Several of the wannabes at the table ooh’d and aah’d at the scary genius of Summer’s plan. I had hoped that with Trinity gone, people at this school would begin think for themselves a little more, not be such blind followers of the popular kids. But, alas, it wasn’t to be so. I suppose once a follower, always a follower.
“Do you think that’s really a good idea, Summer? I mean, they still haven’t caught the Southmoore Slayer and you know Arlisle Preserve is where most of his victims have been found.”
Summer rolled her eyes. “Like one guy’s really going to attack a huge group of high school kids, Ridley.”
What she didn’t know is that the murders were being committed by a band of rogue vampires called Uccideres, not by one human serial killer as the police thought. Just one vampire could easily take out many, many unprepared teenagers, but I couldn’t very well tell her that.
“Yeah, Ridley. Paranoid much?” Aisha said from down the table, turning to giggle with Carly. They were both cheerleaders and quite possibly two of the biggest followers of them all.
“Just remember that when you have to go into the woods to pee, in the dark, by yourself, Aisha,” I taunted with a quirk of my brow.
Aisha’s head whipped around, her mouth agape and her eyes round. Her look plainly said that she hadn’t thought of that.
“That’s what I thought,” I said smugly, unscrewing the lid to my Coke and taking a swig.
I used to sit quietly by and let life play out around me. All I used to want was to keep my head down, graduate with honors and get a cheerleading scholarship to Stanford. I had to smile at how much had changed in such a short amount of time.
“Anyway,” Summer said pointedly. “Who’s in? Who’s not afraid of their shadow?”
Several people snickered and almost everyone agreed to Summer’s plan.
What it sounded like to me was that they were agreeing to jump off of whatever cliff Summer chose. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach. It made the loss of my lunchtime compadres even harder to swallow than usual, and that was pretty hard.
I pushed my way through the meal, dreading cheerleading practice more and more as the day wore on. It was becoming increasingly difficult to pretend that my life was here with these people, people that I nearly detested sometimes, because it wasn’t. My life was with a guy that I hadn’t truly seen, not with my eyes, in weeks.
My heart ached with thoughts of Bo. I missed him more than I ever thought I could miss another human being. Well, quasi-human being. I would’ve gladly given up…well everything to see him just one more time.
Since that night, when his visit had ended up turning steamy, Bo had kept a safe distance. I knew he still checked in on me; I could smell him. Sometimes I even thought he might be watching me from not too far away during the day.
Sometimes I suspected he was somewhere fairly close watching me during practice.
It was like a tugging deep in my belly, like my body wanted to go to him, wherever he was. I never did see him, though, not even his shimmer. He was careful to remain undetected. Though I found it incredibly frustrating, it was, at the same time, an amazing comfort just to know that he was still with me.
I’d long since discovered that the best thing I could do was keep busy. An effort to do exactly that (keep busy) is what prompted me to change my course on the way home from practice. At the last minute, I decided to pay Savannah a visit.
Though I’d gone to see her in the hospital during her recovery, I had never been to Savannah’s house before. Luckily, it was easy to find and not too far from Bo’s old house.
I thought back to the first time I saw her after the accident, when she was still in the hospital. That first encounter was strange, what with Savannah still coming to terms with her new infirmity and all.
“Aren’t you going to ask about all the scratches on my face?”
Savannah had been sitting up in the hospital bed, her coppery hair flipped to one side, hiding the shaved places of her scalp. She was smiling cheerfully.
“Alright, what happened to your face?”
“Give me a break! I’m a blind girl learning to eat with a fork. What did you expect?”
Shaking my head, I had rolled my eyes. I was discovering that Savannah’s primary coping skill was humor, humor that I suspected was a clever cloaking device for denial. Of course, I didn’t think any of the jokes she had told on that day were funny. They were all blind jokes that made me incredibly uneasy.
“How am I ever going to find a boyfriend like this, Ridley?”
At that I had looked up, my heart going out to her .
“Savannah, I—”
“A blind date, dummy,” she’d cackled .
By that point, I had become downright uncomfortable with her “coping” and that joke in particular struck a nerve.
Savannah’s jovial expression had straightened after a minute and her smile had died. Though her chocolate eyes stared blankly past me, I could see a deep sadness filling their luminous depths. Without her having to say a word, I knew what she was thinking. I had been thinking the same thing.
She had cast her eyes down as if she was staring at her covers, where her fingers picked anxiously at the material of her bleached white sheets. “Still no word about him?”
She had been referring to Devon. He and Savannah had just begun their relationship when Trinity had attacked them. No one had seen or heard from him since. The trail was ice cold and the police had no leads. I alone could’ve pointed them in the right direction, but they would’ve carted me off to the loony bin within five minutes of arriving at the station.
I suppose I could’ve told Savannah what I suspected might have happened to Devon, but somehow I thought that might only further traumatize her, knowing that her boyfriend had most likely died a terrible death at the hands of a vengeful vampire.
“No, but they’re still looking. No one’s giving up.”
Dejected, Savannah had simply nodded . “I’ll never give up hope.”
“None of us will.”
Savannah cleared her throat before moving on to a subject slightly less painful for her, though at that time, it had been one infinitely more agonizing for me.
“No word about Bo either?”
Now, as I cut the engine in Savannah’s driveway, I almost felt guilty about what had happened since that conversation. No longer did I have to torture myself with worst-case scenarios about what had become of Bo, nor did I have to look ahead to a future without him. I knew he was alright. For the time being anyway.