by Flynn Meaney
Unfortunately, my seat on the train was directly facing three teenage girls. Didn’t girls in New York ever go to school? Oh, wait, school hadn’t started for me either. Well, I could just look out the window. Oh, wait. I didn’t have a window seat. Oh, well. If I had to look ahead, I would focus on the books the girls were reading and not on the three pairs of crossed legs beneath them.
The first book cover had the typical Fabio-style romantic male lead. He had blond hair longer than the woman’s and a piratelike shirt ripped open to reveal pectoral muscles that were bigger than hers, too. He was a guy who could speak five languages and perform award-winning sexual maneuvers. He was a seducer.
I could never be a guy like that.
On the second novel cover, the guy was swinging an ax dangerously close to the woman’s face. She was still smiling. He was a clean-cut kind of guy, with a flannel shirt and bulging biceps, like the Brawny paper towel man. He could handle a canoe or a grizzly bear, and catch and grill a fish for dinner. Like that guy on the Discovery Channel who scoops the insides out of buffaloes and then sleeps inside them.
I could never be a guy like that.
The third book cover was different. First of all, the book was called Bloodthirsty, which didn’t seem very romantic. The letters of the title were enormous and red and dripping with blood. On this cover, the girl was featured prominently. Although she was wearing a white lacy dress and making the sort of innocent face you see on kids in juice commercials, she had some pretty intense cleavage. The Grand Canyon of cleavage. I admit that I leaned forward to examine this a little closer (hey, it’s literature!), but then the guy on the cover caught my eye. No, not in that way. In fact, he wasn’t sexy at all.
The Bloodthirsty cover guy was lurking in the distance behind the girl. He had bad posture. His arms were crossed. He was brooding. His skin was the color of paper. And his eyes… He had eyes like mine! They were spooky, crystal-ball blue. Why was the cleavage girl with him? What was this guy’s secret?
The Brawny book girl looked over at the Bloodthirsty girl. She smiled and said, “I love that book.”
The sexy pirate book girl looked up to see what the other two girls were talking about. “Oh, me too!” she chimed in. “How sexy is the guy in it?”
The girls all moaned in unison. Really sexy, urgent moans. Somewhere a sound guy for a porn movie was kicking himself that he missed it.
“He is SO sexy!” the Bloodthirsty girl emphasized.
But why? I thought. I was bursting to ask them out loud. If the guy they were talking about was the guy on the cover, what was sexy about him? He was thin! He was pale!
“He’s so brooding,” the first girl said.
Wait, I was brooding! In fact, I was brooding right now!
“He’s so smart,” the second girl said.
I’m smart! I’m smart! I can give my PSAT scores to prove it.
“He’s so thoughtful,” the third girl said.
Thoughtful? No one’s more thoughtful than me! Hell, I’ll chase you down the street with the first edition of your favorite book!
What was happening here? Either brooding, smart, skinny, and pale had suddenly become sexy and karma was paying me back for the time my priest suggested I use self-tanner so I wouldn’t blend in with my altar boy robe, or I had stumbled upon my own personal fan club. I’d dreamed of this day before. I would call them “Fanbars.”
“I know,” the first girl said. “I love vampires.”
Wait, what was that? Excuse me? Pardon? Had I heard right over the conductor’s announcement that “a crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch”? Had this girl said she… loves vampires?
“I started with Bloodthirsty,” the second girl said. “After that, I read all the Twilight books. And once I finished them, I read everything about vampires. I’m obsessed with vampires!”
That was it! It all made sense now! Girls loved vampires! How had I forgotten about the Twilight craze? Robert Pattinson and his pale mug everywhere? His accepting Hottest Dude awards or Best Kisser awards or whatever awards Nickelodeon and MTV thought up?
So that meant that the blond girl from the train car hadn’t been insulting me by calling me a vampire. She hadn’t thought I was a bloodsucking killer. She had thought I was a bloodsucking killer with sex appeal.
And she hadn’t sat next to me because she was deranged. She wasn’t deranged. She was attracted to me! Okay, some might think those are the same thing.
Optimism and a sense of power flooded me, a sense of power that’s pretty unusual when you’re six-foot-one and weigh only 130 pounds. Maybe I couldn’t be a Brawny paper towel man or a bodice-ripping foreign lover. Frankly, I couldn’t even unhook a bra. But when it came to being pale and dead-looking, when it came to being old-fashioned and a little bit strange, I could ride this trend like no one else.
I would become a vampire.
When a storm broke over the electrical lines of the train, it seemed the perfect time to christen myself. The early fall heat sparked into a sharp sliver of lightning, small through the train window, and I became a new man. A brave, fearless, fearsome man. A bloodthirsty man.
I stood up and (silently) declared myself: Finbar Frame, vampire.
Then the train conductor walked through and told me to sit down. He also gave me a suspicious look, like I’d been inappropriately touching people. I think he sensed my newfound power and was threatened by it.
But I did sit down.
chapter 5
With only seventy-two hours left before school started, I was off to a magical place that would be the source of all my vampire secrets and power. The Pelham Public Library. I still believed books could change your life, even though they hadn’t worked during my previous attempted transformations (see the still shrink-wrapped copy of Weightlifting for Wimps on the third level of my bookshelf).
Thank God for my kick-ass attention span. Between Saturday and Tuesday morning, I read the following books: “The Family of the Vourdalak,” by Count Alexis Tolstoy; Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (this one had some really cool lesbian vibes going on like 150 years before Marissa kissed Alex on The OC); Dracula, by Bram Stoker (this one I just flipped through; I’ve read it twice before. I also saw it acted out in the episode of Degrassi where Emma gets gonorrhea); Revelations in Black, by Carl Jacobi; ’Salem’s Lot and “The Night Flier,” by Stephen King; Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett; four books by Anne Rice; two House of Night books by P. C. and Kristin Cast; and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.
Getting any reading done, much less this many books in one nerdy weekend, was an impressive feat considering I shared a room with Luke. In Alexandria, we’d had rooms at opposite ends of a hallway, and I’d only heard about his cracking a wooden ceiling beam with a basketball, his using his bed as a trampoline and swinging from the window sash. In Pelham, I got to experience it firsthand.
At some point in my research, when I already had, like, twelve paper cuts, I heard Luke pounding his way up the stairs. The lamps in our room were trembling in fear of him. I swear, the kid’s a portable earthquake. I looked around quickly. All the book covers on my bed looked suspicious and creepy—knives, blood, some bare female chests. So I scooped up five of them and shoved them into the crack between my bed and the wall, where I kept all my other suspicious and creepy stuff like my Megan Fox Transformers poster (it’s life-size, and you can totally see one of her nipples).
Luke banged open the door, his white headphones blaring and his shirt soaked through with sweat. He lifted it over his head while he walked to his bed. My brother walks around shirtless more than Mario Lopez.
“Summer reading?” Luke’s pecs asked me.
Yeah, right. I’d completed the Pelham summer reading list by the fourth of July. Summer reading is my favorite thing in the world!
“Just reading,” I said.
“Hey, when are we going to the beach again?” Luke asked. “I never got to go.”
“The beach made my
skin boil,” I told him.
Luke shrugged. “Mom said she enjoyed it.”
I rolled my eyes. Then I put The Queen of the Damned down on my bedspread. Although I never thought I’d say this, I was sick of reading. I decided to do what the rest of the country did instead of reading: watch TV.
“Hey,” I asked Luke, “did you ever watch True Blood?”
Luke took one of the towels we shared and rubbed it over his head, neck, and chest. Reminder: never use that towel again.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A show on HBO,” I said. “There’s vampires.”
“What happens on it?” Luke pulled a polo shirt over his head.
Retaining Luke’s attention requires a team of Mexican soap opera scriptwriters, but he agreed to watch the DVDs and followed me downstairs to the den, where we have that enormous HD television whose radiation my mother fears. I put the first season in the DVD player and got absorbed in the show almost immediately. My brother, ADHD poster child, left the room whenever no one was being killed or having really noisy sex. Luckily, there were a lot of murders and a hell of a lot of sex (maybe becoming a vampire would be more fun than I predicted). Luke was better able to pay attention when he watched while simultaneously trying to balance on this wooden board on wheels. That balance board is the first physical manifestation of my father’s midlife crisis. He bought it to work on his balance when he decided to become a surfer. That never worked out for him. Or me. Apparently delusions of surfdom run in our family.
While Luke balanced (or, rather, crashed into the couch, like, three times), I let all the information I’d read and watched come together. Every book had a different take on how vampires worked. For example—how were vampires made? Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, said it took three bites from a vampire to “turn” a human. The House of Night books said that becoming a vampire was an automatic physical change, like puberty (and God knows, I didn’t want to relive puberty. I think I would have rather turned into a vampire than get braces with red rubber bands). And what was the deal with vampires and the sun? In True Blood, sun shriveled up vampires until they dropped dead. In the Twilight books, sun doesn’t hurt vampires but reveals their super-beautiful skin. Well, I didn’t have to worry about that.
But there were a lot of “vampire rules” I couldn’t possibly follow. For example, True Blood is actually the name for this fake blood drink that Bill Compton and the other HBO vampires drink instead of biting people, which reminded me: vampires can’t eat. This led me to realize that vampires also can’t drink, or breathe. Eating, drinking, and breathing? I probably couldn’t kick those little habits. Also, according to my books, vampires freak out if they see religious symbols, like crosses or Christian statues. If this were the case for me, I wouldn’t be able to enter my own home. My mom has saints and Virgin Marys camping out all over our backyard.
But I realized, as I watched the on-screen vampires with their deep, drawling voices, their slick movements, their secret-agent reflexes, and the way they drew the attention of everybody (mostly every girl) when they walked into a bar or a party, that there was more to the vampire image than drinking blood and biting people. There was even more to vampires than those things I was good at—the brooding, the solitude, the old-fashioned determination to act like a gentleman with girls, the intelligence and knowledge of history. There was something more than that: vampire attitude.
Maybe I didn’t have vampire attitude down yet because there was one important vampire book I had yet to read. The book that had started it all. That bible of vampiric seduction: Bloodthirsty. To be honest, I was too embarrassed to buy the book, even online. Bloodthirsty was a romance novel. Ninety percent of its readers were female. If I ordered it online, I’d probably get on some sappy romance novel list and get e-mails with pictures of shirtless men with long blond hair.
But if I was using this vampire thing to get girls, I had to read Bloodthirsty. So I sucked it up and went back to the library. I strolled the romance novel aisle between two twelve-year-old girls who were giggling and asking each other, “What’s a member? Like a member of a club?” I managed to stealthily slip Bloodthirsty off the shelf. There had been seven copies of the book, and five of them had already been taken out—a good sign about the continued popularity of vampires. Concealing my Bloodthirsty between two more macho Stephen King novels, I casually strolled to check them out.
Agnes, a librarian who already knew me by name, smiled as she took my card. But when she saw Bloodthirsty, she shook her head.
“You can’t have this one,” Agnes said.
What? She was taking this mother—or grandmother—role too far.
“There’s a parental warning on this book,” Agnes told me.
“Books can have that?” I asked.
I thought parental warnings were for video games where you could steal cars and pick up anime prostitutes.
“I can call your mother and get permission over the phone,” Agnes suggested.
I looked down at the cover of Bloodthirsty, with the young woman’s breasts featured prominently.
“No thanks.”
When I first settled down in a dark, private corner of the Pelham Public Library to read Bloodthirsty without checking it out, I didn’t see why the book was so forbidden. The first chapter was poorly written, but not very scandalous. The story started off as a harmless Dracula rip-off with a bunch of cheesy dialogue. This English girl, Virginia White, is chosen to deliver a message to this rugged mountain town in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that she is a terrible messenger, can’t climb mountains, and wears white dresses everywhere, which is dumb to do in a rural place. Anyway, Virginia White ends up at the estate of Chauncey Castle, who used to be a professor at Oxford but did some controversial research into immortality and drinking blood and got kicked out. Now, everyone’s saying he’s a vampire, but dumb Virginia wanders into his estate anyway.
For forty days and nights, she had been a prisoner of his home, her lily-white wrists bound by heavy metal chains…. But now, unchained, she had become a prisoner of Chauncey’s mysterious allure, and a prisoner of her own lust. Everything about him set her girlish heart pounding. His alabaster skin.
(Attractive, of course.)
His extensive vocabulary.
(A very sexy attribute.)
And his ironic struggle to find the right words with her, in their stolen, conflicted moments of passion.
(That’s right, give the guy a break. Not even vampires understand women!)
The gay suitors of her girlhood, with their red ascots and horse races, seemed shallow compared with Chauncey.
(Hell, yeah! Ditch those jocks!)
If the rumors were true, Chauncey Castle hadn’t left the Chateau Sangre in eighty years. Yet he was, more than any man she had known, an explorer of worlds: the worlds in his leather-bound books—Perhaps an explorer of her worlds, the undiscovered worlds beneath her silk skirt, her petticoat, the satin laces of her corset…
She pressed herself against him, with nothing between them but her young, ample bosom, quivering bare and exposed like two pheasants trembling before a hunter. Chauncey’s chest, when she raised her hand to it, was cold and hard—as cold, hard, and unyielding as his own castle walls.
“I cannot feel a heartbeat,” Virginia told him, breathless. “Do you even have a heart?”
“What does it matter what I do or do not have?” Chauncey asked, averting his eyes. When they returned their gaze to Virginia, they pierced her like swords of pleasure. It was as if the two were in a lustful duel and he had the upper hand….
“All that matters is what I am.”
“What are you?”
“I cannot tell you what I am.”
(Wow, this guy is some smooth talker.)
Luckily Chauncey didn’t talk much longer. Virginia White took over the dialogue, and jeez did she have a filthy mouth for a maid from Sheepfordshire.
“Now I know where all that blood you drink goes,�
�� she said, rubbing his engorged…
“Oh em gee.” The two girls from the romance novel section were giggling above me.
Feeling a heavy embarrassed flush, I looked up at them. They were both raising eyebrows at the page I was reading.
“Member,” one whispered meaningfully.
I scrambled quickly to my feet and closed the book, saying, “Uh, this isn’t the fitness section?”
After reading most of Bloodthirsty, I had learned eight new metaphors for erections, but hadn’t learned much about vampire attitude. I guess I needed to immerse myself in the lifestyle in order to understand the attitude. So for the rest of Labor Day weekend, I practiced vampiric habits around my family to test their reaction.
I began by reducing the amount of food I ate in public. I didn’t plan on starving myself to prove I was a vampire, but I also didn’t want to be seen winning a hot dog eating contest or anything. So when my dad grilled me a mouthwatering pound-and-a-half burger on his new grill, I turned it down.
“Just the way you like it, Finbar,” my dad announced, flipping the burger onto the toasted bun waiting on a paper plate. The paper plate was almost immediately soaked in beef juices. “No lettuce, no tomato, no ketchup, no mustard, no barbecue sauce.”
I’m a very plain eater. In addition to my sensitive soul and sensitive skin, I have sensitive taste buds. So this burger was my Holy Grail. My stomach growled and I even drooled a little bit.
But I said, “Uh, no thanks. I think I’ll just have something later.”