“What is it?” she heard a voice ask from the backseat of the car. Gina or Jennifer; Claire could never tell their voices apart. “It looks kind of human.”
“I don’t know. Zombie? We’ve had zombies here, right?” Gina (or Jennifer)’s vocal twin said. “Could be a zombie. Hey, how do you kill a zombie?”
“Cut its head off,” a third voice said. There was no doubt about whom that voice belonged to, no doubt at alclass="underline" Monica. It was cool, confident, and commanding. “Let’s find the brain-freak and ask her—she’d know. Hey, zombie chick. Have you seen Claire Danvers, Girl Brain?”
Claire flipped her off and kept walking. Monica—black-haired again, no doubt looking shiny and pretty—was just a vague shadow in her peripheral vision, and Claire wanted to keep it that way.
And she knew, fatalistically, that it was never going to happen.
In fact, Monica didn’t like being flipped off. She accelerated the sports car, whipped it around the corner, and came to a hard stop to block Claire’s progress across the street. Monica and Gina snapped at each other, probably arguing about the specifics of how to kick Claire’s ass without breaking a nail or scuffing a shoe.
Claire gave it up and crossed the street.
Monica threw the car into reverse, and blocked her there, too.
They played the game two more times, back and forth, before Claire finally just stopped and stood there, staring at Monica.
Who laughed. “Oh my God, it is the brain-freak. You know freak is only an expression, right? You didn’t actually have to become a circus attraction just for me.”
“It’s the new thing. High-speed tanning. I’m on the way to an awesome summer glow; you should try it,” Claire said. Jennifer actually laughed. She looked immediately guilty. “I’m going to be late for class.”
“Good. That’ll move the bell curve back toward the middle.”
“Only if you actually attended to drag it down.”
“Ooooh, zing,” Monica said. “I’m crushed, because brains are my only asset. No, wait—that would be you, right?”
Claire sighed. “What do you want?” Because it was kind of obvious they wanted something—and probably something other than just the daily harassment. Monica had worked at cutting her off, after all, and Monica just didn’t do work.
“I need a tutor,” Monica said. “I don’t get this economics bullshit. There are fractions and stuff.”
Economics, in Claire’s opinion, was voodoo science, but she shrugged. Math was math. “Okay. Tomorrow. Fifty bucks, and before we get into it, I won’t take a test for you, steal the answers, or come up with some high-tech way for you to cheat.”
Monica raised her perfect eyebrows. “You do know me.”
“Yes or no.”
“Fine.”
“Common Grounds, three o’clock. You buy the mocha.”
“Greedy little bitch,” Monica said. Business deal concluded, she flipped Claire off with a perfectly manicured finger, smiled, and said, “You look like shit. Love the hat—where’d you get it, Cousin Cletus on the short bus?”
Their laughter lingered, along with the exhaust, as the three girls sped off on their usual mission of chaos and destruction.
Claire took a deep breath, pulled the hat down lower over her face, and went across the street to enter the gates of Texas Prairie University.
Claire loved classes. Oh, not the actual lectures, really—professors were, as a rule, not that exciting in person. But the knowledge.
That was right there for the taking, as much as you could grab and hold on to—more than you ever wanted, in some classes.
Like English Lit, which she still didn’t know why she had to take, and which was her last class of the day. It wasn’t as if the Brontë sisters were going to make a difference in her daily life, right? Not like math, which was underneath everything from cooking to construction to going to the moon. No, science was definitely cooler.
At least until today, when her attention was temporarily pulled in by the class assignment.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
It was the strangest thing to read those words of Oscar Wilde at the beginning of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and think of Myrnin saying them, because it was eerily like the kind of explanation he’d give. It gave Claire a strange little lurch, wondering if Myrnin had ever met Oscar Wilde, who had been quite a partyer, apparently. She’d never really considered the lives of vampires much, but now reality set in, and it was strange.
For Myrnin—and Oliver, and Amelie, and most of the vampires she’d ever met—history wasn’t just stuff written in a book, or sometimes captured in an old, stiff photo. For them, history happened day after day after day. Oscar Wilde had just happened a whole lot of days ago.
She bet Myrnin had met him. Probably borrowed his hat or something.
That thought distracted her so much, she didn’t hear her phone ring at first; she’d set it to ultrasonic, so the professor rambled on down on the stage of the stadium-seating room without noticing a thing. Those around her did, though, and she smiled an apology, switched it to silent, and checked the name on the tiny screen. It was Eve. Claire texted her back—IC for in class. It was their standard code. Eve texted CG ASAP OMG.
Meaning, get to Common Grounds as soon as she could.
911?
No.
Shane?
No.
Tell!
No!
Claire smiled and folded up the phone, and refocused on the professor, who hadn’t noticed a thing. The last ten minutes of class seemed to crawl by, but she did try to pay close attention. If she was going to seriously ask Myrnin about Oscar Wilde, it might help to actually know something about the dude. Something other than he was snarky, and more or less gay.
After class, Claire jogged through the campus quad, across the grass, and out to the gates. It was still midaft ernoon, so there was loads of time left before sunset. That was a good thing, because it was kind of nice to be out in the fresh air before it got, as Eve liked to title it, THTL—too hot to live, which lasted from about June through October. It didn’t take long to make the trip to Common Grounds. Claire kept her head down, mostly using the cap shading her face to keep passersby from staring at her in horror.
She got to Common Grounds, and for the first time it occurred to her that the place might very well be totally packed, and she might really get stared at, for real.
Wonderful.
Well, nothing she could do about that.
Claire took a deep breath, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. The interior was dim after the brilliant sunlight, and she blinked away glare and looked around the room. It was crowded, all right—maybe forty people clustered around small café tables, drinking their mochas and lattes and espresso shots. Students, at this hour. The mix of caffeine enthusiasts changed after dark.
Everybody stared as she passed. Claire tried to pretend it was because of how fabulously cute she was, but that was a leap of faith she really couldn’t make, and now her sunburn was worse because she was blushing on top of it, and also, ow.
Eve was all the way toward the back, jammed into a corner and defending an empty chair across the table with sharp glares and careful deployment of harsh words. She looked relieved as Claire dropped into the seat, leaned her heavy backpack against the table leg, and sighed, “I really need coffee.”