After I had enrolled as a student, I was following Alexis to her first class far enough behind that I could watch people's reactions to her, which were nearly non-existent. Except for those two friends from the other day and the occasional teacher, nobody even glanced at her. I was probably going to have to get some random boy addicted to venom and then point her out to him. I'd probably have to use mind control too. It was as though she were going out of her way to be invisible.
"Hey, what are you doing?" came a familiar voice from behind.
Turning around, I saw Tanner and smiled. "I didn't think I'd see you until later."
He was smiling. "I just got suspended for the day."
I raised an eyebrow. "That's good news?"
"Yeah. I punched five guys from the team-and they couldn't even take me. Five against one! Can you believe it?"
"That's awesome. Hey, let's go somewhere and celebrate."
"Don't you have to go to your classes?" he asked.
"Nah. Let's go enjoy the day." Spending the day with him would be much better than following Alexis around, not even the humans had any interest in her.
"Okay! Come on," he said, grabbing my hand. We walked to his car and he got on the freeway.
"Where are you taking me?"
"I thought we could take a drive and see where we end up."
"Oh, an adventure! That sounds like fun." And it actually did. I remembered back to the days when I made fun of my sister for becoming giddy over a human guy. Now I understood, although I hoped that this would end better than it had for her. The days of rounding up rioters to stake vampires were long gone. I looked over at Tanner, his head bouncing in tune to the music, and couldn't picture him trying to kill me.
He looked at me. "What are you smiling about?" he asked, smiling too and still moving to the music.
"Just enjoying the company," I said and started moving to the music.
Tanner belted out the words of the song and I laughed so hard that my stomach ached.
A little while later, we approached a beach. "Wanna go there?" he asked.
"Sure!"
"Wait. Are you hungry? We can grab some food and make a picnic."
"Only if it's my treat," I said, smiling.
He pretended to think about it. "I can live with that."
Soon we were sitting by the water's edge on a blanket, eating greasy chicken. I couldn't recall the last time that I'd had so much fun. When we'd finished eating, we reclined on the blanket and pointed out different shapes of clouds. After a while, we settled into a comfortable silence.