How to Start Over

Milly was pulling on her socks when someone knocked on the door of her dorm room. To say it startled her was an understatement.

It was 6 in the morning. Tamiya was off printing for the school paper, and there was no one else in the school that would want to come by the dorm.

Something made her clutch at the silver cross she had set on her nightstand. She looped it around her neck and pulled on a pink shirt.

Whoever was on the other side of the door knocked again. A little harder this time.

"I'm coming, I'm coming, just hold on."

She swung the door open to find the last person on earth that she would ever have wanted to be there.

Yumi gave her a half smile, and lifted her hand to wave awkwardly.

Milly stepped back, a little unsure of what to make of having a vampire on her doorstep.

"What do you want?"

"Well, can I come in?"

Milly shook her head. "No, you can't. Your kind isn't allowed across a threshold without permission, and no one in this room is willing to do that."

Yumi sighed, her hands now on her hips. Milly was a child even by the standards of humans. And here Yumi was nearly a hundred years old, not counting how old she had been before she was turned. She wasn't used to dealing with people that were this obstinate.

"Then we're going to talk out here."

The set of Millie's jaw seemed to say otherwise.

"Why are we going to do this? I would have thought you'd not want anything to do with me, since. You know."

She pointed at the welt that was still visible on the back of Yumi's hand.

Yumi slid her hand into her pocket more than a little self-consciously.

"Exactly. So why are you here?"

Yumi was silent for a moment. "I wanted to see how you're doing."

"I'm doing fine. Detention every day until lights out, with almost no room to help Tamiya with her journalism and no time at all to have any fun and be a kid."

"You were going to be expelled Milly! Delmas was going to press charges against you. Assault and attempted murder Milly."

"So that's why you're really here? You want me to thank you for ruining my life?"

"It's just a year. It'll be over soon enough, and as long as you don't do anything stupid you shouldn't have any problems next year."

Milly put her hands on her hips, her nostrils flared and she was genuinely angry now.

"You know what, I don't really care. Vampires are evil. Maybe you've managed to go as long as you have without hurting anyone, but it's going to happen. And if I kill one of you, my family won't be angry with me, my dad would pull me out of here in a second, and my brother? He's fifteen and he hasn't even met a vampire before."

Yumi stared at her. It had never occurred to her that Millie's entire family were hunters.

"I'm not going to stop Yumi. This is something that needs to happen. Clearly you've been sheltered away all your life, or whatever your kind calls it. But vampires are always killing people, and those people are always missed by someone."

Yumi suddenly thought she understood what was really driving Milly in this. The sort of thing that would cause her to so willingly throw her life away in a pursuit of what could only be vengeance.

"Your mother?"

All the fire went out of Milly in an instant. Yumi couldn't help but feel bad for the girl. "I'm sorry Milly."

She wiped at her eye. Yumi suspected that it was to hide a tear.

"When dad caught up to the one that did it, he staked it down and forced it to watch the sunrise. He said it took three days to actually kill it." Her phone chirped in her pocket. "I have to go to class. Don't ever try to tell me that your kind can be good again."

Yumi really didn't know how to respond to Milly. The girl pushed past her, slamming closed the door to her room. Before Milly was gone though, She had to know something.

"Hey!"

Milly spun around, even angrier than she had been. "What do you want Yumi!"

She shivered involuntarily. "Were you going to do that to me?" she couldn't imagine how badly that would hurt, and couldn't keep her voice from shaking a little.

Milly stopped for a moment. "No. I was going to just stake you and that would have been the end of it."

Yumi decided she had ot make her point, as difficult as it was for her to relive that moment, which had been the worst of her entire life. "Then what stopped you, if we're all so terrible."

Milly turned and left. Fighting to keep her composure. "You were crying."