Disclaimer: Rainbow Rowell. Taylor Swift. Not me.

SIMON

What kind of eleven-year-old wears a suit and tie? I mean, anyone with a public school uniform, obviously, but outside of school, on just a regular day?

It only gets worse as we get older. The year we're fifteen, Baz shows up at Watford for the year in a black suit with tails and a black tie, like he's attending a royal ball or something. He treats everyday life like he got an embossed invitation. I suppose I treat life like my invitation got lost in the mail.

And I know Baz is old money, but even so I'm shocked when I show up at his family's house. A single family lives here? The thing could take up an entire city block! And everything seems to be engraved with gargoyles or lions or whatever. Absolutely everything is fancy, from the ridiculously complicated Japanese toilets to Baz's four-poster bed to the wall sconces lighting the hallways.

What confuses me most about my visit to Baz's house is that Baz is wearing jeans. They do fit really well, and they look expensive, but even so it's weird to see him out of a suit and tie. I mean, I've seen him in pyjamas. I know he doesn't literally always wear a suit and tie. But that does seem to be how he spends most of his waking hours, and it's throwing me to see him in anything else.

Baz dresses back up before we go looking for the vampires, which calms me down. We may be about to hunt down creatures who are literally hungry for my blood, but at least my roommate (that's how I should describe him, right? "Roommate"? We're not friends . . . ) is wearing what I expect him to wear.

He looks good, I have to admit. He's got his hair slicked back, and I wish he'd leave it down, but even so I can appreciate its lazy wave. And somehow dressing in monochrome works well for him, like his black suit and grey skin make it plausible that he just stepped out of a black-and-white movie and it's the rest of us who are wrong, for being in colour.

It's not until we meet Nicodemus that I realize how good Baz makes his suits look. Like, yes, suits look good on just about anyone, but Nicodemus is wearing a suit, and he looks worn out and desperate. Baz, by contrast, looks like a prince. Part of this is just that there are stitches popped in Nicodemus's suit, but part of it isn't. Part of it is that Baz. Looks. Good.

I don't tell him this at the time because he's on a mission and I'm the possibly ill-advised backup, for all that I was the one who found out who Nicodemus is. But I do tell him, late that night, while we're lazing on his floor.

"Baz?"

"Yeah?"

"You look good in a suit."