"You guys know that this could ruin my GPA," Oliver complained as he looked over his shoulder to change lanes and get ahead of a Honda that was tooling around below the speed limit.
"Relax for once, will you?" Schuyler chided. "All the seniors have been cutting since they got their acceptance letters." Oliver could be such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes. Always following rules. He was a total nerd when it came to academics.
"Yeah, aren't you legacy at Harvard anyway?" Bliss asked.
"College seems like such a weird thing, doesn't it?" Schuyler mused.
"I know what you mean. Before we found out about the Committee, I thought I might go to Vassar, you know? Major in Art History or something." Bliss said. "I kind of liked the idea of studying Northern Renaissance art, and then working in a museum or gallery."
"What do you mean 'kind of liked'?" Schuyler asked.
"Yeah, you don't think that's going to happen anymore?" Oliver asked, flipping through the radio stations. Amy Winehouse was singing about how she didn't want to go to rehab ("No! No! No! No!"). Schuyler met Oliver's eyes, and they smiled.
"You guys, that is so not funny. Turn it off or change it," Bliss admonished. "I don't know. I kind of don't think I'm going to college. Sometimes I feel like I don't have a future," she said, twisting her necklace.
"Oh shush," Schuyler said, turning around so she could talk directly to Bliss while Oliver found something more appropriate on the satellite radio. "Of course you're going to college. We all are."
"You really believe that?" Bliss asked, sounding hopeful.
"Totally."
Conversation dropped to a lull after a few minutes, and Bliss drifted off to sleep. In the front seat, Schuyler chose the music, Oliver letting her DJ this time. "You like this song?" he asked, when she settled on a station playing a Rufus Wainwright tune.
"Don't you?" she asked, feeling as if she'd been caught red-handed. It was the same song she and Jack always played. She thought she could get away with listening to it in the car. Oliver had a bit of an emo streak in him. She liked to tease him that his musical tastes ran toward music-to-off-yourself-by.
"You'd think I would, right? But I don't."
"Why not?"
Oliver shrugged, looking at her sideways. "It's like…too blubbery or something. Ech."
"What do you mean?" Schuyler asked. "Blubbery?"
He shrugged. "I don't know, I just feel like love isn't supposed to be so … angsty, you know? Like, if it works, it shouldn't be so tortured."
"Huh," Schuyler said, wondering if she should change the station. It seemed traitorous to play a song that reminded her of another boy. "You are so unromantic."
"Am not."
"But you've never even been in love."
"You know that's not true."
Schuyler was silent. In the past month they had performed the Caerimonia twice. She knew she should take other familiars—vampires were told to rotate their humans so as not to tax them—but she'd been able to go longer than she'd thought without a feeding. And she had resisted taking other humans, not quite sure that Oliver would approve.
But Schuyler didn't want to think about their relationship—friendship—whatever it was. After Oliver's passionate outburst at the Odeon, it hadn't come up again. She wanted to diffuse the tension she was starting to feel in the car. "Bet you can't even name one romantic movie you like," she teased.
She felt smug when a few minutes went by and Oliver was still unable to name one romantic movie he could profess to enjoy.
"The Empire Strikes Back" Oliver finally declared, tapping his horn at a Prius that wandered over the line.
"The Empire Strikes Back? The Star Wars movie? That's not romantic!" Schuyler huffed, fiddling with the air-conditioner controls.
"Au contraire, my dear, it's very romantic. The last scene, you know, when they're about to put Han in that freezing cryogenic chamber or whatever? Remember?"
Schuyler mmm-hmmmed.
"And Leia leans over the ledge and says, 'I love you.'"
"That's cheesy, not romantic," Schuyler argued, although she did like that part.
"Let me explain. What's romantic is what Han says back. Remember what he says to her? After she says 'I love you'?"
Schuyler grinned. Maybe Oliver had a point. "Han says, 'I know.'"
"Exactly." Oliver tapped the wheel. "He doesn't have to say anything so trite as 'I love you.' Because that's already understood. And that's romantic."
For once, Schuyler had to admit he was right.
When Bliss woke up from her nap, Oliver and Schuyler were snapping at each other in the front seat. "What're you guys arguing about now?" she asked, rubbing her eyes.
"Nothing," they chorused.
Bliss accepted their reticence without question. Those two always kept secrets from her, even when they didn't mean to.
"Okay, I guess we can stop for lunch, then," Schuyler finally said. Ah, so that was what it was about. Those two fought about everything. It had gotten worse since Oliver had become Schuyler's familiar. They acted more like an old married couple than before. On the surface, at least, they pretended their friendship was exactly the same. Which was just fine with Bliss; she didn't know if she could really stand any Schuyler-Ollie PDA.
"I'm just saying we're not going to do Dylan any good by going hungry." Oliver shrugged.
They pulled into a rest area, joining weary travelers at the vending machines and the food court.
Oliver observed that one of the novelties of growing up as city kids was that they were all addicted to suburban fast-food chains. While none of them would ever even consider going to a McDonald's in Manhattan—those places were basically ad-hoc homeless shelters—once they were out of city limits, the rules changed, and no one cared to eat expensive panini sandwiches and precious organic green salads. Bring on the supersized meals.
"God, I feel sick," Bliss said, sipping the last of her milk shake.
"I think I'm going to throw up," Oliver declared, crumpling the wrapper of his greasy hamburger and wiping his hands with several napkins.
"It's always fun to eat this stuff. But afterward…" Schuyler agreed, even though she was still picking at the fries.
"Afterward you always feel like you're going to hurl. Or that your cholesterol count just skyrocketed," Bliss said, making a face.
It was quiet when they climbed back into the car and felt the soporific effects of their heavy meal. A half hour later, the GPS blared "EXIT ON THE RIGHT IN FIVE HUNDRED METERS," and Oliver followed the
signs up the ramp and down the road to a parking lot. They had arrived.
The rehabilitation center grounds were immaculate. It looked more like a five-star resort, where celebrities went to hide after a lost weekend, rather than a high-priced treatment facility for floundering vampires. They saw a group practicing tai chi on the lawn, several others performing yoga poses, and clusters of people sitting in the grass in a circle.
"Group therapy," Bliss whispered as they made their way to the front door of the main building. "I asked Honor what it was like here, and she said there's a lot of past-lives-regression therapy."
They were greeted at the entrance by a slim, tanned woman in a white T-shirt and white pants. The effect was less clinical and more fashionable—like a New Age ashram.