It should make me happier than it does.

How long before someone figures you out, you think?

I shrugged and jogged across the crosswalk. “I don’t go to lunch. If anyone even notices, it’ll be Madison. She’ll just think I’m starving down to bikini weight.”

You could always eat her.

“Don’t tempt me,” I said, a reflex.

Then I thought about it — Madison screaming as I sliced into her neck with a plastic fork and started drinking. It would be like drinking Victoria’s Secret perfume, but I’d never had blood fresh. It might be worth it, just to find out what it tasted like when it was still hot and pulsing and —

I made a note to stay out of school when I was hungry.

“It’s just until college,” I said.

Jake said, So you’ll go to college?

Sometimes a normal question can stop you right in the street.

15. It will knock you sideways that everyone around you will grow older and go to college and major in art history, and they’ll get jobs and date and complain and marry and have normal lives and die, and you’ll be stuck at seventeen, sucking blood out of mugs and counting the stripes on your wallpaper forever.

16. You make a note to ask Grandmother if jiang-shi can die; what happens then?

Grandmother was home making tea, shuffling quietly back and forth in her house slippers. (Over the past couple of months she had become the most comforting thing in the world; anything she did was home to me.)

“What happens when I’m supposed to be older?”

She thought about that, shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said, in that tone she used when she had been thinking about something with no good outcome. (She used it a lot.)

Grandmother set a mug of warm blood next to me. “You’ll think of something. I know it.”