Jane Jones Read Online Free Page B

place. I wasn’t really taking into account the fact that after being in high school for decades on end, I had never really associated with anyone who I would want to talk to outside of school. Needless to say, I was surprised when I read, “Eli Matthews has added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know Eli Matthews in order for you to be friends.” Eli Matthews was a kid whose name I thought I recognized from my American history class. Maybe. We might have had some other classes together too, but I wasn’t sure. If he was who I wasn’t 100 percent certain he was, he wasn’t exactly noteworthy. Still, he had noticed me, I guess. My hand hovered over my laptop. After the evening’s events I wasn’t sure how smart it was to establish a relationship with someone at school, no matter how virtual or casual it was. I didn’t click Confirm, but I didn’t click Ignore or Delete either. The message would be there when I decided what I should do.
    The last message was a news alert I had set up for any article or blog post containing the words
vampire
and
cure.
I had originally set it up with just
vampire
, but thanks to certain movies starring certain sexy teen actors, my in-box was flooded. Once I refined my search to include the word
cure
, the notifications practically dried up. When I did get a hit, it was usually an article in which the two words had nothing to do with each other in context. Occasionally, I’d get a link to some crazy vamp fan fiction. I wasn’t expecting much when I clicked on the email or when I clicked on the link contained within. Actually, the website I was taken to didn’t say much itself, yet what it did say nearly knocked me off my chair. The headline simply said, “Local Researcher Claims Vampires Exist, and He’s Found a Cure for Their Condition.”

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    L OCAL R ESEARCHER C LAIMS V AMPIRES E XIST , AND H E’S F OUND A C URE FOR T HEIR C ONDITION
    I scanned the article for what had to be the zillionth time since Friday night. Of course, I’d printed it out right away so I could fold it up and hide it from my parents. Then I made sure to delete the email and erase my browser history. I had to do it. Like I said, my mom’s really into Internet safety, so I’m pretty sure that while I’m at school she looks at all the websites I’ve been on to see if I’m downloading naked pictures or something. Kind of bizarre considering I’m technically in my early nineties.
    In any case, my mom’s reaction to finding porn on my computer would pale in comparison to what she’d do if she found out that I was researching potential cures for vampirism. It wasn’t that my family didn’t dream of beingcured. Lots of vampires do. It’s just that we’d heard the stories of other vampires who’d attempted treatments and the results had been bad. And by bad, I mean fatal. And by fatal, I mean that we’d heard about a few of our kind who went from being undead to totes dead. Whether or not these stories were true is anybody’s guess. But it isn’t like pharmaceutical companies are spending research money testing drugs to cure a condition most mortals aren’t even aware is real. Any vampire who considers a cure must also consider that he’s taking his life, such as it is, into his own cold, dead hands. My parents weren’t too big on stuff like that.
    By now, my printout of the article was all smudged and tattered from my furtively reading it every chance I got over the weekend. Now that I was at school, sitting on the floor in front of my locker, I felt fairly safe just reading it out in the open. When I say “safe,” I mean nobody here was interested in me or what I was doing or what I was reading.
    “Hey, Jane.”
    I didn’t even have to raise my eyes to know that Timothy Hunt was standing above me. After finally hearing his husky voice, I would never again fail to recognize it. Plus, while I was lying on the ground the night we met, I memorized his shoes. If I had a