Re-Vamped! Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself.”
    “That
would be cool,” agreed Olivia. Just then, Ivy’s cell phone rang. “Dad,” she
announced, glancing at the caller ID display and flipping open the phone.
    “Hello,
Ivy,” her father’s smooth voice intoned. “Will you be joining me for dinner
tonight? I am preparing hemoglobin stew with parsnips.”
    “Hi,
Dad,” Ivy said. “I’m glad you called. Olivia’s coming over this afternoon to,
uh . . .” Olivia mimed reading a book and taking notes. “Do some research,” Ivy
finished. “She’s dying to meet you.”
    There
was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “It is fine for Olivia to
come over, but I am afraid I must leave for an appointment with a client,” her
father said at last.
    “Can’t
you change it?” Ivy pleaded. “No,” her father said simply. “My regrets,” he
finished and hung up.
    Ivy
sighed, her warm breath forming a frosty cloud in the air. “The good news,” she
told her sister, “is that the computer will be free.” She kicked a rock into a
pile of frozen leaves. “The bad news is that my dad won’t be there.” She
couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Why isn’t my dad more eager to meet my
twin sister? she thought.
    “That’s
okay,” Olivia said, swinging her book bag onto her other shoulder and putting
her arm through Ivy’s. “We’ll cross paths one of these days.”
    “He’s
already two hundred years old,” Ivy said with a roll of her eyes. “ ‘One of
these days’ could be two decades from now!”
    Olivia
had been to Ivy’s a handful of times before, but the mansion at the top of the
hill still blew her away. From the outside, the place looked like something out
of a Civil War epic—or an old black-and-white vampire movie.
    The
inside was just as glamorous. She’d seen Ivy’s basement crypt bedroom with its
huge closet. And she’d helped to decorate the gothic third floor ballroom for
the All Hallows’ Ball, so she wasn’t expecting Mr. Vega’s study to be a pile of
old decorating magazines on top of a bangedup filing cabinet. Still, Olivia
couldn’t keep from being impressed when Ivy opened the door to the study on the
second floor.
    All
four walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a huge mahogany desk crowned
by a flat-screen computer monitor, and across the room was an enormous globe in
the middle of a rug that looked like a starry sky. Next to it, on top of a wide
pedestal, stood a gray model with tiny paintings on the walls.
    And  then Olivia looked up, and realized that the dark-wood bookshelves lining the walls
stretched up for another story, and there was a narrow walkway—like a
balcony—to enable browsing up there.
    This
place is awesome! she thought.
    Ivy
dragged a second high-backed blacklacquer chair behind the desk and motioned
for Olivia to sit beside her as she powered up her dad’s computer.
    The
screen lit up with a black-and-white photograph of Ivy in profile, looking
thoughtful, the outline of tree branches against a sunset sky behind her.
    “I
wish my father would change his background,” Ivy said with a sigh.
    “But
that’s such a good picture of you!” Olivia exclaimed.
    “Look
at my nose,” her sister scoffed. “It’s huge.”
    “Hey,”
Olivia countered with mock offense. “You better be careful what you say about
our nose!”
    Ivy
grinned. “Are you ready for the Vorld Vide Veb?” she asked.
    Olivia
nodded and Ivy clicked on an icon of a moon in the corner, and the screen went
black, except for three big Gothic letters in the center:

  VVV
    “Can
anyone access this?” Olivia asked. Ivy shook her head. “Your computer needs a
special chip just to get this far.”
    Ivy
carefully started clicking on the letters: the upper left tip of the first V ,
then the bottom of

  the V, then the place where the upper right
tip of
    the
first V met the upper left of the second V . “What are you doing?”
Olivia asked.
    “You’ll
see,” said Ivy. Her seventh click, on