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VAGUELY COGNISANT OF THE CLAMOUR AND CLATTER OF THE BOYS PUTTERING ABOUT DOWNSTAIRS, bossing each other around and whipping each other in the ass with beach towels and wash cloths and then yelling about it like they were trying to wake something beneath the ground, Violet, Sage and Kit were holed up in Kit's room, where Sage had artlessly shoved Kit's many encyclopaedias and books of the scientific research variety to as many corners as they could find to clear up some space in the middle of the room for Violet to drag out an old whiteboard Kit stored under her bed for some inexplicable reason.
While Sage's room was a lesson in entropy, a chaos of character and tangle the three of them fought to swim through since there hardly was any room to sit, and Violet's room was four white walls entombing a space that was less lived-in and more carved into, a mausoleum of disconcerting emptiness and clinical silence that Sage claimed had the ability to kill all creative flow, Kit's room was a sort of medium between the two. A middle ground where they preferred to meet because it wasn't claustrophobic or daunting and they could actually sit in the floor. Though she never seemed to have a system of organisation for her books, which were scattered in little stacks over the floor like stalagmites in a cave, Kit kept her room neat and tidy, albeit, not as structured and bare-boned as Violet's maids kept Violet's room, dustless and blemish-free, and certainly not like Sage, who never cleaned out her room at all and still harboured relicts from the fourth grade in the name of sentiment. They'd tossed their skateboards behind the door, wedged into the corner. Plan first, skate later.
After they'd left Nino's with stomachs so full they thought they might puke (though Kit claimed she was still hungry, even after wolfing down a whole pizza and her milkshake) and more milkshakes to-go, Violet gave her father a call to let him know about her plans for tonight's bonfire, which Paul had invited her to, and then a sleepover with the girls, which Sage declared mandatory. It was a Friday night, and she'd promised to finish all her school work over the weekend in exchange for being allowed to stay the night at Kit's place, which he'd been fine with, as long as she let him know what time she would come home, so he could send Aaron to pick her up.
Outside, the overcast sky was still lined with silver, the sun, an eye of holy white poking out from a thin veil of clouds, keeping a vigil for the monsters lounging in the Lahotes' backyard, the whole pack of them, bronze-skinned and dust-born and glowing. Inside, the overhead fan whines, and Kit's body heat fills the space, their own personal radiator. They knelt around the whiteboard, an altar of strategy and schemes. At the very top, Violet had scribbled in block letters, OPERATION: LOOKING FOR LUKA—something about it sounding better with alliteration.
"Step one," Violet says, uncapping the marker and scrawling the first phase of her plan at the top left corner before turning to her friends, who looked back at her with earnest eyes, "we find Carlisle Cullen. He's Edward's father—and also a vampire—and my dad's colleague, so he should be easy to track down."
