"Ouch, ouch, ouch..." Jane tried to keep her body still while the medic rubbed a yellow ointment on her open wound.
"Didn't hear you saying a word back there," Rose said. She was standing nearby, or more accurately, Jane was the one invading her resting area.
"Yeah. It didn't hurt until I started walking." Jane wasn't too worried about the wound. With her new healing ability, it wouldn't take more than a week.
What she did hope, however, was that everyone would be too busy to notice. But with her pants ripped open, exposing the fresh skin underneath, that seemed impossible.
"I meant at the horse stable." Rose scoffed. "Have you ever experienced that before?"
Jane had planned an appropriate occasion to ask about what happened, but she didn't expect it to come straight from the source.
"No… I haven't." Unless standing in front of a giant statue counted.
"Ryan didn't use it on you?" Rose asked.
Jane hadn't been thinking about him, and certainly didn't expect to hear his name from anyone's mouth.
Her life had moved on, while his was scattered in the air. It had only been less than a week, yet he was fading from her memory.
She didn't want to make another lie, but she couldn't tell the truth either.
"You didn't seem like the obedient kind," Rose added casually, clearly basing her conclusion on Jane's resistance earlier.
"Oh, right, he did." Jane's answer was short, the kind that left the other person wondering.
But it was nothing compared to your power.
I did fall back then.
Those were the following sentences, but none made it out. There was no safe answer, and the more she spoke, the easier it would be to expose herself.
When silence began to spread among them and the end was close, the end of her lying day, a male voice broke through, saving her from the tension.
"Excuse me. You're Jane, right?"
Jane turned around. Her face lit up and her voice lifted with joy.
"Yes. I am!"
She pulled him closer to Rose, who was standing with the sign "running out of patience" hung on her face.
"This is my old friend," Jane said, another short sentence. She wasn't exactly lying. The boy's face was familiar. She couldn't quite remember his name, but her life was so quiet that he had to be a friend from school.
Rose said nothing. Her eyes drifted to Jane's fingers gripping onto the boy's sleeves.
"Sure. Have your time." She politely said and walked away, deciding not to point out the fact that introductions normally came with a name.
Her footsteps blended into the scratchy sound of grass until they stopped entirely.
"And Jane," Rose changed her mind.
"Ryan was disabled."
As the word twisted its way out of Rose's mouth and cracked Jane's mask, a strange satisfaction flooded through her, washing away the irritation that had haunted her all day.
Jane's mouth corners stuck to her face. There were many ways to interpret Rose's words, but Jane knew exactly what she meant. And she used the past tense!
"Jane... Jane!" The boy called her back to the present.
"Yes. Sorry. You are...?" Great, she destroyed another conversation.
"I'm sorry. My memory isn't very good."
The brief joy of meeting someone from her old school vanished. Jane just wanted to flee and hide somewhere no one could find her, after she had found Amelia and asked her what a disabled vampire meant.
"It's okay," he said with a smile, showing a snaggle tooth. "I'm Jim. Our classes were next to each other."
Next class… Jim … The name did ring a bell in her head, though the face didn't quite match...
"Oh my god — Jim! Yes, I have seen you before…"
Back when you were only half a head taller than me and still carried a baby face.
"… but you look so different now, in a good way." Puberty treated him well. Jane bet plenty of his old classmates would die to hang out with this Jim.
"Yeah, I don't need glasses anymore," he scratched his head and removed the glasses from his nose. The thickness of the glasses had declared they were nothing more than a decoration.
The image of a boy who was always shy merged with the one standing in front of her. His expression was still the same: the slightly tilted down head, the awkward way he held his hands, but the freckles and the flushed cheeks were gone. Jane hoped it was only puberty, that his features had finally settled, and time had simply blurred her memory of who he used to be.
"What's wrong?" Jim touched Jane's shoulder. She flinched from the action but didn't move away.
There was still a possibility that Jim had a secret millionaire parent who could have secured him a spot here. She stupidly hoped.
"I just got lightheaded from riding the horse." Jane moved to the nearby bench.
"Anyways," she continued, "Is this where you've been hiding?".
"Yes, almost 6 months now," he said while looking at her. "I saw you on the welcoming day, but I wasn't sure it was you until earlier."
Their height difference had given him a chance to watch her closely. Checking the slightest change on her face, but her focus was elsewhere.
He wasn't wrong. Jane was half here, half there, wondering when she could slip in the question burning in her chest. They weren't close enough for her to just ask, "Are you a vampire now?"
"So why did you move here? I'm guessing for the same reason as me?" Jim asked the exact question Jane had planned to use. And ultimately, whoever asked first won. Now the fireball was in her hands.
His nervous look told Jane she wasn't the only one itching to touch this taboo topic, and her answer would satisfy them both.
"Yes… If you meant the change," Jane said carefully. She didn't want to sound too eager.
"It was crazy, right? You go home one day and someone shows up, telling you you're going to a school for vampires because you might become one."
"Wait! What? Someone informed you?" Jane nearly jumped from her seat. She quickly glanced at his chest, and a sweet bitterness flooded her when she saw the plain glass pin.
"Yeah. They came and explained what I needed to know, what to be cautious about. Luckily, my parents weren't home." He smiled, and a sharp fang peeked out under his lip.
Jane had nothing to contribute to their conversation. That person never showed up at her front door. She came here completely unprepared, unaware she would be surrounded by vampires. Something straight out of fiction like this was little Jane's dream, but even as a kid, she would never want it to come true.
"It was nice talking to you," Jim said, standing up. "But I have to go back. Miss Kelsey told me to tell you to come to her office or the lab. She said you were late."
Jim walked away. The nervousness faded with each step he took. He smirked; his face couldn't hide the excitement of seeing the red pin on Jane's chest. If he was fast enough, anything was possible.
Jane wiggled her jaws, relaxing her face after waving her old friend goodbye. There was so much to process. Everything that hadn't made sense before started to come together.
The whole thing was one big spiderweb, luring her into this place.
And most importantly, it all started with that damn cursed pin! She could've studied here as a normal student.
But the most urgent question now was: Who was Miss Kelsey, and where could Jane find her?
There was a burning desire in Jane to walk around and find her immediately to clear her name of being "unpunctual", but that would be stupid. She only had one hour left before the main classes began.
***
Jane stood in front of the door, hesitating, worried, and anxious about what she was about to face or who she was about to meet.
She bit her lips, curled her hand into a fist, gave herself a silent cheer, and stepped into the classroom with as much confidence as she could gather. Maybe she was wrong, she told herself. Rose wasn't the most present student.
Her hopeful stride stopped halfway.
Rose was already there, sitting in her seat and facing the door with a bright smile. Her nails tapped on the empty chair beside her, sharp and loud, slipping into Jane's ear in a room full of people.
Jane glanced at her usual seat. Her deskmate had his head buried in his arms again. Jane liked that seat, the spot itself, her unbothered deskmate, and the suspicion she had about him that she could only satisfy if she could still sit next to him.
She said goodbye to the seat, then turned and walked the other way. The moment she sat down, she felt the weight of dozens of eyes. Some were admiring, some surprised, a few even jealous, but none felt sorry.
Behind her was Alina sitting alone while Amelia and Alice paired up together. Jane carefully looked at Alina, feeling a hint of guilt that she might have thrown off their usual balance.
Jane, with her talent of being dramatic and her imagination, scared herself because the night passed by peacefully. The only time Rose said anything was after Jane's 5th time fidgeting in her chair.
"Can you sit still? I'm not gonna eat you."
"Sorry," Jane mumbled. Chemistry was already boring enough, and sitting beside a vampire who might know she had killed one of their own wasn't helping. Her nerves had nowhere else to go, so they escaped through her shaking legs.
Rose glanced over. She started to regret teasing Jane to the point where she sat stiffly, like a robot.
No fun, Rose thought, and closed her eyes.
Ten minutes later, a voice drifted to her ear.
"What is a disabled vampire?"
Rose didn't need to look to know who was asking.
She straightened a little, still half-leaning on her arm, raised one brow, and stared at Jane's face. Naïve, curious. As if she had just asked what the weather was like. But was she really that calm?
Listen to her heartbeat.
Thump Thump Thump.
A heart like that must include a plumbing stream of blood. Thick, warm, running towards the throat…
Roes's tongue glided against her fangs. A quick sting of pain followed by the faint taste of iron brought her back to Jane's face.
"Ryan was the new generation," she said, turning away, pulling her attention and her senses off Jane. "He lacked a lot of things, one of which you knew."
She must have been really hungry, and she had just had her meal not long ago! More annoyingly, she couldn't walk out of class to deal with it, not when the usual teacher was replaced by someone who wasn't so "casual".
"Your fangs," Jane whispered while drawing a small circle near her own tooth with her finger. She carefully moved her chair away from Rose, making sure it didn't scratch against the floor.
"You said you weren't going to eat me." Her head pulled back, and her hand automatically raised in a stop sign between them.
"But I'm hungry. Can I just have a little?" Rose pouted, sliding lower in her seat until her head dipped and her eyes looked up through her lashes, all while her arm covered her stomach.
What kind of vampire felt their hunger through the stomach?
One who liked to mess with humans, obviously.
"Stop teasing me." Jane returned to her chair and fixed her attention on the front of the room.
"I wasn't. At some point, I really did think about eating you." Rose's gaze stayed locked on her. Their eyes held—one unblinking to look serious, the other unblinking to figure out where the joke ended.
"You're lying," Jane said. "Maybe you were hungry, but not out of control. Nothing about you changed, besides the teeth and the eyes. Your veins didn't run crazy on your face."
"Oh?" Rose raised an eyebrow, intrigued. "And how do you have such a conclusion?"
"From Ryan. He looked like a beast at the ball... right before he let me run."
Rose remained half-leaning on the edge of the desk, the wooden rim pressing into her chest. It must be uncomfortable, but she didn't move.
"The lack of control," Jane continued. "Is that one of the differences between you and someone like him?"
This was her real question—the one she needed answered for herself.
"I'd tell you," Rose said, "if you agreed to hang out. After curfew." She knew exactly which part Jane wouldn't agree to.
Jane bit her lips and made a pitiful face. She stretched out her bandaged knee forward: "Maybe another day. When my knee heals."
She only had to say no a few times. No one is interested enough to be turned down that many times.
"Jane Lucien."
Jane almost stood up from her seat. She hadn't heard her full name in ages. The last time was when her mom yelled to wake her up.
"Yes?"
"Stay and meet me after class."