Never Bite a Boy on the First Date

“Good one,” the thick-headed guy said. “Let’s go.”

“You go on,” Zach said. “I think I’m about to get lucky.”

“Yeah, you are,” I said. His eyebrows waggled. “Lucky that I don’t want to get kicked out, so I’m not going to kill you today.”

“Oooooo,” Zach said, which maybe should have tipped me off that we’d hit the outer limits of his witty repartee. But just then the bell rang and the hall started to empty, which distracted me.

“Move. Now.” I gave him my best steely-eyed vampire glare.

“Or what?” he said, crossing his arms as the last couple of kids hurried into their classrooms.

“I’m glad you asked,” I said. In my head I was like, You know what, I’m a freaking vampire. I have super-strength, hardly anything can kill me, and if I get in trouble we’ll just move again. Why hold back?

So I threw him into a janitor’s closet and locked him in while I went to Chemistry.

He was sitting on an overturned bucket when I got back, listening to his iPod. He grinned like a pirate when I opened the door and slipped inside.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said.

“You’d have looked pretty silly if I didn’t,” I said.

“You needed another piece of this pie, didn’t you?” Zach pointed to himself with an oh, yeah expression.

“You’re much cuter when you don’t talk,” I said, and kissed him in the dark.

I didn’t really mean to encourage his alpha-male obnoxiousness. I mainly wanted to shut him up. And also I wanted to see what would happen. I’d never dated a guy like this. My one and only boyfriend back when I was alive was the sweet, sensitive type who took, like, three years just to ask me out.

Plus, when dealing with a guy like Zach, it was nice to have super-strength. Like, for instance, when I found his hands instantaneously roaming to my butt.

“OW!” he yelped as I flung him into a shelf of toilet paper.

“I make the rules,” I said. “Got it? You touch only what I want you to touch.”

“Can I have a list?” he said, recovering quickly. “With descriptive details, please?”

“Seriously, shut up,” I said. I pushed him into the wall, twisted his hands behind his back and held them there while I kissed him again. His kisses were very enthusiastic. And he didn’t try to free himself, so I figured he’d be easy to train.

He was really warm, and he tasted kind of salty and sweet at the same time. Before I knew what I was doing, my mouth went to his neck. I licked his skin lightly and he shuddered. I could feel my canine teeth sliding out. The blood in his veins pulsed under my tongue.

I realised I wasn’t in lust at all. I was hungry.

“You,” Zach whispered in my ear, “are the hottest, most psycho girl I’ve ever met.”

His voice stopped me just before my teeth grazed his skin. What was I doing?

I dropped his hands and jumped away from him as if he had holy water running through his veins. Olympia had warned me that it would be hard once I was around mortals all day long, especially attractive, young mortals. But it didn’t even occur to me that kissing could lead so quickly to wanting to bite someone. Especially someone whom I did not by any means want to turn into a vampire.

That was one of the rules Olympia had lectured me about over and over again: “You bite it, you bought it.” We were responsible for anyone we turned into a vampire. That’s how we survive. If we let new vampires wander loose with no idea of the rules, they’d be staked in no time and the rest of the world would soon catch on that we exist.

It is possible to bite someone and leave them alive, but it’s dangerous and hard to do – Olympia says once you start to drink, it’s almost impossible to stop yourself before your prey is dead. And even if you do stop, the victim probably will have figured out what you are, and that’s not great for us either.

I was lucky that Zach couldn’t see my teeth in the darkness of the closet. I covered my face and tried to force them back down to normal. Don’t think about feeding. Don’t think about feeding.

“Wait,” Zach said, groping for me with his hands outstretched. “Don’t stop. What happened?”

“I lost interest,” I said, stepping out of his reach. My fingers were trembling, but I kept my voice level. “Too bad for you. Now stay away from my locker.” And I got out of there as quickly as I could.

I probably should have guessed that this wouldn’t shut down Zach. If anything, it made him even more interested. I started finding him at my locker every morning when I got there, usually with chocolate. My guess is, he read in some men’s magazine that girls like chocolate, because he really stuck with that theory.

I ignored him for the first week. He loved it when I shoved him out of my way; he went on and on about how freakishly strong I was “for such a tiny thing” until it started making me nervous. I was sure Olympia didn’t want to hear gossip about the new freakishly strong teenager while she was buying up all the raw meat in the supermarket.

So at first I started talking to Zach just to distract him. I told him if he really wanted to bring me something before class, he should try hot chocolate and a croissant. That fit his theory just fine, so the next morning, there was my order, exactly as I’d requested. Like I said – the early signs pointed to “easily trainable”.

“Hmm,” I said, letting the hot chocolate scald away the taste of blood on my tongue.

“So you’ll go out with me this weekend, right?” Zach asked. “I figured we could start with dinner at Los Espejos.” He pronounced it “ezz-PAY-joe’s”, but I still recognised it as the Spanish word for mirrors. Olympia and Wilhelm had scouted out all the more dangerous places in town and this Spanish restaurant was at the top of the list. It was lovely and expensive, but the walls and the ceiling were completely covered in mirrors. Too risky, no matter how besotted my date might be. Our little “family” tried to avoid even walking past it.

“Meh,” I said with a shrug. “I’d rather have a hamburger at Big Burgers and Bowling.”

He clutched his heart. “You are my dream girl.”

So that’s how it started. And I’ll admit it: I kind of fell for him. Dating Zach fit the new take-no-prisoners attitude I was trying to develop. I figured if I could be a badass vampire, I wouldn’t miss my old life so much. It was nice having someone to distract me from wishing I could call my mom or kiss Jasper one last time.

Plus it was sort of exciting to have someone be that into me. He couldn’t keep his hands off me, no matter how many times I threw him into a wall or nearly broke his fingers. I admired his persistence.

On the other hand, it got harder and harder not to bite him. You have to understand, the blood we drink every day to stay alive comes out of a jar in the refrigerator. It is the very definition of gross. Vampires are designed to drink from living (or very recently dead) people; that’s what we’re hungry for. Olympia was trying to teach me to exercise self-control, but I wasn’t learning nearly fast enough to keep up with my relationship with Zach.

After three months, I started thinking about the future. By that point, I thought Zach was pretty hot. I figured it was almost definitely true love forever. And wouldn’t it suck (ha ha!) if I stayed sixteen and he got older and older? Wouldn’t it make more sense to turn him into a vampire while he was still my own age? Then we could really be together forever. Awesome, right?

But I still don’t think I would have done anything on my own. I would have waited at least another three months to be sure that I liked him that much. I mean, I’m not totally crazy.

Unfortunately it was only a month later when Zach spotted my teeth sliding out during one of our make-out sessions – this time in a closet that was apparently not dim enough.

“Whoa,” he said, stepping back. “What’s wrong with your teeth?”

“Uh – nothing,” I said, covering my mouth with one hand. I turned away from him, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me around.

“That is so weird,” he said, which was a much calmer reaction than I would have had. He reached out and touched one of my teeth with his index finger. A drop of blood immediately appeared on his skin, and I panicked. Was that enough to turn him into a vampire? That wouldn’t be fair! I hadn’t intentionally bitten him!

At the same time, I couldn’t stop myself from licking it off. He took his hand back and we stared at each other for a minute.

“OK, yes,” I said. “I’m a vampire.”

Zach let out a bark of laughter. “That’s impossible,” he said.

I let my teeth slide all the way out and held back my hair so he could see the marks on my neck. “It’s not impossible; it’s just lame. Here, check for a pulse, you’ll see.” I grabbed his hand and wrapped his fingers around my wrist.

I knew he wouldn’t find a heartbeat on me, but we were close enough to each other that I could hear his own heart speeding up as he held my wrist and stared at me some more.