My stomach was in giant knots, and they only seemed to tighten as the seconds passed.

I’d been sitting on my bed for the past couple of hours, trying to wrap my brain around what I’d just learned tonight.

Nolan had been hiding the fact that he was a vampire the whole time we’d been hanging out. He hadn’t even wanted to tell me that he was one. If I’d never chanced upon him changing from his bat form into his human form, I doubted that he would have ever told me on his own accord.

I still couldn’t believe it. He’d lied about going to the forest once a week because he needed to feed.

Wait, didn’t that mean that I basically took away his chance to eat every time I accompanied him into the forest?

Groaning, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling.

I couldn’t believe all the signs I’d missed the past several months.

Now that I was looking back at them, they were all so glaringly obvious.

The first time I flashed the light into his eyes in the darkroom, I’d thought his reaction was overkill. I had never seen anyone react like that before, and I couldn’t get why he was being so melodramatic about it.

The first time he came to gym, it was when it was held at the indoor pool. Why hadn’t I noticed something off about that?

Then again, why would it ever have occurred to me that he could be a vampire?

Letting out my billionth sigh for tonight, I grabbed Georgie and squeezed his little paws.

“What am I going to do, Georgie?” I asked him, swinging him around by the arms. “What should I do?”

Was there anything to do?

Nolan was still my friend, after all. It wasn’t as if I made the discovery when he tried to eat me or something.

I checked my phone for the time again.

It was two in the morning, and my brain was going into overdrive. I couldn’t believe how long I’d been lying here, just trying to gather my thoughts.

Despite technically knowing that he was a vampire, I still couldn’t believe it.

Had he always been one? If he hadn’t, when did he become one?

Was he the kind that lived forever?

I’d seen him eat human food several times now that he was joining us for lunch almost every day, so what did he mean when he said that he couldn’t eat regular food?

The questions swarmed around in my brain, making sleep an impossible task. Knowing Nolan, I likely wasn’t going to get the answers to most—if not any—of them.

The thought of going to class tomorrow morning filled me with dread.

I really hoped he wouldn’t avoid me.

Then again, would I even be able to face him normally?

Heaving another large sigh, I turned around and closed my eyes.

I’d just have to deal with it tomorrow.

---

Nolan was already at his desk when I entered the classroom in the morning.

I stared down at his sleeping form.

He looked asleep, but maybe he was simply pretending so that he wouldn’t have to talk to me.

When I sat down beside him, he didn’t seem to move a muscle.

He didn’t wake up until the end of the lesson, and then when he did, it was to walk right out of the room.

I knew it. Somehow, I already knew that he was going to avoid me.

Miserably, I tossed my things into my backpack and waited for Ashley to walk to my desk.

“Nolan left pretty fast,” she said, glancing at the classroom door. “He’s not walking with us today?”

“I guess not.” I shrugged.

She squinted at me. “Are you okay, Chels?”

“Not really.”

We strode into the hallway.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Did you guys have a fight?”

I looked down at my shoes as we walked. “No, not really.”

It’s just that I found out he’s a vampire, and although he didn’t explicitly tell me not to tell anyone, I’m pretty sure it’s a secret that I’m not supposed to share. Yeah, like I could say that.

I had a feeling that if I ever told anyone about this, Nolan would never trust me again. He didn’t even want me to know, and I was the closest person to him in school.

“Really? He didn’t say anything to you before he left,” Ashley said, looking concerned. “I haven’t seen him ignore you like that for such a long time.”

“Maybe we did sort of have a fight, except not really,” I said instead.

Her bemused frown was almost amusing, but I was too busy sighing again to appreciate it. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Me neither.”

Ashley scowled. “Did he do something to upset you? You can tell me, you know.”

“I know I can,” I said reassuringly. “Thanks, Ash. You’re the best. But seriously, it’s nothing like that.”

“What is it like, then?” she said, the scowl still resting on her face. “If you aren’t talking to each other, something must have happened.”

Tipping my head back, I groaned. “Please, Ash! I’m barely processing everything as it is.”

She paused. “Processing what? What are you trying to process?”

Great, I was overthinking so much, my thoughts were leaking out.

“Can we talk about this later?” I asked. Or maybe never? “Sorry, but I have a really bad headache.”

I wasn’t lying, either. The merciless pain thumped about shamelessly at the back of my head. I imagined it holding a baseball bat, whacking away at whichever part of my brain it could reach.

Right now, I didn’t have the brain capacity to figure out how to explain things to Ashley without revealing Nolan’s secret.

Ashley shook her head. “Fine, if you’re sure you really don’t want to talk about it.”

Despite her words, the expression on her face told me that this wasn’t going to be the end of it.

“I’m sure,” I said.

When lunch period came around, I didn’t even get a chance to talk to him—Nolan bolted from his chair and was out of the room before I could muster the courage to say ‘hi’.

I was afraid to greet him, because I didn’t think I could take it if he completely ignored me.

Besides, now that I knew he didn’t actually eat regular food, the idea of asking him to join us didn’t make much sense. Sure, he could have just joined us anyway for the company, but I wasn’t sure he wanted to be in my presence anymore.

He was back to acting like I didn’t exist.

As I got up from my own chair and trudged to the classroom door, I kind of wanted to cry.

---

“Where’s Nolan?” Melissa said, spearing through several peas with her fork. “Is he eating lunch with us today?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ashley raising her head to look at me, but I staunchly stared at the sandwich in my hands.

“No,” I said. “He’s sleeping.”

That was probably true. He’d been napping through all of the lessons today, and he didn’t even stir when Mr. Jameson forced him awake with a textbook to the head. There was no question about it—he was most definitely off somewhere sleeping the lunch period away.

“Huh,” Derek said. “He must be tired.”

I didn’t know what to say in reply, so I said nothing.

I was fairly certain that they would start asking questions when Nolan didn’t turn up at our table for lunch tomorrow, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I had enough things to worry about, like figuring out how to get him to stop avoiding me.

First, however, I needed to sort out my own emotions.

Approaching him without knowing what I wanted out of the interaction probably wouldn’t be the best idea, and I genuinely had no clue what I wanted at this point.

---

Nolan didn’t reply to a single one of my texts.

Not that any of them were meaningful, anyway. Since I couldn’t think of how to start a conversation, they were all basically variations of ‘hey’ and other similar greetings. I couldn’t approach the hard topics over text, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to in the first place.

My eyes were getting dry from staring so intently at my phone screen, but still, I couldn’t pull my gaze away. Was he ever going to reply me? Was our friendship over? If that were the case, I wished I’d never seen him in his bat form.

Finally, I typed, ‘Are you going to ignore me forever?’

My heart dropped when I pressed the ‘send’ button without allowing myself to overthink it.

Antsy from having sent that message and awaiting his reply, I paced about in my room, trying to calm my heart down. It was tenacious about trying to escape from my chest, and the unprecedented pain that kept twisting through it was leaving me with almost as much shock as learning that Nolan was a vampire had.

The thought that he’d continue avoiding me this way for the foreseeable future drove the pangs even deeper.

Was this what it was like to really like someone? No wonder characters were frequently so melodramatic about it in romantic movies and novels, if the pain was this bewilderingly sharp.

My mind was an absolute mess—all I could keep thinking about was that I liked Nolan, but he was a vampire, and he’d been hiding it from me the whole time, and I didn’t know what else he was hiding, but I still liked him and just picturing his face made my chest hurt, and I wanted to stop liking him, but I wanted to hold onto these feelings because they felt so real and clear and piercing, but it wasn’t like it mattered now he wasn’t even talking to me or staying awake long enough for me to try to speak to him, and he was a vampire, and I didn’t even know what kind of vampire he was, like the kind that lived forever, and was he even actually my age, and how exactly was I going to handle this matter—

With my foot lifted in the air about to take the next step forward, I forced myself to stop moving.

At the increasingly rapid pace I was going, my nausea was only getting worse. I needed to quit thinking before both my heart and brain imploded.

Forcing myself to sit at my desk, I propped my chin up on the back of my hand and stared at my phone. It wasn’t like I could currently focus on anything else, anyway. My mind would keep drifting back to his potential reply.

I remained stubbornly seated in my chair until my eyes started closing on their own, but Nolan never responded.