After yard time, we had remedial vampire classes-sunscreen application, judging our bloodthirst, avoiding silver. We had to (slowly) read The Guide for the Newly Undead, Second Edition like it was Bible study so Jane could quiz us on chapter topics. Georgie would wear clothes from thrift stores saturated in several levels of human smell, in exchange for bribes of more Hershey's Blood Additive and video games. This served two purposes. For one thing, it was very unsettling, feeling that crazy bloodthirst for a child-shaped person. The self-loathing gave you all kinds of negative reinforcement about not feeding from humans. And if that didn't keep you from lunging, Georgie could be downright mean. She was a gouger and a hair puller.
Despite the gouging, Georgie was the most welcoming member of the "family." She seemed to find my flailing newbie antics charming. Or at least amusing. She was . . . extremely freaking creepy. I would not lie. She had this flat, sarcastic way of speaking that just sounded wrong coming out of a cute little blond child. Also, the glassy sheen of her dead shark eyes made me think that she was secretly plotting my death. And I was pretty sure she was smart enough to get away with it.
Jane still watched me like she expected me to bolt with the family's flatware. I maintained a polite distance from Gabriel. He was a perfectly nice guy, though he seemed permanently befuddled. He was the centered, steady yin to Jane's clumsy, hyperverbal yang. But I'd been in enough foster placements to know that you didn't get too cozy with the man of the house. Especially if your new foster mom already had some issues with trusting you.
Ben stretched my polite distance by miles. Not only would he not try to work around Jane's Firewall of Death so we could contact our friends on campus, but he dedicated a lot of time to ignoring me. Maybe ignoring people who lived in the same house as he did was his special vampire talent.
Long gone was the adorable boy whose heady cookie-based flirting had left me weak in the knees. Oh, he wasn't cruel, and he didn't snub me to my face, but I could only take seeing so many smiles die on his lips when he saw me walk into a room. He went from happy and laughing at something Jane had said to completely dead-faced. So I stopped walking into rooms where I knew he would be. I wasn't trying to be petulant about it. I just timed my day to be as Ben-free as possible. I did my homework in my room. During yard time, I ran at my own pace, which just happened to be fifteen yards behind Ben.
I decided not to let it bother me. I didn't do romantic entanglements. I embraced casual sex and all its awesome, minimal emotional requirements. But I hadn't done that very often, because the chances of turning up pregnant or contracting some weird disease were pretty high for my demographic.
I'd always prided myself on not investing in people who didn't invest in me. Life was too short to attach yourself to people who didn't really like you. If a friend reduced our interactions to nothing but texts and Facebook likes, I found new friends. If a guy didn't call, I didn't make up elaborate excuses about him "liking me too much." I moved on to a guy who did call. Ben was no different. We'd had the beginnings of something that could have been special, but it had been destroyed by a forty-five-pound weight.
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On the plus side, having little contact with the outside world or the people who lived two doors down from me meant that I threw myself at my school assignments like they were the only thing keeping me sane. Because they were. Which was sad. But my grades had never been higher.
Whether it was to keep us socialized or to give Jane a break, some of her vampire friends came to visit. It was mostly her friend-colleague hybrid Dick Cheney, who seemed super-defensive about his name when he first introduced himself for some reason. Dick came off as pretty sketchy when you first met him, like the kind of guy who lingered around campus asking girls if they wanted to go to his modeling school. But he was completely devoted to his wife, Andrea, in that googly-eyed, hung-the-moon way I'd only seen on the CW lineup.
After about two weeks of this, Jane trusted us enough to introduce us to the larger circle of vampire friends at a big potluck. Well, it was actually a test of our bloodthirst, dressed up as a potluck. Basically a training Trojan Horse.
It started with Jane's vampire friends slowly filtering into the house. There were so many of them-pale, attractive, conspicuously coupled off-that I had a hard time keeping track of all the names. I'd met Dick and Andrea (indecently pretty, with clothes that looked like something on Mad Men). And then there were Miranda and her boyfriend-sire, Collin (uptight and British but yummy in that Michael Fassbender way that kind of made me understand why she put up with his constant grimacing). Then there was a tall dark-haired man named Cal (funny accent, cool vintage rock T-shirts) and his petite brown-haired wife, Iris (who seemed to want to mother me one moment and ground me the next).