“Summer’s here! Can you believe it?” Becky said, catching up to me. We clasped hands and shrieked like we had just won tickets to a sold-out concert.

“It’s finally here!” I exclaimed. “No more tardy slips or calls to my parents about dress codes.”

Becky opened her locker, which had already been cleaned out. Photos of her and Matt presumably had been placed in a scrapbook with colorful captions, beautiful borders, and funky heart-shaped stickers. She examined the empty locker for anything else she might have forgotten.

“It looks like you even dusted it,” I teased.

“This is going to be the best summer ever, Raven. This is the first summer we both will have boyfriends. To think, we’ll be lying poolside with the hottest guys in Dullsville.”

I spotted a painting of Alexander and me in front of Hatsy’s Diner that still hung on the inside of my locker door. The stars twinkled above us and we were lit by the glow of the moon.

“Well, one of us will be,” I said. And I wasn’t referring to the fact that my boyfriend wouldn’t be able to worship the sun.

I had a bigger problem—he wasn’t even in Dullsville.

Becky must have read my wistful expression. “I bet Alexander will be back anytime now to have graveside picnics with you,” Becky offered with a bright smile.

Alexander and his creepy-but-kind butler, Jameson, had driven the ailing tween vampire, Valentine Maxwell, to Hipsterville in hopes of reuniting him with his nefariously Draculine siblings, Jagger and Luna. After Valentine tried to sink his tiny fangs into my little brother, Billy Boy, my sibling and his best friend, Henry, began questioning his possible nocturnal identity.



2 из 119