“That guy is totally cracked out,” Vic said one day, as we walked past Balthazar in the great hall.

“I don’t think he’s on anything.”

“I didn’t mean, for real. If he was cracked out for real, he’d probably be having more fun, right?” Vic shrugged. “Balty looks like he’s not having any fun. He looks like he never had any. Like he wouldn’t know fun if it started dancing around yelling ‘I’m fun’ in his face.”

It took me a couple of seconds to process that. “He does look sad, doesn’t he?”

“Doesn’t look good, that’s for sure.” Vic brushed his mop of sandy bangs from his forehead, then snapped his fingers. “Hey, I’ll invite him to my next classic DVD screener. We’re doing a Matrix/Fight Club double feature about awesome leather coats and the evils of the corporate hegemony. You think he’d like that?”

“Who wouldn’t?” I resolved to look up hegemony in the dictionary. Once I’d thought that Vic wasn’t a very bright guy, but I’d learned better. Oblivious to details as he often was, he knew more about more subjects than virtually any of my other friends.

I cared about Balthazar as a friend, and that made it hard enough to watch him when he was so obviously miserable. But I would be lying if I claimed that the main reason I was frightened was because I was worried for him. I was too selfish for that. Every time I saw him so lost and strung out, I couldn’t help thinking, He’s going to tell.

Balthazar’s funereal gloom, and his silence, lasted for more than a week, until the first day of driver’s ed.

The driver’s education class at Evernight Academy was split into two sections. There was one for the regular human students, who could be expected to be fairly familiar with modern automobiles and probably drove their parents’ cars at home, and one for the vampires, some of whom had been driving regularly since the Model T days, others who had never been behind the wheel of a car before and whose wildly uneven sets of experiences were best kept hidden from human eyes. By rights I should’ve been put in the human section, but instead I was assigned with the vampires—probably because of my parents’ concerns that I wasn’t socializing with the “right people.”

“I just don’t get why every car needs a computer now,” Courtney bitched as she fumbled for the blinker. “Seriously, what is the point? I’m not doing math while I drive.”

“Please concentrate on the road, Miss Briganti.” Mr. Yee sighed heavily as he marked something on his board. We were driving one of the school’s official cars—a nondescript gray sedan, several years old—around the gravel paths that stretched through the back grounds. “I’m going to ask you to take this next loop a little faster.”

“Speeding is unsafe,” Courtney said, then smiled. “See, I read the booklet.”

“That’s very impressive, Miss Briganti, but you’re currently driving approximately twenty miles an hour. I’d like to see how you handle the car at something approaching normal street speed.”

Courtney’s hands tightened around the steering wheel. She was out of practice, and her nervousness had a tendency to manifest as whiplash-inducing sharp turns. I fumbled around to make sure my seat belt was fastened. It was difficult, because I was squashed into the middle of the backseat, with Ranulf on one side and Balthazar on the other. Ranulf studied the car interior as though he’d never seen one before, and Balthazar stared gloomily out the window.

Ranulf said, “These automobiles have only become popular in the last one hundred years. They might not remain so.”

“What, you think we’re going back to horses and buggies?” Courtney snorted as she stepped on the gas and the car lurched forward. Mr. Yee braced himself against the dashboard. “Dream on, Prince Valiant.”

“Innovations are often forgotten,” Ranulf said wistfully.

“I don’t think cars are going anywhere.” I tried to sound sympathetic and hide my amusement. Poor Ranulf always looked so lost.

“I liked horses. A horse was a friend to you. A companion. This is merely metal, and the countryside goes by too quickly to see.” That was about as much as I’d ever heard Ranulf say at once.

“I bet it was kind of nice.” I thought about that for a second—about how nobody really had horses and carriages anymore, and how many vampires must have felt more at home in those days—and then I sat up. “Hey, why don’t we start an Amish colony?”

That made Balthazar turn toward me, confused. “What?”

“You know. We have Evernight Academy, and we’re building that rehab center in Arizona—all the safe places for vampires to go, the ones where nobody else will bother us and where we can control who gets in. So why don’t we have an Amish colony? Or town, or whatever Amish people call it.” Nobody seemed to be getting it. Maybe I wasn’t explaining it right. “People who aren’t really caught up with today would be more at home there. They could have horses and carriages, and old-timey lanterns and clothes and stuff, and nobody would care. Come on, that’s a good idea!”

Mr. Yee seemed to have become drawn into the conversation despite himself. “Our gathering places are meant to bring people up-to-date with the modern world, not hide from it. Left turn signal, Miss Briganti.”

“It could be a halfway step. People could start there and work up to Evernight or wherever.” I really thought it was a pretty great plan. “And people who got homesick for ye olden days could visit sometimes.”