The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

(which was a lot); who knew only three recipes (spaghetti, salad with a chicken cutlet on top, and burritos); who was good at braiding hair and not pulling too hard (except for when she did French braids); and who could fix almost anything (sinks, toilets, favorite mugs). At school she was obviously somebody else. Somebody who swaggered around in her big boots and black leather jacket, taking auto shopwith the boys and glowering at everyone who wasn’t Pearl or Pauline as if she wanted to knock them out.
    She and Pauline leaned back in their chairs, grinning at each other over Pearl’s head. It was weird.
    “We have a special speaker today,” Principal Wong told them in her no-nonsense, embarrass-the-school-and-I’ll-make-you-sorry voice, short hair combed tightly to one side and gelled to stay there. “We’re going to hear from someone who was trapped inside Springfield when the walls went up. Thank you for agreeing to come and tell your story, Yashira Baez. Let’s give her a big Astell Regional welcome!”
    Everyone applauded noisily, with a few sarcastic whoops from boys in the back. Pearl leaned down to take a strawberry-scented pen and notebook out of her bag, in case she was supposed to write stuff down.
    A small Latina woman stepped onto the stage, wearing jeans and a muted yellow cardigan, looking old enough to be someone’s grandmother. “I’m going to tell you this story just like it happened. I was headed into Springfield to get my great-aunt out when the military blockaded the area. She was in an assisted-living apartment complex and she was too old to drive. So when I heard the rumor that the city was going to be closed off, I thought I could get her out in time. Unfortunately, I got trapped in there with her. I lived in the first Coldtown for two long years until I could figure out a way to get enough cash together to buy myself a marker from a bounty hunter. I could never have done it without donations from my church, so now I go around to schools to try to give back to the community.
    “People ask all the time whether vampires are like us. I always saythat in my two years trapped inside, I played checkers with vampires. I sat on stoops with vampires. And they were a lot like the people they’d been before. But they weren’t the same . Vampires are predators and we’re prey. You’ve got to never forget that.”
    She looked out at the audience very seriously. “Circuses tame tigers. Get them to jump through flaming hoops. Those tigers are real nice to their trainers, I bet. Bump them with their big heads. Roll on their backs like house cats. But if they’re hungry enough, those tigers are going to eat those same trainers they were so nice to.”
    A couple of people in the audience laughed nervously. Tana didn’t laugh. Pauline looked over at her a little worriedly.
    “Now, I never assume that everyone knows the basics, so we’re going to go over them again. Infected people—people who have vampire blood in their veins, people who’ve gone Cold—they can’t spread the infection. They’re infected , but not infectious . Got it?”
    “ Obviously ,” Pauline said under her breath. “Otherwise, the whole world would be buried in vampires.”
    Ms. Baez went on, going over stuff she considered basic. Pearl knew most of it—or at least she felt like she’d heard it before.
    Once a person was bitten, symptoms appeared within twelve to forty-eight hours. Sometimes people were rescued before a bite could be completed and experienced minor symptoms, but didn’t actually go Cold.
    A very small number of people had immune systems able to fight off the infection. Ms. Baez told the story of an Indonesian bounty hunter who’d been bitten on eight occasions, and even though his skin was mottled by scars from the attacks, he didn’t get infected. He swore by the cocktail of snake blood mixed with a drop of infectedhuman blood and plenty of arrack that he drank each morning—his recipe for staving