Never Bite a Boy on the First Date by Tamara Summers Page B

window a couple days ago?”
    Crystal tilted her head the other way. “Maybe not that cute,” she said.
    “Oh, thanks.”
    “But if you had some green eye shadow—” she added hopefully.
    “Come on , Kira!” Zach yelled from downstairs as I ducked away from Crystal and grabbed my book bag. “We don’t want to miss the big mourning assembly!”
    Oh, man. The school had had one of these assemblies on the first day, so that everyone could get together and grieve about some ancient French teacher who’d died over the summer. It was wicked boring when you didn’t know the person being mourned. On the other hand, if my Ann Arbor school had had one of these for me, that’d be okay. I’d have to ask Olympia if they did; she was the one who filled me in about my funeral and everything, which I missed, what with how busy I was being really dead and all. It takes a couple days of being a corpse before a vampire rises.
    Zach and I were early to school, as usual, so I lurked around the gym doors while everyone else filed in and found seats on the bleachers. I was watching for any of my suspects. I knew I should start by talking to Rowan—you couldn’t get more suspicious than what he’d said to his dad yesterday—but part of me was hoping that smiley guy would walk in first. Or, you know,Daniel…that’d be okay, too.
    I poked around inside my book bag as if I was looking for something while everyone went by. It was a lot quieter than our normal assemblies; I heard a few muffled sobs and a lot of shocked and curious whispering. The football team is usually the noisiest group, pounding on bleachers as they go by and whooping to each other across the gym. But today they were subdued, shuffling along with their heads down. I’m no fan of jocks, but even I felt sorry, seeing them like that. Tex had been a doofus, but from everything I’d heard about him, he’d been a well-liked, good-natured doofus. Not the kind of obnoxious guy with lots of enemies who usually gets murdered, at least on TV.
    A few minutes before the bell rang, I finally spotted Rowan’s big combat boots stomping through the doors. The hood of his black sweatshirt was up and his shoulders were hunched. He didn’t look at anyone as he slouched into the gym and climbed the bleachers, taking two at a time with his long, skinny legs. He reached the top and sat down, way back from the gymfloor—far from most of the football players and cheerleaders, who were sitting in the front two rows, sniffling and consoling each other.
    I already knew that my one new friend in town, Vivi, wasn’t coming to the assembly. She’d emailed me last night that she was “too overcome” and “shattered” by the whole murder thing (even though I was pretty sure she didn’t really know Tex). Her parents were letting her stay home for the rest of the week. There was no sign of Daniel or Smiley Guy either. So I took a deep breath, scrambled up the bleachers, and casually plunked myself down next to Rowan.
    “Mind if I sit here?” I asked.
    His long red-brown bangs hung over his face as he leaned his elbows on his knees. He pushed his hood back a little to give me a nod. I saw him notice my legs first, and then his gaze traveled up to my face.
    Now, I’m not drop-dead gorgeous like Vivi is, but I think—given my tasteful emerald nose stud and my half-Japanese features and my striking, dark green hair—that I’m not exactlythe most horrifying teenage girl on the face of the planet.
    But when Rowan met my eyes, he gave me a look that said exactly that. In fact, he looked so spooked that for a moment I thought he was either going to scream and dive off the bleachers or have a heart attack and literally die right there in front of me. Which would make it much harder to get him to confess to a murder, don’t you think?
    “Who…what…?” he stammered. He actually started to get to his feet like he was going to run away.
    “Whoa, what’s wrong?” I asked, touching his