by Flynn Meaney
What a terrible weekend for my father to buy a grill the size of Peyton Manning.
I adopted a vampire lifestyle as I lounged around the house, isolating myself from others, reading a lot of books, and glowering at my mother when she ran over my foot with the Swiffer mop. Curiously, no one seemed to notice me acting any differently.
Well, clearly I needed to step up the attitude. And I knew exactly how—with a deadly stare. Legends, movies, and X-rated books say a vampire’s stare is so powerful that by merely looking a mortal in the eyes he can bend that person to his will. I tested this theory on my brother. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt.
Every morning of the summer Luke would leave for a run at seven AM. He’d return at eight, pounding up the staircase like a full corps of Marines, knocking the door open with a sweaty arm and ruining my REM sleep with the latest pop song blaring out of his iPod headphones. Lacking my discriminating taste in music, Luke always downloaded whatever was playing incessantly on the radio. On this Labor Day Monday, the last day of summer vacation, it was Lady Gaga, a club remix at max volume.
Usually I would throw a pillow at Luke, miss him by six inches, roll over, and go back to sleep. Today as he lifted his t-shirt to wipe his face and then did a goofy dance to the song’s refrain, I sat up and fixed my eyes on him.
“Turn it off,” I called out, loud enough for Luke to hear me.
“Huh?” Luke lifted both hands to pop out his headphones, and when they dangled on his chest, they blared even louder.
“Turn the music off,” I said.
Then Luke got the full brunt of the ferocious vampire stare, which I’d been perfecting in my mom’s makeup mirror for three days. It was designed to either (a) melt him into a puddle of his own sweat, or (b) make him totally obedient to me. Initially it worked in the second respect. Luke met my eyes and came over to my bed. It was working! My powerful gaze was pulling Luke over to me. My powerful gaze was powerful! Then Luke sat on my bed and told me:
“You have that crusty stuff in your eyes.”
Luke reached toward my face. I lifted my arm to block him, but my vampire reflexes hadn’t kicked in yet, and I was too slow. Luke poked me in the eye.
After Luke left for practice, my mother came in with the Dirt Devil, which I knew meant she wanted to have a heart-to-heart. She sat down on my bed and asked, “Is anything wrong, Finbar?”
I raised an eyebrow skeptically, but then I remembered I was practicing vampire habits. What would Chauncey Castle say?
“Is anything right?” I asked dramatically in return.
“Finbar.” Now my mother’s eyes narrowed and she gripped the cross at her neck like she was in distress. “Are you on drugs?”
“What does it matter what I am on?” I asked her. “All that matters is what I am….”
“FINBAR!” my mother shrieked, popping up off the bed. “YOU’RE ON DRUGS!”
This Chauncey Castle dialogue didn’t work so well in real life. Maybe there’s a reason Publishers Weekly called the book “skanky trash.”
“I’m not on drugs, Mom,” I said. “Where do you even come up with this stuff?”
“You’re moody, you’re not talking to any of us, and you’re eating less,” my mother said, then took a deep breath. “Are you doing pot?”
“Mom, if I were doing pot, I would be eating more.”
My mother aimed the Dirt Devil at my chest and switched it on, sucking on my black pajama shirt.
“Only someone doing pot would know that!” she yelled over the vacuum’s roar.
After my mom left, I finally hopped out of bed. I took advantage of Luke’s absence to perform an important pre–First Day of School task: decide what I was going to wear.
How was I going to dress like a vampire? I had a pretty lousy history of trying to convince people I was someone other than who I was. Look at my childhood Halloweens. Every year I’d start in August, brainstorming the scariest costume possible. A ghost, or a zombie, a mummy, or an ax murderer. When my neighbors opened the door, I’d growl, I’d wield a knife, I’d rage, I’d roar like the entire Broadway cast of The Lion King.
Still, when those Hoosier moms saw me, they’d always say, “Hi, Finbar. How are you?”
The best I ever got was a halfhearted “Aren’t you scary?” But that was usually followed by the kind of aww sound you make when you find a puppy chewing your shoe. Other neighbors, knowing how to win my mother’s heart, were too busy to be scared by me because they were taping a Bible passage to an Almond Joy. Almond Joys are already the world’s suckiest candy without sores and plagues strapped to them. Pretty soon I’d be hauling half the New Testament door-to-door like a Jehovah’s Witness.
So how would I ever pull off this vampire stuff?
I was lousy with violence. So I wouldn’t be doing what made vampires vampires: I wouldn’t be biting people. Luke had tried that back in the day, and it got him kicked out of Montessori school. My glamouring had no effect on my brother, so I wouldn’t be hypnotizing people. I was certainly not Chauncey Castle when it came to seducing people. And I still didn’t fully understand vampire attitude. So I had no choice but to work on my vampire look. In the hour left before Luke came back, I scrambled around the upstairs of our house, collecting all the sinister-looking clothes and accessories my family possessed. This included a black polo shirt Luke had since we were eight, a black button-up shirt that was too cool for my dad to wear, and a necklace of my mom’s that I thought was a fang but turned out to be Luke’s baby tooth on a string.
The necklace was ruled out first, obviously. Then I pulled the black polo shirt over my head. And believe me, that was not easy. That thing was tight. I looked like I should be raving at a club on the Jersey Shore. Except I couldn’t raise my hand above my head to rave because when I did, the sleeve ripped.
The polo shirt was out.
Next I put on my dad’s button-front shirt. It was kinda long on me (I’m pretty tall, but my dad, Tall Paul, is six-three). So when I tucked it in, the shirttail made a pretty nice bulge in the crotch of my jeans. That couldn’t be bad. Plus, the shirt was black, mature, and pretty vampy-looking. In my mom’s full-length mirror, I turned sideways and then turned the shirt collar up. Whoa. Too vampy. Like Count Whoever on Sesame Street. One ass-kicking for Finn at his new school if he wears this shirt, TWO ass-kickings for Finn… mwah-ha-ha.
Then, as I removed the bulge from my pants, I had an epiphany.
Vampires don’t care about what shirt they wear. Vampires don’t care about making impressions on the first day of school. Vampires don’t care about all the stupid little stuff that the Finbar Frames of the world care about, like being the first one out in gym class dodgeball, facing rejection by girls, and being mocked for carrying SAT flash cards in their pockets. Vampires don’t care that they can’t flaunt their tans at the beach, that they get stared at, that they’re different. Vampires don’t care what other people think. And that is vampire attitude.
At St. Luke’s, I always got to class before the second bell, which showed I cared about my grades. My name was always on the honor roll and the bylines of the school newspaper, which showed I cared about our school. I didn’t go to keg parties, which might seem uncaring, but which actually meant that I cared so much what other people thought of my dancing and my lack of beer tolerance that I didn’t dare show my face. I’d spent two years’ allowance buying snails for Celine and then chased her down the street because I cared too much. That’s why I’d ruined our date. And that’s why I’d never dated, kissed, or even danced with a girl. I cared too much about what they thought of me.
Well, the caring stopped now.
I threw Luke’s shirt and my dad’s shirt in the hamper. I got rid of Luke’s creepy tooth. I pulled my black pajama t-shirt back over my skinny white chest. For the rest of the day and that night, I wore that plain t-shirt. I wore it the next morning as I grabbed a piece of toast and ignored my mother’s plea that I should drink green tea (she’d been watching Dr. Oz). As I climbed
into my Volvo and headed for my new high school, that same black shirt I’d been wearing for three days conveyed it all—coolness, apathy, and a little bit of BO.
chapter 6
What had I been thinking? I was a complete idiot.
It was easy to brave at home. At home I was bolstered by my little bookshelves and my mother’s blind love for her freakish offspring. It was easy to be brave and make plans when all I had to do was read a few books, survive an attack of solar urticaria, or absorb radiation from five hours of television. It was easy to make plans to seduce and impress everyone I knew when I knew no one in New York besides the three people obligated by law to love me: my mother, who gave birth to me; Luke, who shared my DNA; and my father, who didn’t know any better.
Now, driving to Pelham Public High School in my Volvo, I felt completely intimidated. Even my little silver car was cowed by the other bigger, beefier cars—the SUVs and Jeeps with their iffy safety regulations and that one yellow Hummer that didn’t give a shit about the environment. I tried to turn into the parking lot, but I got cut off by a red car whose driver was blasting gunshot sounds from a rap song. Ten minutes into public school and I’d already been in a drive-by!
Apparently I have an “I’m a pussy—cut me off” bumper sticker that I don’t know about, because after that first car cut me off, all these kids on bikes crossed the street in front of my car without looking. As I let them pass, for so long that I shifted into park, I reflected that it might be the diversity that was making me nervous about this whole new-school thing. After all, I am from the Midwest. According to Wikipedia, my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana, has a population made up of “0.46% Black or African-American” people. Our neighbors were so excited when a black family moved in that they got them a welcome basket with the first three seasons of The Cosby Show on DVD. Back in Indiana, I went to school with a bunch of other white dudes in red vests and khakis. Most of them looked like me. And one of them was my twin brother.
But no one looked alike at Pelham Public High School. And you can bet your ass no one wore a tie. I parked my car in the farthest parking space from the school and got ready to hike the rest of the way. I didn’t want to take a closer spot, in case it was reserved for seniors or other students or something. And looking around, there were a lot of other students I wouldn’t want to mess with.
There were guys—guys with earrings, guys in tight jeans, guys with jeans around their thighs, guys who could fit my skull in their hands, guys who were bigger, tougher, tanner, and cooler than me. And there were girls—girls in spaghetti straps, girls in tight jeans, girls making statements, girls clinging to groups, girls rummaging in enormous bags, girls whose ponytails moved independently of their bodies (they must be witches to make them do that!), girls with sunburns, girls smiling so brightly I couldn’t look directly at them.
Trying to avoid eye contact with 150 kids at once, I slipped into the wave of movement toward the front door of the school.
“Hey!” a punk guy called from the hood of a rusted Chevy. One other guy was sitting there with him; another was sitting on the roof. They were sharing a cigarette, and all three were marking up their white sneakers with Sharpie pens.
I looked around me, then called back, “Hey.”
“Nice choice of parking spot,” the kid said.
All three laughed and looked down at my super-safe Volvo, which was chillin’ with its airbags, with a space the size of an Olympic pool between it and the next car.
I shrugged.
“Fag,” he called out to me.
As I cut from the student parking lot to the front of school, I saw my vampire plan through the eyes of all the different kids around me. And, through their eyes, my plan seemed really, really dumb. This guy was going to pretend to be a vampire to be popular! I imagined these kids whispering this to each other, posting it on Pelham Public’s version of a Gossip Girl website. Despite their diversity, all of them would join together to laugh at me.
My head fell down to my chest, Eeyore-style. Same sad, slumping Finbar. And, apparently, same uncoordinated, doofus Finbar—because when I wasn’t looking where I was going, I tripped over something. Actually, someone.
Perched like a gargoyle on the third-highest step, this girl pulled herself indignantly away from a large paperback book.
“You kicked me!” she squeaked, squinting up at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m so dumb. I’m sorry. It’s my first day here, and I really have no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing, so…”
“Are you a freshman?” the girl asked. “I’m Jenny.”
“No, I’m not a—”
“You’re really tall for a freshman,” Jenny said. “What are you, like six-two? You might be a whole foot taller than me. Let’s do back-to-back.”
When Jenny stood up to compare our heights, her book dropped to the steps. There were people rushing by us, so I stooped quickly to pick it up and prevent its being stepped on. The cover had a woman in a white dress that was somehow familiar—a white, lacy, cleavage-baring dress. And those large, drippy, overdramatic letters called to me. Bloodthirsty.
Jenny liked vampires! I straightened all the way up and handed her the book. Suddenly all these different people around me represented nothing more than different brands of inferiority. By God, I was the Chauncey Castle of Pelham Public High School! Guys wielding Sharpie markers from crappy cars and girls with scary-heeled shoes had nothing on me.
“I should get inside,” I told Jenny, adding offhand but clearly, “I don’t do well in the sun.”
When I said that, Jenny looked super intrigued. Without even trying, I’d met the perfect target. Jenny followed me inside, almost tripping over herself to follow me. She followed me to the office, where I got my locker number, and to my locker, where I had to kick in the door to get it open. The whole time she followed me, Jenny asked me questions.
What grade was I? Junior. She was, too. Where had I moved from? Far away. But… where exactly?
“You know, the middle of the country,” I said.
I wanted Vampire Finbar to emulate Chauncey Castle in his vague and philosophical answers to questions. Unfortunately, I ended up sounding like Justin Bobby from The Hills.
Jenny continued her interrogation: What classes was I taking? (I handed her my schedule. We compared classes.) Did I have a driver’s license? Yes. Did I have a car? Yes. Did I like to read? Yes, very much. Did I ever read fantasy books? No. Why didn’t I?
“I just don’t think…” I snatched Bloodthirsty out of her hand. I glanced briefly at the lurker on the cover.
“I just don’t think they’re very realistic.” I capped that off with a meaningful look.
I hoped Jenny would get the hint—that fantasy books weren’t as real as my own life as a vampire. But she was too busy leading me to our first class in common, AP U.S. history. I was pumped to learn that, unlike St. Luke’s, Pelham Public didn’t give us assigned seats (no Johnny Frackas for me here!). Jenny chose a seat in the back and slid easily into it, and I squeezed myself into the seat next to hers. Since my summer growth spurt, I found my knees banging against tables and now my school desk. I was making legroom for myself when a kid sat down on the other side of Jenny. Apparently Pelham kids didn’t care about who sat with whom, because he didn’t even look before dropping his bag there.
“Hey, Jen,” he said mildly. Promptly he went to sleep.
I slid forward to stare at this kid. I was fascinated. I’d never seen a real person fall asleep in class. I thought only seventies sitcom characters and John Hughes antiheroes did that. But there was an AP student, his curly Jewfro rising and falling in peaceful rhythm. He was, legitimately, asleep. I even saw a little bit of drool! As our teacher came into class, young and eager to fumble with the whiteboard and his laptop for twenty minutes to show us a two-minute Jon Stewart clip, I observed that guy’s desktop nap and took it as an omen. A good sign that Pelham Public would be, at least compared with St. Luke’s, a
relaxed place.
Although Jenny was helpful, and I sat with her in my first two classes, I wasn’t sure I wanted everyone to think we were best friends. She was a little strange, with her enormous collection of fantasy books stored in her L.L.Bean backpack and strapped to her back at all times. With orange hair and freckles, Jenny should have looked like a little kid in a graham cracker commercial. But she wore all black—black choker necklace and a black shirt with skulls and knives on it. And she had dyed her hair black too, although the orange hair had grown back in, so it was half-orange and half-black. As vampire companions go, she had the creepy goth look down but was kind of missing that sexy, cool edge I needed.
So in physics, our third class, I separated from Jenny to sit alone at a lab table and brood. Because the same group of kids had been in all three of my classes so far, and it was clear that all of us AP students would be spending a lot of time together, it was important to make a vampiric impression on them. So while our teacher built a model roller coaster out of Legos, I did my best Edward-Cullen-in-biology-class impression. When a pretty brunette girl sat down next to me, I only glanced at her briefly before looking away. I was sure this dark and sinister look would have the same effect on this girl as Edward’s had on Bella in Twilight. My smoldering, angry eyes and bitter expression told her that I was an animal who could barely control my urge to lunge at her bare neck.
Obviously sucked in by my allure, the girl turned to me and spoke.
“Do you need some Pepto?” she asked me.
In my confusion, my mouth dropped open and I kinda lost my smoldering look.
“What?” I asked.
She pulled a bottle of Pepto-Bismol out of her bag, then told me, “You look like you’re going to vom.”
“What?” I asked.
“Vomit,” she clarified.
After this incident, I decided not to venture out on my own as much. I trusted Jenny to give me the necessary information about everyone.
The brunette? “That’s Ashley Milano. She participates too much. And talks too much. And she abbrevs.”