She just looked at them like she'd found a couple of rats that needed to be dealt with [https://img.wattpad.com/55cd53932f93ec36eaf3e4fb821b3fdfe2f54761/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f32415f52583571495271317642513d3d2d313336343833373439312e313737336465316439303663373465363431303633333131343632332e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

“There's somebody else?” said Emily.

I told her as briefly as possible about Sidney, although I didn't mention Sid's actual name. Sid and Emily notoriously hated each other, and while I didn't know the details I did know that stirring up girl drama was something I never wanted to do. Emily was surprised at first, but she took it pretty well.

“So why don't you go bother that other girl and give me a break?” she said.

“Because I've only bitten her once, and that was before I knew about the attachment thing. She doesn't want it.”

“Who would?”

“So we're hoping it'll wear off if I don't bite her again. I'm pretty sure it's not permanent until---”

“Until you thunk,” Emily said. She sounded disgusted.

“You did feel it.”

“I felt it. I just didn't want to think about it. Do you have any idea what this is like for me? You hurt me, Nathaniel. You tried to kill me. And I hated you so much for that. But when I needed that hate to protect me, I reached into myself and there was nothing there. My dad taught me to trust my instincts, but now my instincts were telling me to run toward the monster. Do you know how scary that is?”

“Guess not.”

“Oh, please. Don't give me that face. I'm just saying that if this girl has the option not to thunk with you, then you should stay away from her.”

I exhaled and rubbed my forehead with my fingertips. “What do you think I'm doing?”

“Do you miss her right now?”

Was it my imagination, or did she sound a little sympathetic?

“It's easier with you here. You're . . .” Important to me. Treasured. Like the amputated limb I didn't realize I'd lost. “You keep me distracted.”

“I don't know what that means,” she said.

“It's a compliment. But it only works when you're actually here. Any chance you want to spend the night?”

As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn't. That wasn't the kind of joke you could get away with outside your immediate circle of friends. I don't think I'd ever been close enough to a girl to make a joke like that. And to Emily Harding, of all people, who wore a cocoon made out of Hanes cotton whenever she was around me. But she surprised me.

“If I thought it would help somebody, I might do it,” she said.

“I was just kidding, Emily.”

“I know, that's why I'm considering it. But you'd have to come over to my house. I can't keep leaving in the middle of the night.”

“That wouldn't work. I'm grounded.”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Yes, and I'm totally allowed to sneak out and spend the night with boys.”

I laughed, mostly from awkwardness. “But what if your dad walked in and saw me there?”

“Then I would pretend you sneaked in to rape me and he would kill you.”

“Oh, great.”

“Look, I'm only offering this for the sake of the other girl. It makes sense for you to leave. Just because you're distracted doesn't mean she won't come looking for you. But if you're gone, she won't be able to find you.”

“That's actually a good point.”

“Yeah. I make a lot of them. You should listen to me.”

“Well, if you're going to do something like this to help the other girl, I think it's only fair to tell you who she is.”

“Do I know her?”

“It's Sidney Cross.”

Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. She blinked. Then she laughed once.

“You've got to be kidding me,” she said.

“I know you guys don't like each other.”

“Then why did you bite her? Were you just trying to make things even more complicated?”

“It was a coincidence. You know my friend who was just in here? The one you sent downstairs to---”

“Don't care, move on.”

“Sid's his sister.”

She laughed again. “Thought I recognized the little freak. Oh, god, Sidney. The only girl crazy enough to offer her blood to a vampire. I think she should get what she deserves, don't you?”

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“I hope she doesn't. I don't want what I deserve.”

She leaned back and looked at the ceiling, and then it hit me that she was blinking back tears. Still, she laughed in that bitter, resigned way. I didn't want to touch this emotional jack-in-the-box, but I was pretty sure it was my fault for cranking it.

I said, “You don't have to do it if you don't want to.”

She wiped the water out of her eyes. “Of course, I'm going to do it. If I don't and you end up thunking with Sidney then I'm gonna be stuck with her, too.”

“Oh.”

“So my dad gets up to use the bathroom around midnight. He'll probably check on me one last time before he goes back to bed. You can come over after that if you want.”

“I don't know, Emily. My mom already doesn't trust me. If she finds out I left when I was supposed to be grounded---”

“You have my offer,” she said. “Show up or don't.”

Just then, I heard footsteps on the stairs. Male. Porter. My mother wasn't with him.

“Porter's coming,” I said.

She looked bored. “Was that his name? Thought it was Poindexter.”

“I guess you should go.”

“Not so fast. I still have to make sure we don't end up with a gossip leak.”

I let the guys in. When I turned back around, I noticed that Emily had pulled her hair over the bite mark on her throat. Porter's eyes were everywhere, looking for evidence of something. He was brilliant at solving mysteries, but I felt reasonably safe. He was a Sherlock, not a Mulder. He wouldn't draw impossible conclusions.

“Listen, creeps,” Emily said. “I don't care what you think or hope happened in this room while you were gone. I'm going back to school tomorrow, and if I hear so much as a whisper of a rumor that I was in this house, or that I had any kind of contact with Nathaniel or with the two of you, or if I even get the feeling that people are gossiping about him and me, or acting like he and I have some kind of a relationship, or talking about me like I'm a slut, or even if I hear someone congratulating him for scoring with any girl, I don't care who it is, I will make it so that the two of you can never show your faces at school again.” She stood there with her arms crossed, eyes burning with the unquestionable authority of status and beauty. “Tell me I can't do it.”

Porter was pissed, but there was nothing he could say. I watched the whole thing distantly, intrigued by the dynamic. In the social circle made up of geeks, heavy gamers, and intellectuals with a tweak, Porter was the uncontested king. We all looked up to him because he had what we wanted: equipment, information, and ambition. And despite what all the anti-bullying campaigns might have led you to believe, that social circle existed independently of the one made up of jocks and their minions. They saw us as unworthy of their effort, and we saw them as unworthy of our brain power. Porter even argued that the “popular” guys weren't actually part of a higher social circle, but a parallel one, since we never interacted with each other and the actions of one didn't affect the other.

The effortless way Emily dominated him blew that theory right out of the water. Jocks may or may not have been superior to the intellectuals, but their S-ranked women had our junk, along with everyone else's, in their perfectly-manicured clutches.

* * *

Porter started grilling me the minute Emily was gone. He wanted me to admit that I was doing her homework. This was currency he often used, so I guess it made sense that he assumed I was doing the same thing. Maybe I should have been insulted that he didn't even consider that Emily liked me, which, as she had said several times, she did not.

I told him he was right to get him off my back. And guess what? It didn't appease him at all.

“It's such a waste of time,” he was saying. He was angry and self-conscious about the way he'd been pushed around. “What's she paying you? It can't be more than what we'll make off the game once we sell it. Unless---”

His perv detector kicked in and he raised an eyebrow. I said, “I'm just trying to be nice. She was sick, remember?”

“You mean you're not getting paid at all? And you're blowing off the game for it? If you think being nice is going to get you in there, Papadakis, then you're fooling yourself. You'll be labeling molecules and she'll be boinking some football player in his pickup truck.”

No, Porter didn't actually say “boinking.” This time, he didn't censor himself. It's just that I imagined my mom reading this and finding the F word, and I couldn't make myself type it. It says a lot about my mom, that of all the incriminating things I've written here, I'm worried about her finding the F word.

How had my life come to this? Juggling murderous vampire urges with trying not to lose the good opinion of an alpha geek just because he was the only friend I had. All I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone so I could fight the compulsion to go bite Sidney in peace. And, as I was thinking about this, the solution came to me. Like a vision from an angel. Game Toolbox. It was still downstairs.

I ran to the kitchen, retrieved the Game Toolbox key, and gave it to Porter with my apologies and some lame excuse about the cops finding it. Hundreds of cars stolen in the city every year and the fine folks down at the police department stop what they're doing to hunt down a missing software key. Okay.

Porter just about lost his mind. He was furious at me for forgetting to tell him about it when he first showed up. Then he grinned and clutched the thing like it was his kidnapped baby. Of course he wanted to install it and try it out, which meant he had to go home where his “good” computer was. He and Zero were in the car and driving away so fast that he almost forgot to order me to fix the story again. Almost.

Once they were gone, I pulled out the phone Porter had given me and checked the contacts. As I hoped, he hadn't gone to the trouble to delete everything from the device itself. Starred at the top of the contact list was a “Totalitarian She-Beast,” which I figured had to be Sidney.

Maybe I was crazy, but I called her. She answered after three rings. That surprised me. She shouldn't have recognized my number.

“Hello?” she said. Tentative. A little afraid. I felt her voice in my chest, a splash of cool to a fevered soul.

I said, “Hi.”

Silence on the line. Then, “What do you want, Nate?”

I didn't have a script. I wasn't sure why I'd called her either. But something inside me answered her.

“To make sure you're okay.”

“Well, I'm not okay. I don't know what you infected me with, but this is some dystopian sci-fi shit.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't know this would happen when I bit you.”

“I don't care if you're sorry. I just want it to stop.”

She didn't know how dangerous it was to say something like that to me. I could make it stop right now if she wanted me to. The only thing holding me back was the idea that she didn't actually want me to.

I said, “I'm leaving my house. I think you should leave yours, too. Go some place I don't know about.”

“Hey, you take care of you and I'll take care of me.”

“I'm just afraid I'll come looking for you if I lose control of this.”

“Don't worry. I've already got a plan. And, no, I won't be home.”

“Good.”

“Listen, Nate. I thought it was crazy, the idea of killing you. I still do. But I won't live my whole life like an addict. Do you understand?”

I did. She was saying, in an oblique way, that she would do whatever it took to keep me away from her. And she wouldn't be sorry.

I said, “I'm going to do my best to leave you alone.”

“You'd better.”

“Just take care of yourself, okay? Don't do anything too dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Like letting a vampire bite me?” Then she laughed bitterly and hung up.

I sat on my bed for a long time, watching my hands tremble, trying not to remember the touch of her fingers on the back of my arm at school. At some point, my mother came upstairs and kissed me goodnight. There was a distance between us, a coldness that had never been there before. One day I would have to make it up to her, but right now I had bigger problems to deal with. Once Mom was asleep, I grabbed the phone and headed out to Emily's.