“Let’s load it up, y’all!” I call out to the rest of my team.
“Roger that, Cap,” Landry says, as a few girls from the opposing team whistle at him. Landry is hot. Not just hot for Middle of Nowhere, Texas, but real-life hot. He’s a six-foot-tall bisexual dreamboat with deep brown skin and tight and smooth cornrow braids. The whole world has eyes for him, but lately he’s only got eyes for Peach—if only she’d notice.
We all gather up our signs, pom-poms, and gym bags. On the bus, I pull on my sweatpants under my skirt and yank my hoodie over my head.
“Hey, Karily,” I shout into the dark bus. “Great job on that toe touch!”
“Yeah!” a few other people chime in.
“Thanks, y’all,” says her tiny freshman voice from the back of the bus.
Ms. Garza, our faculty sponsor, boards the bus last with a romance novel tucked under her arm. “All right, Ms. Rhodes,” she says to our bus driver. “Let’s get going.”
Ms. Garza settles into the front row with her reading light and book as we rumble down the road.
I sit with a bench to myself while Peach and Landry settle in across the aisle from me, the two of them huddled over Peach’s cell phone, watching their favorite beauty guru vlogger unload the details of her very messy and very public breakup.
I’ll never know what it feels like to not know that vampires exist and should be feared, but moments like this are the closest I come to the sweet relief of ignorance. In this bus, I’m not responsible for the lives of everyone in a ten-mile radius. In this bus, we’re speeding down the road faster than any vampire can move. I love the safety of this bus when we’re driving home late at night after another away game, and I can just let my guard down.
Even if I wanted to shirk my duties back in Sweetwater, my anatomy would never allow it. Vampires set off some kind of reaction inside me. My own internal dog whistle. It’s like when you know you’ve forgotten something but you just don’t know what it is, or that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and realizing you didn’t write the paper that’s due tomorrow. All this energy piles up inside me, and I’m not satisfied until it’s released. Suddenly every frustrating hour of training with Mama and Aunt Gemma clicks for me, and every other desire and care fades away until all that’s left is my one purpose: protecting Sweetwater.
But here in this yellow school bus, barreling down farm roads, the feeling is gone. Not a bloodsucker in sight.
No one really knows who was here first: Resurrection Home for Wayward Souls or the town of Sweetwater. Or maybe the town of Sweetwater just started as a bunch of wayward souls. Either way, the rules are simple: They don’t leave the ground of Resurrection Home, and my family allows them to continue using their glamour to disguise themselves as a Pentecostal youth shelter on the outskirts of town. It’s not a perfect compromise, but we’ve made it work for more than a hundred years.
I like to think of the place as a halfway house or vampire rehab, where bloodsuckers go to learn to control themselves and drink bagged blood from private donors. The only problem with rehab is that only three kinds of vampires come in and out. First, there are the well-behaved vampires, who pass through Sweetwater after a successful stay at the home. Then there are the vamps on their way to the home, searching for one last living, breathing fix. And lastly, there are those who go to Resurrection Home and fail, coming out worse than they went in.
The bus rumbles over the gravel on the side of the road, jostling me awake, and it’s only then that I realize I’ve been dozing in and out of sleep. The bus comes to a halt.
“Looks like the Sweetwater spirit bus,” says Ms. Rhodes, as she peers out the driver’s window, pointing to the bus parked ahead with its hazards flashing.
The feeling hits me like a brick wall. Adrenaline. Whatever’s on that bus, it’s not good. And I have a feeling that everything on it is either dead or immortal.
Ms. Garza stands up. “Must have broken down. Maybe we can save them the trouble of sending out another bus.”
Ms. Rhodes pulls the lever, the pneumatic door wheezing open into the pitch-black field alongside the road.
I shoot to my feet. “Wait.”
The whole team looks at me. This isn’t the first time I’ve popped up in the middle of a crowd or screamed “Stop!” or tried to cause some kind of distraction. If you ask around town, people will even tell you that Crandall women are peculiar in a special kind of way, but they wouldn’t hurt a fly. (Supposedly.) Nothin’ peculiar about us, except that we know more about what’s happening under mortals’ noses than any human should.
“I’ll, uh, come with you.” I mean, really, what’s Ms. Garza going to do in the face of a vampire? Throw her bodice-ripping romance novel at its fangs? Yeah, I don’t think so.
Ms. Garza waves me off. “Jo, you stay on the bus. You think I’m about to let a student off this bus on the side of the road in the middle of Jesus knows where? No, ma’am!”
She jogs down the steps before I can get in another word.
I walk to the front of the bus, hovering by the stairs. Every away game, the town sends one school bus of fans, dubbed “the spirit bus.” You don’t have to be a student to ride the bus. Shit, I don’t even think you need to show an ID. After all, Sweetwater is the kind of place where every face is familiar. So, basically, anyone or anything could be on that bus.
“Back it up. You heard the teacher lady,” says Ms. Rhodes.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I mutter. Let’s hope I’m faster than whatever’s waiting for me on the bus.
I watch as she stalks up the side of the road, my breath held. If we were just a little closer, our headlights might stretch far enough for me to see what the hell is on that bus.
It’s too quiet. That’s the thing about people: Where there’s people, there’s noise. Vampires, though, their lives stretch over such long spans of time that they crave the things that make time pass. Quiet. Dark. For people, there really is safety in numbers. Hint, hint, Ms. Garza.
As Ms. Garza knocks on the door to the other bus, I tune out every noise around me and focus in on her. Don’t get on the bus, don’t get on the bus, don’t get on the bus.
She gets on the bus. Of course she does.
Come on, lady.
I decide to count to ten. That’s what reasonable people do. They count to ten. One, two, three, four—fuck it. I race down the steps and to the other bus, expecting to find sweet, naïve Ms. Garza in a puddle of her own blood, a vampire crouched over her breathless body.
I barrel up the steps and Ms. Garza shrieks as I catch her off guard. Immediately, I throw my body in front of hers.
I glance around, but … not a drop of blood in sight.
“Jo, I told you to stay on the bus,” she says sweetly through gritted teeth as she elbows her way out from behind me.
“I was—” Coming to save your life, I nearly say, but then my gaze catches on the half-full bus of Mustang fans, most of them familiar faces.
“Oh, thank heavens!” says Mr. Bufford, the faculty sponsor for the spirit bus. “Ms. Garza has invited us all to load up on the cheerleading team’s bus. That includes you, Deidra!” he says to the bus driver.
A few whoops come from the back of the bus.