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came back early, too, and they don’t have any personal boundaries. “Did I tell you Trixie got her ears pierced this summer? She wears big noisy bells right in the pointy parts.”
    Sometimes I think Penny’s Trixie diatribes are borderline speciesist. I tell her so.
    â€œEasy for you to say,” she says, all stretched out on Baz’s bed again. “You don’t live with a pixie.”
    â€œI live with a vampire!” I argue.
    â€œUnconfirmed.”
    â€œAre you saying you don’t think Baz is a vampire?”
    â€œI know he’s a vampire,” she says. “But it’s still unconfirmed. We’ve never actually seen him drink blood.”
    I’m sitting on the window ledge and leaning out a bit over the moat, holding on to the latch of the swung-open pane. I scoff: “We’ve seen him covered in blood. We’ve found piles of shrivelled-up rats with fang marks down in the Catacombs.… I’ve told you that his cheeks get really full when he has a nightmare? Like his mouth is filling up with extra teeth?”
    â€œCircumstantial evidence,” Penny says. “And I still don’t know why you’d creep up on a vampire who has night terrors.”
    â€œI live with him! I have to keep my wits about me.”
    She rolls her eyes. “Baz’ll never hurt you in your room.”
    She’s right. He can’t. Our rooms are spelled against betrayal—the Roommate’s Anathema. If Baz does anything to physically hurt me inside our room, he’ll be cast out of the school. Agatha’s dad, Dr. Wellbelove, says it happened once when he was in school. Some kid punched his roommate, then got sucked out through a window and landed outside the school gate. It wouldn’t open for him again ever.
    You get warnings when you’re young: For the first two years, if you try to hit or hurt your roommate, your hands go stiff and cold. I threw a book at Baz once in our first year, and it took three days for my hand to thaw out.
    Baz has never violated the Anathema. Not even when we were kids.
    â€œWho knows what he’s capable of in his sleep,” I say.
    â€œYou do,” Penny says, “as much as you watch him.”
    â€œI live with a dark creature—I’m right to be paranoid!”
    â€œI’d trade my pixie for your vampire any day of the week. There’s no anathema to keep someone from being lethally irritating.”
    Penny and I go back to the dining hall to get dinner—baked sweet potatoes and sausages and hard white rolls—then bring it all back to my room. We never get to hang out like this when Baz is around. He’d turn Penny in.
    It feels like a party. Just the two of us, nothing to do. No one to hide from or fight. Penelope says it’ll be like this someday when we get a flat together.… But that’s not going to happen. She’s going to go to America as soon as the war is over. Maybe even before that.
    And I’ll get a place with Agatha.
    Agatha and I will work through whatever this is; we always do. We make sense together. We’ll probably get married after school—that’s when Agatha’s parents got married. I know she wants a place in the country.… I can’t afford anything like that, but she has money, and she’ll find a job that makes her happy. And her dad’ll help me find work if I ask him.
    It’s nice to think about that: living long enough to have to figure out what to do with myself.
    As soon as Penelope’s done with her dinner, she brushes off her hands. “Right,” she says.
    I groan. “Not yet.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘not yet’?”
    â€œI mean, not yet with the strategizing. We just got here. I’m still settling in.”
    She looks around the room. “What’s to settle, Simon? You already unpacked your two pairs of trackie bottoms.”
    â€œI’m enjoying the peace and