Chapter 33
The rest of the day was similar to first period. Even in the hallways, kids I didn’t really even know came up to me and asked if I knew anything else, anything different than what they’d heard. One girl reported that Sidney, one of my sister’s friends, had passed out at the funeral. I didn’t think that was true. Someone else said that Jack had screamed at the coffin as they were lowering it into the ground and then punched a tree. I was pretty sure that my sister would’ve mentioned that, although there was a lot that was going unreported, at least to me, lately.
“Why can’t anyone think of another topic to discuss?” Emma asked before taking a bite of her sandwich. She had the same thing for lunch every single day. Ham and cheese sandwich, Cheetos Puffs, apple, bottle of water, Little Debbie Zebra Cake.
Lucy and I always bought our lunch, and we were both glad that it was pizza day. There was an option where you could pick from a variety of fast food choices at the “salad bar” but when there was pizza on the tray, you got a lot more food for a lot less cash. The brownie squares we had for dessert even looked a little bit like the ones my mom made, though I bet they didn’t taste the same.
I’d already filled them both in on what little I’d gleaned the night before. Also, that morning, Cadence had told me she might not be there when I got back from school. She said she was going shopping with Eliza and might go straight to her new job, depending upon how things went. I had hugged her goodbye, but it wasn’t easy for me to think about what all of this really meant, and I doubted I’d have too many more opportunities to gather clues if my sister wasn’t home when I got there.
“Are you nervous about your discussion with Dr. Sanderson?” Lucy asked, picking the pepperonis off of her pizza. She preferred cheese, but they didn’t have any left by the time our lunch period, the last of the day, got our trays.
“I am,” I admitted. “I’m afraid he’ll be able to brainwash me again.”
“It’ll be fine,” Lucy assured me. “As soon as you get done talking to him, you’ll call me, and I’ll unfreeze you.”
Emma laughed. “Just like freeze tag. Remember when we used to play at recess?”
I giggled. Recess seemed like a million years ago. Sometimes I couldn’t even believe we were in high school. I heard parents talk all the time about how their kids were growing up too fast, and now that all of his had happened with Drew, I was beginning to realize they were right. “I hope you can thaw me out,” I replied. “And that I can get some more information from him.”
Lucy had revealed she’d found “tons” of information about “real” vampires online, though she wasn’t sure how reliable the information was. She was making notes that she would share with us later on, she’d explained, but for now, it didn’t seem like Cadence’s situation was quite as uncommon as I’d initially suspected. In fact, Lucy said, the more she read, the more plausible it seemed to her that my sister might actually be a vampire.
That hadn’t sat well with me, but I was at the point now where I was beginning to think that at least having an answer would be better than continuing to wonder what was going on with her. Even Emma seemed to think there was a slim chance that Lucy could be right, which had blown my mind. Apparently, she’d done as thorough a search as possible online for a street drug that might have the qualities this one would need to have, and she wasn’t able to find anything. She’d also said she’d found something else but hadn’t told us what in the hallway.
Lucy must’ve remembered at the same time I did. “Em, what were you going to tell us earlier? What did you find?”
“Oh, right.” Emma dusted her orange fingers off on the napkin her mother tucked into her lunchbox every morning. Emma’s mom still did a lot for her. “You won’t believe it. I don’t believe it, and I’m the one that found it.”
“Try us,” I said, thinking there wasn’t much I wouldn’t believe at this point.
“Okay.” Emma pulled out her phone. “I was looking for information about Dr. Joplin. There wasn’t much. I had to really dig. I didn’t know how old he might be, though I think he looks like he’s not old enough to be a doctor at all.” I agreed with her there. She had been flipping through her phone. “I kept going back until I found this.” She turned her phone around to face us, and Lucy and I huddled together to see the screen.
It was an old picture of a group of men in suits. I couldn’t tell exactly what I was looking at, though I assumed the picture had to be about a hundred years old. “What is it, Emma?” Lucy asked, her forehead as crinkled as mine.
Emma let out a deep breath and turned her phone to swipe. She turned it back around.
This time, the picture was zoomed in on just one man. It was much grainier, but he looked vaguely familiar. His hair was different. Rather than being tall and spiky, it was brushed to the side, more in line with the fashion of a century ago. I felt my mouth go dry. Though the picture was blurry, I was pretty sure this was the same guy I’d seen on Eliza’s social media friend’s list.
“Uh, so you think that’s the same Dr. Joplin that Eliza knows?” Lucy asked tentatively, glancing up at her friend, the same one who’d been convinced the day before there was no such thing as vampires.
Without a word, Emma withdrew her phone again and swiped. She turned it back to us.
There was no picture this time, just text. “Dr. James Joplin, Boston Massachusetts, graduate of Harvard Medical School, 1883, aged 15.”
I had to read it several times, trying to let it sink in with each pass, but the information seemed stuck somehow between my eyes and my brain.
“Wow,” Lucy finally uttered, and Emma withdrew her phone. “So… according to this… if that’s the same guy—and it looks like the same person, though his hair is different, and he looks slightly older—Jamie is, like….”
“A hundred and forty-six years old,” Emma concluded for us.
I took her word for it. Her math was never wrong. “How....?” That was all I could say.
“Maybe it’s his great-great-whatever-grandfather,” Lucy offered. I was suddenly confused. It was as if Emma agreed with me that this could be a case of vampires, and Lucy was the skeptic. But then I realized she was playing devil’s advocate.
“I could do a facial recognition test,” Emma offered. “I could scan both pictures and see if it’s the same guy.”
“Can you do that?” I asked. I knew Emma had access to computer programs most people did not, but I didn’t realize she had that sort of capability.
“Sure,” she shrugged. “I thought about doing it last night, but I wanted your opinions first.”
“Do it,” Lucy agreed. “And let us know.”
“Okay.” Emma put her phone in her pocket and checked the time before opening her Zebra Cake.
I tried to turn my attention back to my pizza but my stomach felt unsettled. I saw Liam across the cafeteria and wished he’d look in my direction. Maybe that perfect smile could calm my nerves.
“Stop staring,” Lucy mumbled, and I took a deep breath. I hoped my afternoon classes would go by quickly, all of them except for algebra, and that I could survive my discussion with Dr. Sanderson. I took a sip of water and tried not to dwell on the fact that my sister might be friends with a guy who was alive during both world wars. Everything just seemed to keep unraveling.
