck to my shoe, washed my hands, and left. As the door was closing, I thought I heard the word “slut,” and then all the girls laughed. But I blew it off, assuming they weren’t talking about me.

Was one of those girls Sheila Lavelle? I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t even remember what any of them looked like.

“Haley,” Erika said. “Please don’t worry about it. I am going to make you look so gorgeous for the party tonight that Tommy won’t even be able to remember Sheila’s name.”

I gave a little watery laugh. “Okay,” I told her. “Maybe you should add a little glamour to my look, though. I’m not sure natural makeup is going to take care of it.”

Chapter 9

Haley

Erika really was talented. I can’t say that I looked gorgeous, but I would have to have been a whole different person for that to happen. I can say that I looked at least twenty percent better as we were heading out to the party than I did when I’d walked in the door. Most of it was very subtle. Erika told me, “A lot of it has to do with color and shading and enhancing what’s already there.” But I didn’t feel like I was wearing a mask. I didn’t feel like I had eyelashes so full of crap that it looked like someone had glued a bunch of dead spider legs to my eyes. I felt pretty natural. Only prettier.

Erika lent me an aqua blue sweater that really made my eyes pop, and she ran my jeans through the dryer at a high heat to shrink them down a little so that they were kind of snug. She slid a flat iron through my hair and even wanted to lend me a pair of earrings until I pointed out to her that my ears weren’t pierced. That really threw her.

“You’re seventeen and you don’t even have one set of holes in your head? Why aren’t your ears pierced?” she demanded.

I shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed but beginning to trust Erika as someone I could talk to as a friend. “Never had anyone to go with me to the mall and do it,” I said. Having your ears pierced really felt like something you should do with a friend.

“Okay, fine.” Erika shook her head like she found me a little hopeless but didn’t judge me for it. “We’ll go to the mall after Christmas and get them done. It’s really simple when they use a piercing gun and only hurts for like a minute. But I understand if you want someone there to hold your hand.”

I opened my mouth to explain to her that I wasn’t afraid of getting my ears pierced; it just felt like something you did with a friend or your mom or older sister or something. Doing it all alone would just make me feel like a loser, and that was something I dealt with on a daily basis. But having someone as pretty and awesome as Erika offering to go with me made the whole thing sound like fun. “Okay,” I said, trying not to look like a loon by smiling too much.

“And if you’ve got some time during break, I’d love to put some really glamorous makeup on you for my video blog,” Erika said. “But, you know,” she said, giving me a tentative look, “that would involve me filming the application and stuff.”

“Sounds like fun,” I told her. And it really did. I couldn’t believe I was going to a party and that I’d actually made a friend. Now if Tommy would just do what he promised to do and start telling people I was his girlfriend, then my life might actually not suck.

My mom would still be crazy, and I’d still be living at Uncle Kevin’s house in a room the size of a closet, but besides that, life would be pretty good.

We picked up Ashley and the other two girls. I still wasn’t sure of their names, but everyone just assumed I knew who they were, so I didn’t say anything. They both had brown hair with very obvious blonde highlights. I wondered if they’d all highlighted each other’s hair at a slumber party or something. Erika, apparently, was the only one smart enough not to mess with her hair and a home dye kit. But then again, her hair was a sleek and shiny black. There was no reason to want to change it.

The girls had gathered at Ashley’s house to get ready, which was nice. It saved me from driving all over town. Erika and I both got out of the car and went up to the door. I know a lot of kids would have just honked the horn or texted or something, but that always felt rude to me.

Ashley’s mom had remarried well, so they lived in a much nicer house than the one I shared with Uncle Kevin. It wasn’t nearly as nice as Erika’s, but it was pretty nice. Ashley at least had a room with a window.

My ex-aunt Fern answered the door. She smiled at Erika and then gave me a puzzled look. After a moment, she said, “Oh, Haley. I barely recognized you.” I didn’t know if she meant it to be an insult or a compliment, but I decided to take it as a compliment. Then she turned and bellowed over her shoulder, “Ashley, your friends are here!”

The girls came piling out the door, laughing and giggling. I had no reason to believe they were laughing about me, but I felt my shoulders tighten anyway.
Just keep breathing
, I told myself.
You’re going to a party, and you have a new friend.
That should have been enough to help me tolerate my cousin and the other idiots.

Ashley pulled up short when she saw me. Her friends bumped into the back of her, and they all gave me a good hard stare.

“Wow,” one of the other girls said. I felt my face get warm. She turned and looked at Erika. “You should do my makeup next time.”

“Seriously,” Ashley agreed. “You should do all of us. I mean, if you can pull this off, imagine how we’d end up looking.” She beamed at her aspiring clone friends. I felt the snub neatly packaged in the compliment.

Erika gave me an apologetic look. “Yeah, maybe sometime after break,” she said and then headed back to the car.

“Shotgun,” Ashley sang out, racing down the front walk and bumping into me as she darted past.

“Sorry,” I told her. There was no way I was letting my cousin sit next to me in the front seat. “Erika already called it.”

My Honda was not the most spacious car in the world. It wasn’t really meant to hold five people. There was some complaining about my car from the backseat, which I thought was pretty inconsiderate seeing that I was the one giving them a ride. And I wasn’t even going to mention gas money. Once we had all piled in the car, we just sat there. I was waiting for someone to tell me where to go, and they were apparently assuming that I had the location of every house in Tiburon memorized.

“Would you go already?” Ashley whined. “Laura’s knee is up my ass.”

I wasn’t sure how they were sitting that anyone’s knee would be up anyone’s ass, but that did mean that one of the two girls was named Laura. I just didn’t know which one it was.

“Go left,” Erika said from her reasonably comfy position in the front passenger seat.

As I pulled down the street, I forced myself to focus on driving. There were five of us in the car, and we didn’t need to end up in a ditch just because I was excited about attending a party. Well, maybe I wouldn’t mind if Ashley was in a ditch, but that was no reason to kill the rest of us.