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“Oh, great. I mean, that would be great.” I hadn’t counted on having to repaint my toenails for the rest of the school year, but if I could learn something useful, it would be worth it. I began, “It must have been difficult keeping things up in the old days, before, like, nail polish remover and stuff like that.”
“Well, we didn’t have nail polish to remove. But grooming was a challenge. Talcum powder helped a lot.” Patrice sighed, a soft smile on her lips. “Florida water. Scented sachets, too, and perfume on little handkerchiefs that you could tuck in the bosom of your dress.”
“And that drew the guys in?” When she nodded, I pushed it a little further. “So you could, well, bite them?”
“Sometimes.” Her face changed then, shifting into an expression I’d hardly ever seen on Patrice’s face: anger. “The men I met weren’t beaus, you know. They were bidders. Buyers. The balls I went to before the War Between the States were octoroon balls—You don’t even know what those are, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Girls like me—who were part white and part black, pale enough for plantation owners to consider pleasing—a lot of us were sent to live in New Orleans, and we were brought up as proper young ladies. You could almost forget you were a slave.” Patrice stared down at her half-painted toenails, three of which gleamed wetly. “Then, when you got old enough, you could go to octoroon balls so that white men could look you over and buy you from your owner, as a kind of concubine.”
e time I got downstairs, I felt like I was getting a handle on my enhanced senses. What worried me more was the suspense about seeing Lucas. Even though he’d asked to be bitten, the wound had to hurt. What if that had scared him off?
He wasn’t waiting for me when I came downstairs. Last term, when we’d been together, he’d usually waited at the entry to the girls’ dorm, backpack over one shoulder, but today, nothing. I shrugged it off and told myself that Lucas had simply overslept again. Sometimes he did, and after the previous night, no doubt he needed his rest.
At lunchtime, I looked for him on the grounds. Lucas was nowhere to be seen. Still, I said nothing to my parents or anyone else. Lucas had said last night that he believed in me, and that meant I had to believe in him. Even when I got to chemistry class and saw that Lucas had skipped, I kept telling myself that I had to have faith.
It was just after class when Vic sidled up to me in the hallway, doing a very poor job of acting casual. “Heya. Remember that time you sneaked into our room?”
“Yeah, just before Christmas.” I squinted at him. “Why?”
“You think you could do it again? Something weird is going on with Lucas, and he won’t say what’s up. I figure if anybody could talk him into going to the doctor, it’s you.”
The doctor? Oh, no. Stricken, I grabbed Vic’s arm. “Get me up there. Now.”
“Okay, already!” He started leading me toward the guys’ dorm, glancing around furtively as if we were being followed. “Don’t panic. It’s not like appendicitis or something. Lucas’s just acting strange. Stranger than usual, that is.”
Everyone was on edge since Erich’s disappearance, so it wasn’t quite as easy for me to sneak up there this time. Vic had to scout each hallway, wait for the coast to be clear, and then motion frantically to me. Then I hurried into the next hallway and ducked into a corner while Vic checked the next hall. Finally we made it, and I stepped inside their room.
Lucas lay on his bed with his hands on his stomach, as if he felt sick. When he looked up at me, I saw surprise—and then relief. He was happy to see me, despite everything, and that made me so glad I had to smile. “Hey,” I said, kneeling by the side of his bed. “Stomachache?”
“I don’t think that’s the problem.” He closed his eyes as I brushed a few strands of hair away from his sweaty forehead. “Vic, could you give us a few seconds?”
“Sure thing. Just hang your necktie on the doorknob if you get busy in here. Usually I’m all about the free p**n , but—”
“Vic!” we protested in unison.
He held up his hands and backed out, grinning. “Okay, okay.”
The second the door shut, I turned back to Lucas. “What’s wrong?”
“Ever since this morning, it’s like—Bianca, I can hear everything. Everything in this whole school. People talking, walking, even writing. The pens scraping on paper. It’s all so loud.” It was all so familiar that an eerie shiver swept through me. Lucas squinted, as if the light was too much for his eyes. “Smells are intense, too. Everything is just…exaggerated, I guess. It’s unbearable.”
“It happened to me, too, after I bit you.”
Shaking his head, Lucas insisted, “It can’t be the bite. I didn’t feel this last time. I woke up at Mrs. Bethany’s sort of light-headed, but that was all.”
“More than once,” I whispered, remembering what my mother had told me. “You can’t become a vampire until you’ve been bitten more than once.”
Lucas jerked upright, so that his back was wedged against the metal headboard. “Whoa, whoa. I’m not a vampire. I’m alive.”
“No, you’re not a vampire. But you could become a vampire now. It’s possible for you. And maybe—maybe once it’s possible—your body starts to change.”
He grimaced. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“I wouldn’t joke about something like this!”
“Well, can we, like, reverse it? Fix it so I couldn’t become a vampire?”
