by Flynn Meaney
“She what?”
“She talks in abbreviations,” Jenny told me. “Okay, next up, that’s Jason Burke. He looks like a jock, but he’s actually pretty smart.
“Matt Katz.” Jenny pointed to the kid who’d fallen asleep in U.S. history. “Stoner kid. He’s pretty cool. He knows more about the rap wars than Ms. Karl knows about centrifugal force.”
Matt Katz didn’t look like someone who would know about rap battles. He looked like someone who would camp out at a Dave Matthews concert and share a joint to “Satellite.” Then again, I didn’t look like a rap fan myself. Of course, I wasn’t as intense as Matt, who apparently had a five-point thesis to prove that Tupac was still alive.
“Nate Kirkland,” Jenny continued, pointing to a kid with surfer hair. Her description was brief: “Nosepicker.”
“Really?” I asked. Picking your nose in class seemed a very bold move to me. Even bolder than sleeping in class.
“Well, he picked his nose once in third grade,” Jenny said.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“We’ve all gone to school together forever,” she told me. “We haven’t had a new kid in three years. We all find you… very mysterious.”
Automatically, I smiled in delight. My plan was working! Then I remembered that mysterious guys—and vampires—didn’t smile. So I generated a very manly frown.
“That’s Kayla Bateman.” Jenny continued her introductions, rolling her eyes at this one.
I looked over. Oh, I’d already noticed Kayla Bateman.
“She’s always drawing attention to her boobs,” Jenny said bitterly.
Now, Kayla was talking to some spellbound guys about the necklaces she was wearing. She fished one, then the other, out of her fathomless cleavage.
“My dad gave me the Star of David, and my mom gave me the cross,” Kayla was saying. “But it’s, like, why can’t I have both of them on my chest?”
“Uh-huh.” The two boys she was talking to nodded, mesmerized by her two… necklaces.
Gym was a pleasant surprise. And I’ve never said that in all my years of secondary education. When I arrived, there was a coach sitting at a table and about sixty-five kids lined up in front of him with their backpacks on. As each student came away from the table, they sat on the ground and filled out paperwork. This looked more like the DMV than physical fitness. And actually, I prefer the DMV to gym class.
I joined the long line and asked the girl in front of me, “Is everyone in sixth-period gym? There’s, like, seventy of us in this line.”
That would be a hell of a dodgeball game. I imagined sixty-nine people against me. I’d get creamed.
“There’s only, like, twenty people in each rotation,” the girl said. “Or maybe thirty in flag football. All those guys lined up early so they could get in the flag football rotation.”
“Wait, so you’re saying we can choose which activity we want to do?” I asked her.
When I got to the front of the line, the gym teacher barked at me: “Name?”
“Frame, sir.”
For some reason, these guys always elicit a “sir” from me.
“Frame. Right, Frame.” He handed me a lock closed around a hole-punched index card. “Locker number and combination.”
Then he gave me a creased yellow sheet from a large stack.
“This is the list of rotations. Mark your first and second choice. And sorry to say…”
The coach slashed a big red X across the first choice on the sheet. Gym teachers got red pens, too?
“… flag football is all filled up.”
“Gosh darn it,” I said. That was my lame attempt to act upset. Really, I was pleased. Flag football always resulted in everyone grabbing at everyone else’s crotch.
Yellow sheet in hand, I sought an open spot on the gym floor. There I sat, legs crossed, perusing my options. Weight Training. No way in hell. Soccer. Eh. CardioPump, CardioFunk, CardioFlex… embarrassing. Nutritional Science?
“Shit, man. All that’s left is Nutritional Science,” one guy leaving the line told another. Both guys sat down next to me.
“Hey, what is that?” I asked. “Nutritional Science?”
“You sit in a classroom and talk about vegetables,” the guy told me. “You even have tests. It sucks.”
“Yeah, sounds bad,” I said.
Tests? I loved tests! I was great at tests! Folding my paper over so they couldn’t see, I wrote a huge number 1 next to Nutritional Science. I creased the paper in half and slipped it into the pile on the coach’s table.
The first day went so well that, by the time it was over, I had forgotten the one rough patch—homeroom. In fact, I didn’t remember it until now, when I’m remembering everything.
Eff the F homeroom. It’s always a terrible place. For fifteen minutes between first period (history) and second period (physics) I was plunged into a boiling pot of kids from all different cliques, with the only thing we had in common being F last names. Our homeroom teacher was Mr. Pitt.
“Frame?” Mr. Pitt, who was more pit stains than Brad Pitt, squinted at his attendance sheet.
“Is that Frame? Where’s Frame?”
I tried to hide behind two kids playing hacky sack between the desks.
“Uh… uh,” I stuttered. Then I remembered I was a vampire and stood up proudly.
“That’s me,” I declared.
“It’s Frame? First name?” Mr. Pitt squinted at his sheet.
“Frame, last name,” I said.
“So it’s Finbar?”
“Right.”
I sat at my desk.
“Jesus,” said a lacrosse player next to me. “What kind of gay name is that?”
His friend, who was wearing one of those white baseball caps that’s never seen a washing machine, gave a dumb laugh.
I waited with forced calm until Lacrosse turned around to check on my reaction.
The old Finbar would have turned red from embarrassment. Now, as Vampire Finbar, I retained my pasty serenity and focused by unwrapping a stick of Doublemint. Gum was also part of my plan. Somehow, gum chewing and coolness are associated in my mind.
When he turned toward me, I had a better view of the lacrosse player’s rampant acne. Every lacrosse player I’ve met has been covered in zits. Neutrogena must be making a fortune off those cagey helmets.
“No answer, kid?” Lacrosse prodded. “What kind of gay name is that?”
I pointed toward a particularly ripe zit on his chin. It had two half-moon indents where he’d clearly tried to pop it with his nails but hadn’t succeeded.
“You have something on your face… right there,” I said.
God bless his friend’s stupidity. He gave that same stuttering laugh to my comment as he had to Lacrosse’s.
“Shut up, dude,” Lacrosse muttered vaguely, to one or to both of us.
The bell rang. Homeroom torture was over and I felt different than I had before, when mocked. At St. Luke’s, I’d always scrunched up in my seat, slumped over, or shrunk back. Today, I felt tall.
chapter 7
Upon first impression, Pelham Public looked just like I assumed it would be from Matt Katz’s first-day-of-school nap: relaxed. But there was bullying going on—more than the snide remarks about my name.
During my second week at my new school, I left physics class early to get my lab notebook and saw this kid Chris Cho from my Nutritional Science class in the empty hallway. Cho is a freshman, but he’s so skinny and small he looks like a lost middle schooler. He has one of those faces that always looks sad, but this period he looked even more bummed than usual. Then I saw that he wasn’t alone in the hallway—he was with Chris Perez.
Chris Perez was a sophomore with a shaved head. Girls went crazy for him—partly because he was good-looking and partly because he was a badass. Everyone called him Perez. Everyone talked about him. I mean, I’d only been here a week and a half, and I’d heard several legends about him already. Perez had parked in the teac
hers’ parking lot. Somehow he’d convinced the principal to let him keep the spot. Perez had climbed to the top of the rope in gym class. Perez had set off the fire alarm. Perez had bigger balls than anyone at Pelham Public. He was notorious at Pelham because he got in trouble a lot. Wait, correction—he should have gotten in trouble a lot. But when teachers caught him marking up the desks with ink pens or stealing from the school store, he’d play the sympathy card. He’d tell an elaborate story about his parents crossing the border and struggling to speak English, and he would get off scot-free.
But Perez didn’t seem like a sympathetic character now. He swaggered up to Chris Cho and nudged him in the ribs with his fist.
“Hey, buddy!” Perez said in a loud, unpleasant voice that let me know he wasn’t Cho’s “buddy” at all.
Cho lowered his head and tried to walk past Perez down the hallway. But Perez sidestepped easily and blocked Cho’s way.
“Nuh-uh-uh.” Perez shook his head. “Gotta pay the toll.”
Cho looked up with a blank face. I was watching from my locker down the hall, but Perez moved so quickly toward Chris Cho that I didn’t know what had happened until I saw Perez hold Cho’s wallet up above his head.
“Let’s see what we have in here,” Perez said. Lowering the leather wallet, he pulled it open with both hands. “Ten… eighteen bucks. Not bad today, Cho.”
Perez removed five bills from Cho’s wallet before letting it drop to the floor. He folded the bills in half and put them in his pocket. Then he clapped Cho on the shoulder like a teammate and walked away.
As I walked past Cho, he was picking up his wallet from the hallway floor. I reminded myself that vampires didn’t care about petty human interactions. I was a vampire, therefore I didn’t care about what was happening to Chris Cho. I didn’t feel bad for him—or feel empathy for him—at all.
In Jenny Beckman, I had my first female friend.
Being close to a girl—I mean, literally being within three feet of a girl—was new to me.
The motto at St. Luke’s dances was “Leave room for the Holy Spirit.” Our dean and chaperones would tell this to any guy who was dancing too close to a girl. I’m not sure anyone was concerned about the Holy Spirit being there as much as they were worried about St. Luke’s guys rubbing their khaki boners all over those poor girls. As for the Holy Spirit, I’m pretty sure if He could be anywhere in Heaven or on Earth, He would not have chosen to sweat it out beneath that lame disco ball and spill Kool-Aid down his dress shirt like the rest of us.
I was never told to “Leave room for the Holy Spirit.” Of course, I’d attended only two dances at St. Luke’s—the first one freshman year, when I was hopeful about meeting girls, and the last one sophomore year, when I collected tickets. I didn’t dance at either one, and I actually got closer to a girl when I was collecting tickets. I shared the ticket table with a suspicious student government leader from St. Mary’s who accused me of stealing from the cash box. I recounted the crumpled five-dollar bills and cigarette butts in the cash box while, in the center of the dance floor, Luke yelled himself hoarse and pumped his fist in a circle of girls. Luke is unafraid to look like an idiot, so he’s a great dancer. He’s also unafraid to get physically close to girls, which is the main reason I’ve avoided dancing for sixteen years.
Now I had Jenny around, all the time, with no room for the Holy Spirit. I got to see all her quirks and emotions up close and personal. And Jesus, she had a lot of emotions.
“I can’t believe Kayla Bateman got out of gym today,” Jenny was saying. “It’s, like, put on a sports bra. I’m pretty sure you can play dodgeball with big boobs. They’re, like, extra protection.”
Kayla Bateman apparently has some medical condition where her boobs won’t stop growing. It’s, like, a type of gigantism for boobs. She’s the Andre the Giant of boobs. Although I’d seen Kayla talking to our male gym teacher, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the doctor’s note that got her out of class.
After three weeks of friendship, I had already decided that a lot of Jenny’s frustrations in life derived from the fact that Kayla Bateman had enormous boobs and Jenny had no boobs. Well, not no boobs. I definitely still would have looked if she flashed me. Jenny had small boobs. Jenny would never admit that she was jealous of Kayla, but I picked up on it anyway. I have more sensitivity than the average male Clearasil user.
Personally, I thought a great solution would be to take some of Kayla Bateman’s boobs and give them to Jenny. Like, just lipo-suck Kayla’s chest and inject it into Jenny’s. It was the perfect solution. The girl who had too much would give to the girl who had too little. It was a redistribution of resources—a sort of Boob Communism. Boob-unism. Jenny would be happy with bigger boobs, and Kayla’s chiropractor would probably be glad that she wasn’t hauling those things around anymore.
Thinking about boobs in abstract economic terms was nothing new for me. I’d thought about boobs in more contexts than Karl Marx thought about poor people. But talking about boobs with someone who had boobs (even small ones like Jenny’s)—I’d never done that at all. That was revolutionary!
But I had to remember there were both boys and girls at this school. We were swimming around in a pool of our own hormones and pheromones. There was sex everywhere. Even between the students and the teachers! This one teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had senior boys coming to her classroom every period to propose to her. It was all because she had these perfect, round breasts. Those breasts were the subject of much speculation in our school—namely, were they real or fake? Jason Burke was assumed definitive when he declared Mrs. Anderson’s breasts “too good to be true.”
Jenny wasn’t my only friend at Pelham Public. It was hard not to get to know the other people she had introduced, considering I had seven classes a day with most of them. During our first physics lab period, Jason Burke asked me to be his partner.
“I didn’t want Ashley Milano,” Jason explained.
Not the most flattering motive for friendship. But good to know I ranked over Ashley Milano… and Nate the Nose-picker.
Ashley Milano, in turn, called out to me one day as I walked into AP literature.
“Finn, sit your ass down,” she called to me. “You have to hear this story.”
Someone has noticed me! I thought joyfully. Someone had noticed me… and my ass! Even with Jason, Kayla, Matt Katz, and Jenny there, Ashley’s audience wasn’t complete. She needed me, too.
As Ashley Milano’s story—which, like most of her stories, involved a senior boy and speculations about rhinoplasty—dragged on, I realized I was so busy actually making friends that I kind of forgot to be distant and mysterious. I mean, I’d planned the whole vampire thing to give a reason why I didn’t fit in with everyone else; why I wouldn’t make friends; why I would be so different. But I wasn’t that different, and I was starting to make friends. Dammit! My plan was foiled!
To keep myself on track, when Ashley Milano’s story dragged on, I locked my creepy eyes on her face and tried to “glamour” her into shutting up. Concentrating intensely, I visualized her lips coming together, magically sealed by my will. If Vampire Finbar shut Ashley Milano up, Vampire Finbar would be hailed as a hero. Hell, even a superhero.
It worked for half a second. She stopped the story to say, “Ew, Finn, are you looking down my shirt?”
Yeah, right. With Kayla Bateman two feet away? No chance. But clearly I had to work on my glamouring. In fact, I had to work on my vampire plan as a whole. My planned tactic had been to convince Jenny that I was a vampire first, then have her tell everybody else. Jenny was perfect: she was a big fantasy fan, she was a little needy, and she had once conducted a séance and set her hair on fire, so she obviously believed in crazy stuff. But Jenny had foiled my plan by becoming my friend. She was around too much. Vampires didn’t do these petty little human things like, say, eat or breathe. The eating I could handle—I didn’t have the same lunch period as Jenny, and I wasn’t very tempted by the frozen hamburgers in t
he unrefrigerated vending machines near the student lounge. The breathing, though? I couldn’t really kick that habit. And I actually tried, too.
But Jenny wasn’t getting the hint. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her outright, “I’m a vampire.” Due to her fantasy obsession, I had been waiting for her to confront me with, “You’re a vampire, aren’t you? I know you are!” and let me give my mysterious Chauncey Castle shrug. But she wasn’t confronting me.
Another reason I stalled in my vampire quest was this: I met a girl.
For my first week and a half at Pelham Public, I didn’t brave the cafeteria at lunch, retreating to my favorite place, the library, instead. Because I was the only junior taking AP Latin with the Pelham Public seniors (which was due to my sadistic Catholic teachers and their love of Latin declensions), I didn’t have lunch with any other juniors. I had lunch fourth period, when most of the sophomores and some freshmen ate.
My first day in the cafeteria, I saw a girl sitting by herself at a table, reading a book. This made me incredibly suspicious. Why? Because I thought it was a Finbar-trap. Mousetraps have cheese in them, and Finbar-traps would have shiny-haired high school brunettes in them, reading New York Times Notable Books.
Despite my suspicious instincts, I drew closer to this girl. And I felt the way my mother must have felt when she fell in love with my father through all those hockey pads and that face mask. I loved this girl even from the back, when all I could tell about her was that she had a hell of a great shampoo and had passed every scoliosis test she’d ever taken. I had to go up to her. I had to approach her. This need was bigger than my self-consciousness and my lack of experience with girls and my fear that I would spill my cafeteria spaghetti on her, which was basically the worst thing you could spill on someone.
When the girl turned, she was beautiful. She had glasses on, and behind them she had eyelashes you could count one by one like spider’s legs, and brown eyes taking in great big gulps of everything around her. Then she turned back to her book, which, as I walked up to her, I could see was Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.