A death sentence over one's head is a good way to learn to appreciate the people around you. When I awoke the next day, much earlier than usual due to the way our night was abruptly cut off, I found my mother in the kitchen, making breakfast.

"You're up early," she said without turning around. "I was beginning to think you were turning into one of those vampires you're always reading about."

My arms wrapped around her stomach, my face pressing into her back.

Remember how I said I never felt like hugging anyone?

My mother was as surprised as I was. Because I wasn't merely hugging her, I was crying, too.

"Amy, honey, what's wrong?" Somehow, despite my grip on her, my mother managed to turn around so she could stroke my hair. "Did something happen? Did that boy do something to you?"

I took a deep breath and pushed myself away, tried to compose myself. "Wh-what boy?" I wiped at the moisture under my eyes.

"Don't think I don't know," my mother said, a little smile on her mouth. "The one you met at the art museum? The one who's been making you hum to yourself in the mornings."

I cringed. Humming?

Then her mouth got serious. "Did he break up with you?"

"No, no, nothing like that." I laughed a little, sniffing back all the mucus that threatened to run out of my nose. "No, he didn't break up with me."

"Did he do something else to you?"

"No! Nothing. He didn't do anything. I don't know why I'm crying."

My mother looked at me skeptically. "Are you pregnant?"

"No!"

"All right..." She turned back to the stove. "Do you want an omelet, then?"

I spent a good part of the day with my mother, agreeing to go shopping with her. We wandered around the mall, sipping Starbucks coffees, talking about life. Mostly about her life. I tried to avoid the subject of my own life, letting her know a few details about Lane, "the boy I've been dating." Since I didn't know the answers to most of her questions (Have you met his parents? Where does he want to go to college?), it wasn't very hard.

I even let my mother drag me into a department store, where she went through the racks of formal wear. "Are you going to a wedding or something?" I asked, wincing at a bright pink sequined number.

"I was thinking more for a junior prom," she said, thrusting the dress at me.

"Mom! That's, like, a year away! I don't think Lane and I are that serious." When my mother's face fell, I added, "Besides, I don't think pink is my color."

When we got home, I decided to call Veronica. My mother went into her room to get ready to go out for dinner and drinks with some work friends.

"Hello?" She sounded like she had been asleep all this time.

"Hey, do you want to hang out?"

"Now?"

"Yeah. Or in a little while, if you need to get ready. I think we should talk."

"Talk? About what?"

I glanced at my mother, who was in her room across the hall, within listening distance. "You know. What happened last night."

Veronica sighed. "I don't really see what we need to talk about, but fine. Just let me take a shower and I'll come over. Is your mom going to be there?"

"No, she's going out."

"Good."

"My mom's probably going to order pizza, so—"

The dial tone buzzed in my ear.

I stared at the dead phone in my hand. Was Veronica mad at me? Or did she really not want pizza?

"So you're having problems with Veronica?" my mother asked from the doorway.

"No," I answered quickly, too quickly. "At least, I didn't think so. She just hung up on me."

My mother spoke some words of wisdom: "Sometimes boys can make life very complicated."

She probably didn't even know how wise those words were. Ever since Lane had come into our lives, the relationship between me and Veronica hadn't been the same.

I figured it would take Veronica about an hour to get ready and get to my house. When my mom left at about six, I took her twenty dollar bill and endured a hug good-bye and told her Veronica would be here any minute. An hour later, my stomach was beyond growling—it felt like it was starting to eat itself. I called the Middlebury House of Pizza and ordered a medium pepperoni. Surely Veronica would arrive soon.

By the time Veronica knocked on my door, it was after eight o'clock and I was sitting in front of the television, watching some makeover show and knitting furiously. "Come in!" I yelled. Why was Veronica knocking, anyway? She hadn't knocked on my door in years. My mother liked when people felt welcome enough to let themselves in and starting digging through our refrigerator.

Surely it was a sign that things with Veronica were worse than I thought.

"Making another hat?" she said, falling into the armchair. She was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, even though the sun had already started to set. "You know, when you're a vampire you won't need hats. Ever."

"So you've already made your decision?"

"What decision?" She laughed. I heard a note of derision in it.

"You're not at all... nervous? Or afraid?"

"Afraid of what? Honestly, Amy, sometimes I don't get you."

I was quiet for a while, until the sound of the reality show in the background and the clacking of my knitting needles started to irritate me.

"Do you want some pizza? It's cold."

"No. I fed before I came here."

At the use of this term I found myself studying my best friend. "You fed?" Veronica's face was bare of her usual layer of white powder, and her cheeks were flushed.

"Yes. You know, I had my dinner?"

I stared at her, and she stared at me. She was daring me.

"Are you a vampire?" I asked her directly.

Instead of an answer, she laughed. "Don't be silly, Amy."

"Silly? You think last night was silly?" The anger in my voice had risen, and this seems to cause a reaction in her.

"I barely remember last night, Amy," Veronica snapped. "I was drunk out of my mind, as I usually am when we go out to the cemetery. I don't even remember how I got home."

"Oh, so you're an alcoholic, then? Do I need to plan an intervention?"

"I don't know what I am!" Veronica's voice trembled. "But you need to get your head straight about what's real and what isn't. Vampires aren't real. That was just a stupid game we played."

"You never said it was stupid before," I said quietly.

"Well, it's stupid now." The emotion I'd detected a moment earlier had disappeared from her voice.

"And Lane? You don't think he's a vampire anymore?"

"Get it through your head! It was just a game!"

I didn't know what else to say.

Veronica snatched up the remote and started flipping through the channels as I focused on my knitting. When she settled on a channel playing Resident Evil, I threw down my knitting and went upstairs.

I couldn't help but take it personally when Veronica called the vampire game stupid. After all, wasn't it me who started it? I was the one who had given Veronica my copy of Twilight, and supplied her with my favorite vampire novels after that. I was the one who started recording all of our stories, who came up with names for our characters. Did she think I was stupid, and childish?

Upstairs I knelt in front of my bookcase and touched the tooled leather spines of our stories. I know they aren't more than fan fiction, for the most part, but I was still proud of them. Ever since fourth grade, when I wrote my first story not part of a school assignment, I knew I wanted to be an author. I wanted to walk into a library or a bookstore and see all my books in a neat row, my name on the spine. Back then I aspired to write a series of ghost stories or mysteries, like Nancy Drew or the Boxcar Children. Later I'd walk into a Barnes & Noble for the newest book by L.A. Banks or Charlaine Harris and imagine my name on those thick black spines, my name underneath those magical words: "New York Times Bestselling Author." I even had a binder full of the covers I had created, in anticipation that one day I would be "New York Times Bestselling Author Amy Vaughn." I had painted the cover art and scanned it in, or took photographs of us in the cemetery dressed as our characters and digitally altered them. I pulled out this binder now and flipped through those pages. No, they didn't look quite as good as a real book cover. But they represented something to me. Friendship, maybe. How much fun pretending had been.

A future.

"I'm sorry," Veronica said from behind me.

Somehow I wasn't surprised that she walked as silently as Lane or Malakhi. I had been so deep in thought that I might not have heard her anyway.

"I used to like playing too," she continued when I didn't answer her. "But it's gotten out of control. We need to stop."

"Okay," I whispered.

The cover I had stopped on was a portrait of Veronica. She had wanted to look like the covers of her vampire romance novels, and so she had put on a black corset and a miniskirt and high black boots, and I had photographed her from behind, the line of laces following her spine as she turned her head back to face the camera with a wicked grin on her face. I had digitally drawn in a vampire bite on her neck and a trickle of blood. The similarity of our former games and the current situation was not lost on me.

When I turned around, Veronica was gone.