Never Bite a Boy on the First Date by Tamara Summers

wild!” Wilhelm bellowed now, talking about me again. “She will bring the vampire hunters right to us!”
    “This isn’t the Dark Ages, Pops,” I said. I love the way Wilhelm’s hair stands on end when I call him that. “There aren’t mobs of ignorant villagers outside with pitchforks and torches. Nobody even believes you guys exist. Us guys, I mean.”
    “That is precisely the kind of thinking that will get us all staked!” he shouted. “These new vampires think they can bite anyone they like! They don’t remember how the hunters watch for any signs of us! Careless, reckless, selfish—”
    “But I didn’t do it !” I yelled over the end of his sentence. “Call me what you like, but I DIDN’T BITE HIM!”
    Wilhelm glared at me with beady, bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t bitten until fairly late in life, so he’s kind of grizzled and gray for a vampire. Plus he’s had the same moustache since the 800s—long and droopy and fluffy. Apparently it keeps going in and out of fashion, so he seesno need to shave it. Personally I think it’s really distracting to talk to someone who looks like he has giant, fuzzy caterpillars crawling out of his nose.
    “It might be true,” Olympia interjected. “We can’t be sure she did it.”
    “We can’t be sure she didn’t ,” Wilhelm snarled. “We should move again, and quickly, before they come to hunt us down.”
    “Oh, no ,” I said, remembering the long weeks of car travel and switching cities and identities. It was bad enough after my death; after Zach’s it was even worse, because he was there pestering me the whole time and there was no way to get away from him. I was kind of hoping we’d stay here in Massachusetts for a while. “ Please don’t make me start junior year all over again.”
    “I hardly think relocating is the worst of your problems,” Olympia pointed out.
    “There could totally be other vampires here,” I said. “We saw this way suspicious guy at the school, didn’t we, Olympia? And it’s a pretty big town, right? There could be vampires all over the place!”
    “Most vampires are not as foolish as youare,” Wilhelm growled.
    “Let me find the vampire who killed Tex,” I said. “If I can figure out who did it, will you believe me? Can we stay?”
    Olympia and Wilhelm looked at each other for a long moment. Sometimes I think they’re actually talking to each other when this happens, which is fully creepy. Nobody wants parents with telepathy.
    Finally Wilhelm snorted, which made his moustache flounce up and down. “I am not happy about this,” he said. “I want that to be clear.”
    “All right, we’ll let you try,” Olympia said to me. “But if you haven’t figured it out in one week, we’re moving again.”
    “And then there will be consequences,” Wilhelm warned. I didn’t need telepathy to know he had locked coffins and feeding tubes floating through his head.
    “Be careful,” Olympia said. “Not all vampires are as civilized as we are.”
    Really? Less civilized than medieval Romanians? I bet.
    Finally I escaped upstairs to my room. Zachand I are the only ones who use the upstairs; we don’t quite hate the sun as much as the others do, and it occasionally manages to sneak in through the blinds on the top floor. Our deal is that I get the rooms to the left of the staircase and he gets the rooms to the right. He’s not supposed to come over to my side, although you can imagine how well he obeys that rule.
    Bert and Crystal have a room on the first floor. They’ve both been vampires for less than a hundred years, so they still do some human things like sleep in a bed, although their mattress is rock hard. I guess one day they’ll switch over to coffins, like Olympia and Wilhelm, who sleep behind a hidden door in the basement in parallel caskets of ancient stone. Allegedly one day I’ll want to sleep in a coffin, too, but I am highly dubious about that theory. I like my bed to be as fluffy as possible, with