Had she ever seen him under fluorescent lights before?
Something about the lighting brought out the clean paleness of his skin, cast long shadows along his cheekbones, and fel without reflection into the black velvet of his hair and eyes. A couple of buttons on the col ar of his shirt were undone, and Elena found herself almost mesmerized by the subtle shifts of the long muscles in his neck and shoulders.
"What would a Vital Society be?" he asked suddenly, breaking her out of her reverie.
"What?" she asked, confused. "What are you talking about?"
Damon clicked the mouse and shifted the zoom, focusing this time on the notebook in her mother's lap. Her mother's hands - pretty hands, Elena noticed, prettier than her own, which had slightly crooked pinkies - were splayed over the open book, but between the fingers, Elena could read: Vit l Soci y
"I assume that's what it says," Damon said, shrugging.
"Since you're looking for something that starts with V. It could say something else of course. Vital Social y, maybe?
Was your mother a social queen bee like you?" Elena ignored the question. "The Vitale Society," she said slowly. "I always thought it was a myth."
"Leave the Vitale Society alone." The hiss came from behind them, and Elena whipped around.
The librarian seemed curiously impressive framed against the bookshelves despite her tennis shoes and pastel sweater set. Her hawklike face was tense and focused on Elena, her body tal and, Elena felt instinctively, threatening.
"What do you mean?" Elena asked. "Do you know something about them?"
Confronted by a direct question, the woman seemed to shrink from the almost menacing figure she had been a second before to an ordinary, slightly dithering old lady. "I don't know anything," she muttered, frowning. "Al I can say is that it's not safe to mess with the Vitales. Things happen around them. Even if you're careful." She started to wheel her book cart away.
"Wait!" Elena said, half rising. "What kind of things?" What had her parents been involved in? They wouldn't have done anything wrong, would they? Not Elena's parents. But the librarian only walked faster, the wheels of her cart squeaking as she rounded the corner into another aisle.
Damon gave a low laugh. "She won't tel you anything," he said, and Elena glared at him. "She doesn't know anything, or she's too scared to say what she does know."
"That's not helpful, Damon," Elena said tightly. She pressed her fingers against her temples. "What do we do now?"
"We look into the Vitale Society, of course," Damon said. Elena opened her mouth to object, and Damon shushed her, drawing one cool finger over her mouth. His touch was soft on her lips, and she half raised a hand toward them. "Don't worry about what a foolish old woman has to say," he told her. "But if we real y want to find out the secrets of this society of yours, we probably need to look somewhere other than the library."
He got to his feet and held out his hand. "Shal we?" he asked. Elena nodded and took his hand in hers. When it came to finding out secrets, to digging up what people wanted to keep concealed, she knew she could put her faith in Damon.
"Pick up, Zander," Bonnie muttered into the phone.
The ringing stopped, and a precise mechanical voice informed her that she was welcome to leave a message in the voice mailbox. Bonnie hung up. She had already left a couple of voicemails, and she didn't want Zander thinking she was any crazier or more clueless than he inevitably would when he saw his missed-cal list.
Bonnie was pretty sure she was going through the Five Stages of Being Ditched. She was almost done with Denial, where she was convinced something had happened to him, and was moving quickly into Anger.
Later, she knew, she would slide into Bargaining, Depression, and eventual y (she hoped) Acceptance.
Apparently her psych class was already coming in handy.
It had been days since he had abruptly run off, leaving her al alone in front of the music building. When she found out that a girl disappeared that same night, at first Bonnie was angry and scared for herself. Zander had left her alone.
What if Bonnie had been the one to vanish? Then she began to worry about Zander, to be afraid that he was in trouble. He seemed so sweet, and so into her, that it was almost impossible for her to believe Zander would just be avoiding her al of a sudden.
Wouldn't his friends have sounded the alarm if Zander was missing, though? And when she thought that, Bonnie realized that she didn't know how to contact any of those guys; she hadn't seen any of them around campus since that night.
Bonnie stared at her phone as fresh tendrils of worry grew and twisted inside her. Real y, she was having a very tough time moving on to Anger when she was stil not quite sure that Zander was safe.
The phone rang.
Zander. It was Zander.
Bonnie snatched up her phone. "Where have you been?" she demanded, her voice shaking.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
Bonnie was almost ready to hang up when Zander final y spoke. "I'm so sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to freak you out. Some family stuff came up, and I've had to be out of touch. I'm back now."
Bonnie knew that Elena or Meredith would have said something pithy and cutting here, something to let Zander know exactly how little they appreciated being forgotten about, but she couldn't bring herself to. Zander sounded rough and tired, and there was a break in his voice when he said he was sorry that made her want to forgive him.
"You left me outside alone," she said softly. "A girl disappeared that night."