Blue Bloods (12 page)

Schuyler wondered if she should mention it to her grand mother. She had kept the stranger’s visits a secret, worried that Cordelia would do something to keep the stranger away somehow.

She didn’t think Cordelia would approve of a strange man visiting her daughter.

She turned the page. “Kathryn Elizabeth DeMenil to Nicholas James Hope the Third.” She glanced at her mother’s placid face. Nothing. Not even a wrinkle on her cheek. A ghost of a smile.

Schuyler took her mother’s cold hand in hers and stroked it. Suddenly, tears rolled silently down her cheeks. It had been a long time since the sight of her mother moved her to tears. But now Schuyler wept openly. The man she’d seen through the glass had been crying as well. The quiet room was filled with a deep piercing grief, and Schuyler wept with out abandon for all that she had lost.

EIGHTEEN

Monday at school, Oliver gave Schuyler the cold shoulder. He sat next to Dylan in the cafeteria and didn’t save Schuyler a seat. She waved to the two of them, but only Dylan waved back.

Schuyler ate her sandwich in the library—but the bread tasted stale in her mouth, dry and mealy, and she quickly lost her appetite. It didn’t help that even after dancing together on Saturday night, Jack Force was back to acting like nothing ever happened. He sat with his friends, hung out with his sister, and basically acted like his old self. The one who didn’t know her, and it hurt.

When school let out, she saw Oliver by the lockers laugh ing at something Dylan was saying.

Dylan gave her a sympa thetic glance. “Catch you later, man,” Dylan said, patting Oliver on the back. “Later, Sky.”

“Bye, Dylan,” she said. The three of them—she, Bliss, and Dylan, had gone to get slices at Sofia Fabulous Pizza after the dance. They had looked for Oliver, but he had already left. He would probably never forgive them for doing something without him. More specifically, he would never forgive her. She knew him well enough to understand she had committed a grave betrayal.

She was supposed to have followed Oliver up the stairs, but had danced with Jack Force instead.

Now he would punish her by taking away his friend ship. A friendship she depended on like the sun.

“Hey, Ollie,” she said.

Oliver didn’t reply. He continued to put his books in his messenger bag without looking at her.

“Ollie, c’mon,” she pleaded.

“What?” He shrugged as if he just realized she was standing there.

“What do you mean `what’? You know what,” she said, eyes flashing. Part of her was infuriated with his poor- meact all the time. Like she wasn’t even allowed to have any other friends? What kind of friend was that? “You didn’t call me all weekend. I thought we were going to go see that movie.”

Oliver frowned. “Were we? I don’t remember making plans. But then, you know, some people seem to change their plans without telling you about them.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Nothing.”He shrugged.

“Are you mad at me because of Jack Force?” she demanded. “Because that is really, really, très lame.”

“Do you like, like him or something?” Oliver asked, a stricken look on his face. “That jock loser?”

“He’s not a loser!” Schuyler argued. It amazed her how passionately she suddenly felt about Jack Force.

Oliver scowled. He pushed back his cowlick impatiently. “Fine. If that’s how you feel, Pod Person.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers was one of their favorite films. In the movie, con formist aliens replaced all the interesting people. Pod People was what they called their automaton-like peers, who fell into lock step with everything around them: Marc Jacobs hand bags! Japanese-straightened hair! Jack Force!

Schuyler felt guilty of something she couldn’t even understand. Was it so terrible of her to think Jack Force was a nice person? Okay, so he was a BMOC, the biggest—she had to admit—and yes, okay, so she used to curl her lip at all the Jack Force groupies at school who thought he walked on water. It was just so predictable to like Jack Force. He was smart, handsome, and athletic; he did everything effortlessly. But just because she’d decided to stop disliking him didn’t make her some kind of brainless robot did it? Did it? It both ered her that she couldn’t decide.

“You’re just jealous,” she accused.

“Of what?”Oliver’s eyes widened, and his face paled.

“I don’t know, but you are.” She flailed, shrugging her shoulders in frustration. It was always a green-eyed monster issue, wasn’t it? She assumed that at some level, Oliver wished he were more like Jack. Adored. Like Jack.

“Right,” he said sarcastically. “I’m jealous of his ability to chase a ball with a stick,” he sneered.

“Ollie, don’t be like that. Please? I really want to talk to you about this, but I have a meeting right now—for The Committee and I …”

“You got into The Committee?” Oliver asked incredu lously. “You?” He looked as if he’d never heard anything so ridiculous in his life.

Was it so far-fetched? Schuyler reddened. So maybe she was nobody, but her family used to be somebodies , and wasn’t that what the stupid thing was all about?

But even though she hated to admit it—he had a point. She herself had been mystified as to why she would be cho sen for such an honor, although there was that satisfied look on her grandmother’s face again—when she’d received the thick white envelope the other afternoon.

Cordelia had given her the same appraising glance as when the marks on her arms first appeared.

As if she were seeing her granddaugh ter for the first time. As if she were proud of her.

She hadn’t even mentioned it to Oliver, since it was obvi ous he hadn’t gotten one, because he would never keep something like that from her. It struck her as odd that he wasn’t chosen to be in The Committee, since his family owned half of the Upper East Side and all of Dutchess County .

“Yeah, funny ha-ha, right?” she said.

His face tightened. The scowl came back. He shook his head. “And you didn’t tell me?” he said.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

She watched him walk down the hall, away from her. Each step he took seemed to illustrate the huge gulf that now separated the two of them. He was her best friend. The per son she trusted more than anyone in the world. How could he hold joining some dumb social group against her?

But she knew why he was angry. Up until now, they had done every thing together. But she was invited to The Committee and he was not. Their paths had suddenly diverged. Schuyler thought it was all so silly. She would go to one meeting, just because her grandmother wanted her to, and then drop out. There was certainly nothing about The Committee that was of any interest to her at all.

NINETEEN

It was so funny to see how scared the fresh blood looked. Mimi remembered sitting in that same room last year, thinking they would all start planning the yearly Four Hundred Ball (Theme?

Décor? Invites?) and that would be the end of it. Of course, Jack had known something was up, nothing really got past her brother—and apparently, some of them had more of an idea about what was happen ing to them than others.

Mimi had had the flashbacks too—the memories that would creep up on her without warning.

Like the time she’d been inMartha’s Vineyard , and instead of being outside the Black Dog, she was outside a farmhouse, wearing some hideous gingham dress—believe it or not. Or the time she was taking her French test and she hadn’t studied at all but she aced it, finding that she was suddenly fluent in the lan guage.

She smiled to herself at the memory, and watched as sev eral members of the Senior Committee, her mother among them, entered the room, their Blahnik heels clicking softly on the rose marble floor. There was a hush. The well-coifed women nodded to one another and waved gaily to their children.

The Jefferson Room was the front entry room to the Flood mansion, in the style of Monticello , a tribute to the third president. There was a high, domed cathedral ceiling, several Gainsborough portraits, and in the middle a large round table, where the new members were sitting, looking alternately bored or scared. Mimi didn’t recognize all of them, as some were from other schools.

God, those Nightingale uniforms were ugly, she thought. The rest of the members of the Junior Committee were sitting on the study desks, or leaning on the windows, or standing with their arms folded, watching silently. She noticed that for once, her brother Jack had deigned to grace them with his presence.

So the Wardens had thought to include the Van Alen girl after all. That was odd. Mimi had no memory of her from her past, not even from Plymouth . She had to have been there somewhere; Mimi just had to dig deeper into her sub conscious. When Mimi looked around the room, she could see glimmerings of who everyone else used to be. Katie Sheridan, for instance, had always been a friend—they had “come out” during the 1850 deb season together, and Lissy Harris had been an attendant at her wedding in Newport later that year. But that wasn’t the case with Schuyler.

As for Jack, well, they had been together for longer than eternity. His was the only face she ever saw constantly, wait ing for her in every incarnation of her past. If Mimi prac ticed her meditations, perhaps she would be able to access the deepest recesses of her history, back to their creation, inEgypt before the floods.

Mrs. Priscilla DuPont, a regular presence in the city’s society pages, and the financial and social force behind many of New York ‘s most august cultural institutions, stepped forward. Like the other women behind her, she was preter naturally slim, with a soft, buttery bob that framed her line-less face. She cut a severe figure in her sharp black Carolina Herrera suit. As committee chair and Chief Warden, she called the meeting to order.

“Welcome to the first meeting of the New York Blood Bank Committee of the season,” she said, smiling graciously. “We are very proud to have all of you here.”

Mimi zoned out for a bit, barely listening to the standard lecture concerning civil duty and noblesse oblige, enumerat ing the many services the committee provided their commu nity. The yearly ball, for instance, raised a tremendous amount of money for blood research programs, which was dedicated to the eradication of blood-borne diseases like AIDS and hemophilia. The Committee had founded hospi tals and research institutions, and had been instrumental in funding stem-cell research and other advances in medicine.

Then, after the standard spiel, Mrs. DuPont looked intently at the ten young people seated at the table.

“But helping others is not all that The Committee does.” There was an expectant silence.

Mrs. DuPont looked at each student intently before speaking. “You have been gathered here today because you are very special.” Her voice had a melodious, cultured qual ity, soothing and patrician at the same time.

Mimi saw Bliss Llewellyn look uncomfortable. She had given Bliss grief about Dylan, but it was her funeral. Bliss had even threatened to skip the meeting, but somehow Mimi had helped to change her mind.

“Some of you might have noticed certain changes in your bodies. How many have started to see the blue marks on your arms?” she asked.

There was a smattering of hands, a few arms glowing with the sapphire light shining through their skin.

She nodded. “Good. That is the blood beginning to manifest.”

Mimi remembered how freaked out she’d been when her marks first appeared. They’d formed an intricate, almost paisley-like pattern up and down from her shoulder to her wrist. Jack had shown her his, and it was another of those things that looked like a coincidence but weren’t really—if they held up their arms next to each other’s, the patterns matched perfectly.

The blood marks were a map of their personal histories—it was the blood asserting itself; the Sangre Azul , which marked them as their kind, Mrs. DuPont informed them.

“Some of you find that you are suddenly able to do things very well. Have you noticed that you are excelling in tests you have not studied for? That your memory has become like a photographic snapshot?”

There was more nodding, and some mumbling.

“Has anyone noticed that occasionally, time either slips away or becomes very slow?”

Mimi nodded. That was part of it—the memories that pulled you from the present to the past.

You would be walking down a street, minding your own business, and then suddenly you were walking down the same street, but in a totally different time. It was like watching some really cool movie, Mimi thought, except you were starring in it.

“Do you find that you can eat everything and still not gain an ounce?”

There was giggling from some of the girls. A good metabolism, that’s what the Red Bloods thought. Mimi had to giggle herself. As if anyone could eat as many cupcakes with whipped cream frosting as they wanted and still be as thin as she was. It was her favorite part of being a Blue Blood. One of the lucky ones. The chosen ones.

“The taste of cooked meat has become unbearable. You have begun to crave things that are raw, bloody.”

There were some uncomfortable looks around the table. Bliss looked especially pale. Mimi wondered if anyone had ever experienced what she had—the day she’d devoured several raw, ribeye steaks all by herself ; stuffing her face until the blood dripped down her chin and she looked like a men tal patient. From the looks around the table, Mimi would bet that had happened to more than a few.

“One last question: how many of you have gotten pets in the last year? Dogs, more specifically?”

Everyone raised their hand. Mimi thought of how she’d found her chow, Pookie , on the beach in the Hamptons one day, and how her brother had gotten Patch on the same evening. Their father had been so proud.

“How many of them are bloodhounds?”

Only Schuyler raised her hand. Mimi grimaced. Her brother Jack had merited a bloodhound too—top level. That was annoying.

“We are here to tell you, you are not to worry. All the things you are experiencing are normal.

This is because, like me, like your friends and classmates sitting behind you, like your parents, grandparents, siblings, and relatives, you are part of a long and noble tradition of the Four Hundred.”