One of the twerkers bumped into her, sloshing her drink on to her face. She lurched forward and I grabbed her arm to keep her from going straight to the floor. Turning, she shrieked, ‘Back off, skank,’ to the twerking girl, though it was the guy who’d bumped her.

When she turned back to me, the ugly sneer dissipated. She smiled prettily, like the past ten seconds hadn’t happened. Scary.

‘What’d I just say?’ She sidled closer and I dropped her arm. ‘Oh, yeah. Economics. With what’s-his-name …’ She snapped her fingers a couple of times, trying to remember, while I glanced over her head at Jackie, dancing with a guy wearing a long, dark cape. He laughed at something she said, showing off his white plastic fangs. There were at least a dozen vampires in attendance tonight.

‘Mr Keller?’ econ girl said.

‘Dr Heller,’ I supplied.

She smiled again. ‘Yeah, that’s him.’ She poked me in the chest with a metallic silver fingernail. ‘You sit on the back row. Not paying attention. Tsk, tsk.’

Wow. I have got to extricate myself from this conversation. ‘I’m actually the supplemental instructor for that class.’

‘The who-de-whaty?’

I looked down, pursing my lips. Christ. ‘The tutor.’

‘Ohhhh …’ Then she told me her name, which I forgot immediately, and launched into a monologue of enmity concerning the girl who’d bumped her. I didn’t know either of them, and I couldn’t have cared less about their blood feud, which concerned either a guy or a pair of shoes – I couldn’t determine which in my state of I don’t give a shit.

When I visibly located Jackie again, she’d pulled her bag over her shoulder and was heading out the back door to the concrete lot shared by several of the Greek houses. I’d come to the party hoping to see her, though I had no business stalking her like this. It was just as well I hadn’t asked her to dance or spoken to her. I could leave now, no harm done. Just follow her out the door and go home.

Except I’d squeezed my bike into a small space between a couple of cars out front. No reason for me to go out the back door.

Vampire guy had been watching the back door, too. He slung the cape over a chair and spat out the plastic fangs, shoving them into his front pocket. Exiting right behind Jackie, he didn’t seem rushed, but he wasn’t dawdling, either – like he had somewhere to be. Or someone to meet.

6

Landon

The wooden block on the desk read Mrs Sally Ingram – black lettering set into a polished brass plate. It sounded like a nice enough name, and she’d seemed nice from a distance during the mandatory orientation assembly last week. Nice was the first thing my high-school principal seemed to be and wasn’t.

I hunched into a hard vinyl-seated chair in front of her massive desk. The top was a solid slab of wood that appeared built for the specific purpose of preventing someone from lunging across it easily. I couldn’t imagine how they even got a desk that size into this office. It must have come into the room in pieces, because it sure as hell couldn’t have fitted through the door.

Mrs Ingram leafed through an open file, shifting pieces of paper like I wasn’t sitting there, waiting to find out why I’d been called to the principal’s office on my first day of high school. Her glasses sat at the end of her nose, the way Dad wore his when he was reading or updating the books – the only concession to his previous career I’d seen since we moved here eight months ago.

At first, there’d been arguments and accusations – my father spitting out criticisms concerning Grandpa’s lack of business sense or planning or record keeping with the fishing enterprise that had supported him for decades … which was Grandpa’s line of reasoning. Finally, they’d come to some sort of agreement, and my father took over the financial aspects of the business. While entering numbers in the ledgers or transferring them to his laptop, Dad still mumbled the occasional cuss word or yanked his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose as if his frustration might trigger a nosebleed. But he’d ordered the ‘office’ – which consisted of a cupboard crammed into the hallway between the living area and kitchen (which held logbooks instead of dishes), and the built-in kitchen table … over which drooped a single lightbulb on a cord. The work space was a long way from Dad’s office in Washington or his home office in Alexandria.

Mrs Ingram cleared her throat and removed her glasses, staring at me. Her eyes were dark and close set. I would sketch her as a dragon – beady reptilian eyes sizing up her prey and fixing it to the ground, wordlessly taunting it to run. This was the first day of school. I couldn’t have done anything to piss her off already. Not that I ever tried to piss anyone off. I just wanted to be left alone, and for the most part, I’d managed to make that so.

‘Landon Maxfield.’ She said my last name like it was something slimy, and I couldn’t help the defiance that forced my eyes to narrow. Maxfield was my grandfather’s name, and I didn’t like anyone insulting it. Leaning on to her elbows, she steepled her fingers. ‘I’ve heard about you, and I thought we should become acquainted, since you’re in my house now.’

I blinked. She’d heard about me – from who? And what did they say?

‘Your inauspicious academic beginning in this exemplary school precedes you, you see.’ Her fingers tapped at the tips, like we were simply having a constructive first-day chat. ‘And I make it a habit, as the principal of this school, to take notice of all potential … deficiencies, before these defects transmit themselves to the rest of the student body. A bit of preemptive damage control, if you will. Do you understand?’ She gave me a mocking smile, lips pressed tight and barely turned at the ends.