Never Bite a Boy on the First Date by Tamara Summers

once a month to survive. But it’s hard to be subtle about six vampires feeding in one town once a month, plus, if we start, Olympia is sure we won’t be able to stop. So instead she sends Bert out on blood runs to towns that are at least two to four hours away to buy animal blood in bulk, which just barely sustains us and is also completely disgusting.
    When I got downstairs, Olympia was rummaging in the fridge and Crystal was slicing tomatoes. Bert was sitting at the kitchen island, pouring blood into his cereal bowl. His horn-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose, and he was peering at the Wall Street Journal . Bert and Olympia manage our finances in somemysterious way that involves shadow companies and long-held stocks and stakes in lots of big corporations (obviously not those kinds of stakes), so we have plenty of money and none of the adult vampires have to work if they don’t want to.
    I’m sure I’ll appreciate that once I’m done with high school and I can live a charming life of leisure, too. But right now I just picture them sleeping peacefully all day while I suffer through band in a hot music room that smells like sweaty marching uniforms, and it makes me wildly jealous.
    I sat down and stared gloomily at the blood going gloop-gloop-gloop over Bert’s cornflakes.
    “It’s grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-oss !” I joked.
    Of course, nobody got my brilliant Tony the Tiger reference, because none of these people have ever watched enough television. Bert gave me a puzzled look and then went back to his paper.
    My mom would have laughed. I can’t believe I miss her .
    “Hey, Kira,” Crystal said brightly. “Olympia says you’re solving a mystery!” Crystal wastwenty when she died, in 1926—I’m not sure how, because in my house, we don’t talk about how we died. Except for Zach, who ought to be embarrassed about it but apparently isn’t, since he brings it up incessantly. I was surprised when he remembered all the details of his death; I barely remember anything about the car accident that killed me.
    Anyway, it’s a good thing Crystal got to stick around for the sixties, because that was the perfect decade for her. I think she’s hoping it’ll come back sometime. She still wears tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottoms as often as she can. She has pale blond hair that curls around her chin, and she likes to come into my room and dance in the middle of the night, no matter what music I’m listening to. She’ll dance to anything. As vampire sisters go, she’s not bad. Certainly better than Apolla, the very quiet little sister I had when I was alive. She was ten when I died and was known around our house as “the good one.”
    Crystal is my favorite member of my new family Although the early morning perkiness—actually, the all-the-time perkiness—is probablygoing to get old after a couple of decades.
    “Yup,” I said. “A mystery. Wheeee .”
    Crystal found Bert sometime during the Great Depression and turned him into a vampire after they fell in love. This turned out much better for her than it did for me with Zach. Which is sort of mysterious, since Bert is a buttoned-up math nerd and Crystal is a ditzy free spirit. I never would have put them together, but here we are, like, seventy years later, and unfortunately they still act schmoopy around each other all the time.
    Crystal dropped a kiss on Bert’s head as she sat down with us. Her morning blood was spread on three toasted tomato sandwiches. I couldn’t even look at them.
    Olympia plunked a tall glass of blood on the island beside me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to heat it for you?” she asked, like she does every morning.
    “No, thanks,” I said. It might taste more like living blood that way, but when it’s hot I can’t drink it as fast and get it over with.
    “Where are you going to start?” Crystal asked me, bubbling with excitement. “Do youhave a list of suspects? Are you going to interrogate them?”
    “Don’t forget