Truth be told, it was kind of nice.
“Don’t think I’m not watching you, Mr. Tod,” Principal Snelgrove snarled as Vlad walked by. Vlad waited until the coast was clear before rolling his eyes.
But just inside the doors stood someone whom Vlad was worried about, someone who’d also been watching him, and strapped to his neck was a brand-spanking-new digital SLR camera.
Eddie Poe.
The boy who’d seen Vlad’s eyes flash that weird iridescent purple last year, the boy who’d photographed him floating up to the belfry. The bane of Vlad’s existence had just upgraded his equipment. And he was watching Vlad closely, as if waiting for him to latch onto the nearest cheerleader’s neck right here in the middle of school.
As if Vlad would bite a cheerleader. The thought left a bad taste in his mouth.
Vlad nodded curtly to Eddie, who did the same, gesturing to his new camera. Then Vlad pursed his lips and headed to locker number 313.
Ever since Eddie had seen Vlad’s eyes flash purple, he’d been following Vlad around, snapping pictures, staring. Your basic stalkeresque activities. But Vlad could handle that. What really made him crazy was the sudden surge of hungry confidence that Eddie’s budding obsession had brought on. At every turn, Eddie seemed to delight in taunting Vlad, as if waiting for the day he would snap and reveal his darkest secrets. It was as if Eddie had found a way out of his pit of nobody-ness, and Vlad was the one holding the ladder.
Vlad pulled his padlock from his backpack and slipped it into the hole in the locker’s door, then stuffed his notebooks, pens, and other school supplies inside. His locker already looked messy. Vlad closed the door.
Eddie was waiting for him. And he wasn’t smiling.
Neither was Vlad. “What do you want, Eddie?”
“Just to show you my new camera. You like it? I saved up all summer for it. Must have mowed every lawn in Bathory to afford this baby.” He patted the camera gently, his eyes never leaving Vlad’s.
Vlad shrugged. “It’s nice, I guess. I don’t know much about cameras.”
“I do. I know about lots of things.” Eddie’s normally quivering jaw set, a determined look in his eyes. Determined to expose Vlad’s secret. “Anyway… see ya around, I guess.”
“Yeah… and you can bet I’ll be seeing you.” Vlad watched Eddie walk away, his mood plummeting. He’d never be normal. He’d never fit in. And this kid was out to tell the world why.
Henry walked past Eddie, glaring at him the entire time. Eddie shrank away, and Vlad felt just a little bit better about their encounter. Henry opened his locker. “So what did the National Enquirer want anyway?”
Vlad shrugged. “The usual, I guess.”
He glanced over at Eddie, who had stopped at the drinking fountain for a sip, and bit his bottom lip. “He’s not going to stop until he exposes me, Henry. He’s different this year. Last year he was just annoying. But now… it’s like he’s got something to prove, and that something is me.”
Henry grabbed his English and science books and closed his locker. His forehead was creased, as if he was troubled. “Don’t worry about it, Vlad. We’ll figure something out. After all, it’s just Eddie Poe. He’s nothing. He’s empty space.”
Vlad nodded, unsure if he agreed with Henry’s assessment of the situation. Eddie might be a nobody, but a determined nobody could find his way into being a somebody if the right opportunity presented itself. Trying to push those troubling thoughts from his mind, he frowned down at his schedule. He didn’t share any classes with Henry or Meredith this year, which didn’t exactly give him a lot to look forward to. After receiving a friendly slug in the shoulder from Henry, he grabbed the teal book with a picture of what looked like a brain holding hands with a piece of broccoli on the cover and headed down the hall to first period.
Health class. Whoever had decided that forcing kids to sit in a room together while a teacher blushes and stumbles over the ins and outs of sex and drugs and puberty was a good idea should have realized that kids already know most of the stuff by the time they hit high school, and the stuff they don’t know, they really, really don’t want to hear from an old windbag like Mr. Cartel.
Mr. Cartel was born before the beginning of time, and he seemed to look fondly on those pre-dinosaur years, as he couldn’t help but comment on how things had been when he was a kid. Vlad had heard the horror stories about health class with Mr. Cartel. He’d been warned about the weird wheezing noise he made when he breathed, and about the fact that every time he was forced to say the word gonads he would stutter. But Vlad hadn’t been prepared for the life-size posters of two naked people and all their naked bits. Nor had he been prepared for the desktop models of the human reproductive systems.
Oh. My. God.
Vlad’s face flushed as he did a quick head count on the way to his desk. Twelve girls, eight guys, one very old teacher, and way too many naked parts at the front of the class. It was like a scene out of his worst nightmare.
Suddenly he was relieved that Meredith didn’t share first hour with him.
He took a desk in the back, as far away from all the nakedness as he could possibly get. No one, of course, was sitting in the front row. Mr. Cartel waited quietly until the bell rang, then leaned back in his chair and regarded the class with a somber expression. “Welcome to health. In this class, we will discuss physiological changes in a body as it ages, the reproductive process, the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and we will spend an entire month discussing how smoking cigarettes damages the human body.”
Vlad sank further down in his seat with each item the teacher had listed until he got to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco-he already knew those were things to be avoided if he planned on living past twenty. And not just because of the way they harmed his body-if he touched any of them, Nelly would kill him for sure.
Mr. Cartel cleared his throat and shifted in his seat a little before standing up. He picked up a long, wooden pointer and, much to Vlad’s horror, smacked the pointer against the nether regions of the man on the poster. “ The human reproductive system is a complicated and fascinating subject. We will study each part thoroughly, from glands to g-g-g-gonads…”
Vlad felt his face grow so hot that he was fairly certain he was glowing. He sank even further down in his seat and waited for the nightmare to be over.
After napping through geometry and accidentally freezing Mrs. Patterson’s beaker to the lab table in chemistry, Vlad stumbled into a lunchtime oasis. Meredith had saved a seat for him and Henry sat across from her, making moon eyes at Melissa Hart as she made her way through the lunch line. Vlad slid in beside Meredith and managed a smile. “Is it graduation time yet?”
Meredith laughed, sweet and giggly, making Vlad’s insides all gooey. “Is it that bad so far?”