"Hang on-I'm almost ready," I yelled, shook myself mentally, and gave my reflection one more look, deciding, with a definitely defensive edge, to leave my shoulder bare. "My Marks aren't like anyone else's. Might as well give the masses something to gawk at while they talk," I muttered. Then I sighed. I'm usually not so grumpy. But my sucky birthday, my sucky parents... No. I couldn't keep lying to myself.
"Wish Stevie Rae was here," I whispered.
And that was it, what had me withdrawing from my friends (including boyfriends-both of them) during the past month and impersonating a large, soggy, disgusting, rain cloud. I missed my best friend and ex-roommate, who everyone had watched die a month ago, but who I knew had actually been turned into an undead creature of the night. No matter how melodramatic and bad B movie that sounded. The truth was that right now, when Stevie Rae should have been downstairs puttering around with my lame birthday details, she was actually lurking about somewhere in the old tunnels under Tulsa, conspiring with other disgusting undead creatures who were truly evil, as well as definitely bad-smelling.
"Uh, Z? You okay in there?" Damien's voice called again, interrupting my mental blahs. I scooped up a complaining Nala, turned my back on the terrible birthmas card from my 'rentals, and hurried out the door, almost running over a worried-looking Damien.
"Sorry... sorry..." I mumbled. He fell in step beside me, giving me quick little sideways glances.
"I've never known anyone before who was as not excited as you about their birthday," Damien said. I dropped the squirming Nala and shrugged, trying for a nonchalant smile. "I'm just practicing for when I'm old as dirt-like thirty-and I need to lie about my age."
Damien stopped and turned to face me. "Okayyyy." He dragged the word out. "We all know that thirty-year-old vamps still look roughly twenty and definitely hot. Actually one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old vamps still look roughly twenty and definitely hot. So the whole lying about your age issue is a nonissue. What's really going on with you?"
While I hesitated, trying to figure out what I should or could say to Damien, he raised one neatly plucked brow and, in his best schoolteacher voice, said, "You know how sensitive my people are to emotions, so you may as well just give up and tell me the truth."
I sighed again. "You gays are freakishly intuitive."
"That's us: homos-the few, the proud, the hypersensitive."
"Isn't homo a derogatory term?"
"Not if it's used by a homo. By the by, you're stalling and it's so not working for you." He actually put his hand on his hip and tapped his foot.
I smiled at him, but knew that the expression didn't reach my eyes. With an intensity that surprised me, I suddenly, desperately wanted to tell Damien the truth.
"I miss Stevie Rae," I blurted before I could stop my mouth. He didn't hesitate. "I know." His eyes looked suspiciously damp.
And that was it. Like a dam had broken open inside me the words came spilling out. "She should be here!
She'd be running around like a crazy woman putting up birthday decorations and probably baking a cake all by herself."
"A really awful cake," Damien said with a little sniffle.
"Yeah, but it'd be one of her mama's favorite recipes" I gave my best exaggerated Okie twang as I mimicked Stevie Rae's countrified voice, which made me smile through my own tears, and I thought how weird it was that now that I was letting Damien see how upset I really felt-and why I felt that way-my smile actually reached my eyes.
"And the Twins and I would have been pissed because she would have insisted we all wear those pointed birthday hats with the elastic string that pinches your chin." He shuddered in not-so-pretended horror. "God, they're so unattractive."
I laughed and felt a little of the tightness in my chest begin to loosen. "There's just something about Stevie Rae that makes me feel good." I didn't realize that I'd used the present tense until Damien's teary smile faltered.
"Yeah, she was great," he said, with an extra emphasis on the was while he looked at me like he was worried about my sanity.
If only he knew the whole truth. If only I could tell him.
But I couldn't. If I did it would get either Stevie Rae or me, or both of us, killed. For good this time. So instead I grabbed my obviously worried friend's arm and started pulling him toward the stairs that would lead