Fat Vampire by Adam Rex Page B

like Italian food.”
    â€œShut up!”
    â€œYou don’t anymore!” Jay rushed to add. “But you did back then. Especially during PE. It was like you sweated garlic.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me? Shit!”
    A fresh breeze ruffled the trees. A dead leaf caught in the hair of Jay’s heavy head.
    â€œI don’t think anybody means anything by it anymore,” he said. “It’s just something to call you. Cat isn’t being mean. She’s nice. Stuart calls you Meatball, but you guys are still friends, right? And Adam? He wasn’t even in sixth grade with us. He’s a senior.”
    â€œ Adam ,” Doug snarled. “That guy is completely full of shit. I saw him in Planet Comix over the summer. Twice. You were with me one of the times, for the McFadden signing.”
    â€œYeah. I guess he doesn’t like admitting he reads comics.”
    â€œI guess he doesn’t like admitting a lot of things. You ever notice how he’s nicer to us when we’re away from school? But even then he’s still looking over his shoulder like the girls’ volleyball team is gonna jump out from behind a tree.”
    Jay shrugged.
    â€œLook, never mind,” said Doug. “Just…what’s next.”
    Jay looked at his list. “Holy water. But I couldn’t get any.”
    â€œAnd after that?”
    â€œUm…here. Eat this mustard.”

16
SECRET VAMPIRE SHIT
    A T FIVE TO MIDNIGHT the boys approached the gate of the Hawthorne for the second time.
    â€œI’m going to get in trouble for staying out this late,” said Jay.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œI’m sorry about the garlic thing.”
    â€œI know.”
    They unloaded Doug’s bike from the trunk and tucked it behind a hedge.
    â€œI have my phone. I’ll call you if…something happens.” Doug thought this sounded stupid as soon as he said it. Of course “something” was going to happen—he was going towalk into a house full of vampires. The thought that this alone was not necessarily going to be the lead story of the evening made him suddenly cold. He marched quickly from the car before Jay could offer any words of encouragement. His feet were damp.
    The gravel driveway looped like a racetrack around spare ornamental shrubbery and an expanse of lawn so large and plain that it seemed designed to testify to how much land this woman could waste. Doug had rarely seen so much grass in one place without a soccer net at each end.
    The home of Signora Polidori was huge, redbrick, and brightly shuttered, more blandly Colonial than Doug would have expected. No gargoyles. No severe, Gothic arches. No bat-shaped door knocker. He supposed that last one would have been a little on the nose, actually.
    He rang a perfectly ordinary doorbell, and a few moments later the door opened onto the crepe paper face of the man from the drainpipe.
    â€œYou honor this house with your presence, dark master,” he said, stepping aside to admit Doug. “Truly it has stood patiently these lonely centuries only that it could one day receive such an exalted visitant into its homely blah, blah, etcetera.”
    Doug blinked as he walked into the hall. He had no idea how to talk to this person.
    The interior of the house was more like it. The foyer was aglow with candlelight and clad in marble and bronze. There was a grand curving staircase of the sort that promisedmajestic introductions. In the movies a staircase like this could only exist to provide a beautiful woman with a decent way to enter a room. This was no movie, however, and the banister was rubbed dull and dry. The center of each velvet step was bald like an old dog. But the beautiful woman was a beautiful woman.
    She looked like a college girl but carried herself down the stairs with the air of a woman three times her age. For all he knew, Doug realized, she was a woman three times her age. Thirty, even. It