Jane Jones

“Oh my God, you guys. I am sooooo wasted.
Did you see me? I was totally chugging, and now I’m, like … totally wasted!”

Astrid Hoffman was one of my classmates at my new school, Port Lincoln High. So far, what I’d learned about her was that she was wealthy and confident and lovelier than any girl in the sophomore class. In fact, she was the most poised and best-looking girl in the entire school, from what I could tell, wasted or not. Even heavily intoxicated, even kind of slurring and drooling with her thick, glossy brown curls falling over her glassy green eyes, she was a looker. She made me sick.

Astrid turned her half-lidded gaze to me. “Jane! Jaaaaa-aaaane. It’s your turn. Have a little drinky drink, new girl!” Everyone around the bonfire cheered and someone shoved me in Astrid’s direction.

I nervously shook my head. Actually, if I’m being
honest, I probably spastically shook my head. “Uh, no. No, thanks. I don’t really …”

“Aw, Jane, what’s the matter? Your mommy won’t let you?” Astrid teased. Then the playful look slipped from her face, replaced by an expression of menacing threat. “I’m not asking, Jane, I’m telling you. Drink!”

Astrid bared her teeth at me as everyone around us started chanting, “Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink!” So this, I recalled bitterly, is what peer pressure feels like. In the past, I’d learned to avoid peer pressure by avoiding as much contact as possible with my so-called peers, but on this night, I found myself understanding how things get out of hand. All of a sudden, it was like
Lord of the Flies
up in there and I found myself in not so great a position to resist.

I inched toward Astrid, my mind racing. Funny how a moment is enough time for your whole life to pass before your eyes but not long enough to think of a decent plan for escaping a crappy situation. Knowing there was no way to get out of it, I knelt beside her and said, “Okay, I’ll drink.”

“Good girl,” she cooed, winking as she hefted the pale, bare leg of Ian Holcomb into my lap. There were two small holes in the soft, white pit of his knee, ringed with what looked almost like a lipstick kiss at the bottom of a love letter, but in the shade of his own blood.

The rest of Ian was facedown in the dirt, dozing happily, I presume. He was also wasted, but in the more traditional human sense. Probably on his dad’s vodka and his mom’s sugar-free Red Bull. Whatever he’d been drinking that night, Astrid had made it a point to corner Ian and thank him personally for inviting her to such an awesome rager. Then she made it a further point to lean in really close to his chest and say right into his ear, “I’m having an awesome time.” Then, when Ian suggested that they go out for some air, she responded by saying, “That would be awesome.” I have to admit, what Astrid lacked in vocabulary skills, she made up for in cunning. Now she was hosting her own little party by the side of the state road behind the Holcombs’ property, and the bar was fully stocked with Ian’s elevated blood-alcohol level.

As I bent over poor, dumb Ian’s popliteal artery, I asked myself two questions:
What the hell am I even doing here?
and
How am I gonna make this look good?

I pushed my glasses up my nose, then shoved my face right up against Ian’s leg and clamped my mouth on a spot that looked clean. I closed my eyes and did my best to imitate the rapture I was supposed to be feeling as I sank my fangs into the flesh of the JV football captain. Only, I wasn’t sinking my fangs into anything. I was completely faking it and I might have gotten away with it, too, if I
hadn’t gone in for that one last convincing slurp. That was when Ian, in his stupor, sort of snorted and jerked the way you do when you dream that you’re falling. The sudden motion must have spiked his blood pressure for just a second, but one second was all it took for arterial blood spray to hit me full in the face. Horrified, I dropped Ian’s leg as my hands flew up, too late to block the gruesome mist. My cheeks were slick. The lenses of my glasses were covered with sticky, warm drops. I tore them off and rubbed furiously at my eyes with the sleeve of my favorite flannel shirt.

“Jane!” Astrid howled. “What an idiot. You should see your face! You look totally hilarious.” Oh, I’m sure I did look totally hilarious. We’ve all seen
Carrie
, right? Everybody knows that there’s nothing more hysterically funny than a teenager suddenly and unexpectedly drenched in blood. Unfortunately, in my case, I didn’t have the telekinesis necessary to make a tree fall on Astrid to shut her up. Unfortunately, I was having a difficult time even standing up.

As all the vampire kids circled around to get a better look at me, I realized something very bad had just happened. Whether it had dripped into my mouth as I sat there slack-jawed or whether it had aerosolized and gone up my nose, somehow I had ingested at least a tiny amount
of Ian’s blood. While I may have looked bad, I was about to look a whole lot worse. See, like it doesn’t suck enough to be a teenager who’s a vampire who’s a complete dork, I also have this other problem. I’m blood-intolerant.

Within seconds I could feel hot hives rising on my skin. Panic set in as I felt my throat start to close, and my breathing became shallow, raspy gasps. Weird that someone most people might think of as technically dead needs to keep breathing, but I can assure you that breathing is something I very much enjoy and wanted to continue doing. I scrabbled on my hands and knees over to where everyone was standing and gawking, searching the ground for my backpack. Although the laughter didn’t die down as much as I would have liked it to, it had at least taken on a more nervous and confused tone.

After what felt like minutes, I found my bag and yanked open the front zipper. With shaking hands I extracted what looked like a pen but was actually a small syringe that contained a dose of medication similar to what human cancer patients receive during chemotherapy. I ripped the cap off with my teeth and plunged the needle through my jeans into my scrawny thigh. Almost instantly, the chemical went to work, seeking out the drop of Ian’s blood, wherever it had gone inside me, and killing off the red blood cells, rendering it harmless to me and neutralizing
my terrible reaction. But besides saving my life, or unlife or whatever, that stuff also comes with the side effect of knocking me the heck out.

I knew everyone was standing around me, looking down on me, literally for once. The last thing I remember hearing as my eyes rolled up into my head was, “Holy shit. She’s allergic to blood? What a freak.” The last thing I remember thinking was,
When a group of freaks are calling you a freak, it’s pretty freaking bad.

When I came around again, I had no idea how much time had passed. I could make out Ian’s shape on the ground a few feet from me, and it looked like he was still out cold. I reasoned that, all things considered, he might be in better shape than I was. I pushed myself up onto my elbows and tried to focus my eyes. It seemed like mostly everyone was still standing around the dying fire, but my little scene had definitely been a downer. When I swiveled my head around to make sure my neck still worked, I noticed the silhouette of someone sitting near me.

“You’re up.” The voice was low and scratchy and I couldn’t even begin to place it.

“I picked up your glasses. I didn’t want them to get stepped on. I cleaned them off, as well as I could.” The blurry figure moved toward me and, rather than handing them to me, just went ahead and gently placed the frames
right on my face. As he stepped back, I saw that it was Timothy Hunt, a vampire from the junior class who ran with Astrid’s crowd.

It dawned on me that the reason I couldn’t place his voice was because this was the first time I had ever heard him speak. Sure, I had seen him plenty of times. I mean, he was kind of hard not to notice with his carelessly floppy honey-colored hair and his dark-yet-luminous blue eyes and his perfectly pouty pout. If you were into the whole emo-broody thing, which I knew a lot of girls both vampire and human were, I guess you’d probably look at him every chance you got. But like I said, prior to this night, I’d been pretty good at skipping things like eye contact and conversation. Now all I could do was make eye contact. I mean, why make myself look less stupid at this point, right?

“You’re welcome,” he said. I know he definitely smiled at me, but the thing is, I wasn’t sure if it was a friendly let’s-be-friends kind of smile or more of an I’m-laughing-at-you-and-not-with-you kind of smile. I mean, he had done a nice thing by picking up my glasses, but considering all that had just gone down and who his friends were, the chances were decent that I was being mocked. If being a vampire had been a sport, Timothy would have been the captain of the varsity vampire team, but I think we can all
admit that being well loved doesn’t necessarily equal being lovable. I tried to keep my guard up, just in case.

“Thanks. I … Thanks.”

Timothy tipped an imaginary hat to me and stood. My bespectacled eyes followed him all the way up. I’m sure my mouth was hanging open too. So much for that guard of mine.

“Do you need a hand getting up, or should you—” Timothy was interrupted by Celeste, one of Astrid’s dearest friends and loyal henchwomen.

“Hey, Lame.” I guess she’d nicknamed me Lame because it kind of rhymes with Jane. It wasn’t the cleverest insult I’d ever been subjected to, but it would do in a pinch. “We thought you were dying so we called your house. Your mother’s on her way.”

“Oh, God,” I moaned under my breath. This evening just kept getting better and better. I briefly considered running into the woods and trying to find my own way home. I figured maybe I could play dumb about the phone call and convince my parents that it had been some prank. I had been the victim of pranks in other towns we’d lived in, TP’ed trees and the occasional flaming bag of dog doo. But when I saw Celeste toss my cell phone down on top of my backpack, I realized that because none of them had my home phone number, they’d used my cell phone to call my
folks. I wouldn’t be able to explain away why it had been my number that had popped up on my home’s caller ID. Besides, before I could even fully stand, we all heard a rustling and crashing through the brush, and someone rushed toward us from the nearby road.