by Flynn Meaney
“The guy lives,” I told her. “But Richard Parker dies.”
Life of Pi is about a shipwreck survivor who ends up floating on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. He’s stuck there with a giant tiger from the zoo, the tiger being named Richard Parker. The big suspenseful hook of the story is if the guy will survive in the boat, be saved, or be eaten by the tiger. Then he gets to be friends with the tiger, so you wonder if the tiger’s gonna survive. I’d just spoiled the story for this girl.
One side of her mouth curled up. I’m impressed by people who can do one-sided things, like raise one eyebrow. This, on this girl, was even better. She had great lips.
“I know,” she said.
“Oh… I’m, uh, sorry.”
I fumbled for an apology, ironic because she’d just told me I hadn’t ruined her ending. But I’d anticipated that she would be surprised by my comment, not me by hers.
The girl smiled, but turned back to Life of Pi. I felt the full awkward weight of my own body hovering over her. Say something or leave, Finbar. Fight or flight.
“Read it before?” I asked. I was suddenly obnoxiously loud because I was excited by the possibility that she could have read it before. The only thing better than a girl who read books was a girl who read the same book twice. A rereader. This girl could be a rereader!
“What?” When the girl looked up, her short dark hair fell into her eyes.
“Is that why you knew? The end?” I explained.
“I read the last page first,” she whispered, leaning a little toward me. Then she ducked behind her own falling bangs, like she was ashamed of having ruined the ending for herself.
“Unacceptable.” I shook my head. “I’m ashamed of you, Miss…”
Turning her head to get her bangs out of her eyes, the girl flipped the book so it was facedown next to her lunch tray. That was a big move. I’d officially captured her attention more than a shipwreck and a tiger.
“Gallatin,” she said. “Kate Gallatin.”
Then she placed her hand on the place beside her at the table. And I sat down, as simple as that. Well, first I put my backpack down in an awkward place on the ground, and it blocked the back legs of the chair, so I tried to pull the chair out but failed, so then I moved my backpack, but my legs were in the way of the chair, so I stepped to the side, pulled out the chair, and then sat down. But basically, I sat down.
“I’m Finbar,” I said. “I’m, uh, new.”
Glamouring is very difficult with a gorgeous girl. I narrowed my eyebrows as I locked eyes with Kate for the first time, but then Ashley Milano’s comment about me looking down her shirt popped into my head. I didn’t want Kate to think that!
Luckily, Kate, like everyone else, ignored the intense, hypnotic stare I fixed upon her.
“I’m new, too!” she said. “I haven’t seen you in my classes. Are you a sophomore?”
“No, uh, a junior,” I told her.
“Oh,” Kate said, grinning. “So you were held back in lunch?”
I laughed out loud. She was so quick. I would have to step up my game from “Uh,” “Oh,” and my own name.
“I just couldn’t graduate to using forks,” I said.
“Some guys can’t handle their opposable thumbs.” Kate shook her head.
Again I laughed, breaking that back-and-forth rhythm of our teasing each other. She picked up the slack, saying, “You’re probably only allowed to eat finger foods. Too bad it’s pasta day.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” I joked. “Do you mind smuggling a fugitive?”
Kate smiled. Except for the way my ribs were closing in—like they were cave walls and my heart was Indiana Jones—this whole conversation made me feel like I’d known this girl forever.
Except, of course, if I’d known this girl forever, I wouldn’t be a dour and cynical sixteen-year-old virgin who was pretending to be a vampire. But anyway…
“Actually,” I said, “I have lunch this period because I’m taking a weird Latin class. I mean, uh… an advanced Latin class.”
Maybe my knowledge of Latin was a really sexy quality.
“You would have been cooler if you stuck with the ‘failing lunch’ story,” Kate told me.
Maybe not.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But am I cool enough to eat lunch with you?”
“You should,” Kate said. “I’m great with this.” She flourished her fork. “I could teach you a thing or two.”
“We’ll see, sophomore,” I threatened, narrowing my eyes. Then I sat the whole lunch period with Kate, a smart, funny, literate, and incredibly sexy girl. I was so excited, I actually did forget how to use my fork.
For the rest of the afternoon, I was completely distracted. I was thinking about Kate. When Jenny came up to me at my locker, I barely registered that she was inviting me to go somewhere with her on Saturday afternoon. Still dreaming of Kate, fantasizing about doing a New York Times crossword puzzle together after blasphemous Sunday-morning sex, I agreed to whatever Jenny had asked me.
“Great!” Jenny said. “Don’t worry, we don’t have to wear costumes. And none of the weapons are real.”
“Huh?”
I froze by my locker as Jenny trotted happily away. Either Jenny and I had been hired as entertainers for a Lord of the Flies–themed birthday party, or I’d just accepted an invite to an S&M orgy.
chapter 8
Late Saturday afternoon, I picked up Jenny in my Volvo, and we drove to the Seventeenth Biannual East Coast Fantasy Fest. To me, the convention center was like a zoo where the animals walked around free, shaking one another’s hands and taking photographs together and drinking coffee. As I did when I was at the zoo, I wanted to look in too many different directions at once. Just when I’d focus on something new and strange, trying to understand it, some other thing would shimmer or flutter or screech by, and I’d turn my head. As a result, I bumped into about four different people—or creatures—within my first five minutes in the convention center.
There was a guy with horns the color of foreskin curled around his head who jumped out at me first. From a distance, the mask that covered his entire head was so similar to the color of his actual skin that it seemed an outgrowth of him.
Two men with beards down to their knees made peace signs at everyone who passed. A Round Table’s worth of knights in full armor lifted their face guards to sip from cans of Diet Pepsi. An angry little gargoyle with cracking blue-gray body paint was crouching around the ground and I accidentally tripped over him.
“Watch it, bitch,” he snapped.
“Jesus,” I said to Jenny, pulling myself back on my feet.
“C’mon, not everyone’s that mean,” Jenny said.
She was right. A group of girls in cottonball blond wigs and flesh-colored bodysuits blew me kisses.
Awkwardly, I waved back at them.
“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?” Jenny asked eagerly.
A sweaty mustachioed man in slippers and a green Robin Hood hat lunged in front of us, brandishing a real and rusted sword. His foe was a six-foot-five man in a full-bodied felt dragon costume. The blade missed my aorta by about six inches.
“Whoa!”
I made a face at Jenny, like I was thinking, It’s worse than I thought. But in reality, these crazy people around us both embarrassed and kind of impressed me. They embarrassed me because I couldn’t imagine walking into a public place with some horned mask or body paint. I would never even tell two hundred strangers that I liked to read, much less that I liked to read books about witches and dwarves. I thought about how the standard high school boy writes “I don’t read” under Favorite Books on his Facebook profile. Why? Because, whether it’s true or not, that’s the safe, conformist response. But not one of these Fantasy Fest-ers was a conformist, and they impressed me because of that. I was fascinated with the thought and time they’d put into their costumes, with the enthusiasm of Lord of the Rings fans debating metaphorical issues in Elvish, with
the warmth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Buffys embracing each other after months apart. One dedicated Harry Potter Dumbledore had grown a beard down to his knees. It must have taken him two years to grow that beard. Of course, he was, like, seventy years old. I guess by the time you’re that old, you don’t really care what people think of you. Or maybe none of these fantasy fans cared what people thought of them. Maybe that was what impressed me—their ability to put the weird things about themselves out in the open.
Speaking of people who put weird things about themselves out in the open, Jenny was tugging me across the convention center. She’d come to the Fantasy Fest mostly to get her book signed by Carmella Lovelace, the author of Bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only Bloodthirsty fan in attendance. When we turned the corner, we saw a hundred-person line. About fifteen percent of those people were girls dressed in slutty white dresses to look like Virginia White.
When one Virginia with lame cleavage saw the book in Jenny’s hand, she said, “Better get in line, girl.”
“We’ve been here since noon,” added another, who had ketchup down her dress as fake blood.
Jenny smacked me on the elbow as we headed for the back of the line.
“Ow! What?”
“We should have come earlier,” she admonished me.
“I told you that I have a sun sensitivity,” I told Jenny. “We couldn’t come at noon.”
“It’s not even sunny today!” Jenny told me. “It’s about to rain! And why are you so sensitive to the sun, anyway? What’s up with that?”
A blond girl with hair like feathers jumped out of the line toward me. Because of my recent experience with the sword guy and the felt dragon, it was understandable that I jumped back and kind of shrieked like a girl.
“Hi!” she squealed. “How are you?”
The blond girl pulled me in for a hug, pinning my arms at my sides. Jesus, girls were really friendly at these things. Either that or my mom’s notes were right and I was a stud.
When she pulled away, though, I saw it was the blonde from the train. The girl who had started all of this by mistaking me for a vampire. Apparently she had branched out beyond her own creepy vampire book, Nocturnal Terror, to the more sexy Bloodthirsty.
“How are you feeling?” Blondie asked in a low voice, leaning toward me.
Jenny listened intently.
“Oh, fine,” I said politely. “How are you?”
“I’m sorry I called you out that day on the train,” Blondie said in the same low voice. “I shouldn’t have revealed what you were in a public place. I understand why you got so pissed. I’ll be more subtle from now on.”
“Oh, okay, well, thanks,” I said, hoping Jenny was picking up possible hints from this, but more strongly hoping to escape this psycho.
“Are there any others here?” the blond girl hissed.
“What?” I asked.
“Other vamp—”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean…”
A boy, probably twelve years old, walked by sulkily with his hands in his pockets. He was dressed like Edward Cullen from Twilight—reddish streaks in his hair, all this powder on his face to make him pale.
“No real ones,” Blondie finished for me, her voice low and intense.
“How do you guys know each other?” Jenny asked, looking up from me to Blondie like a child trying to decode a grown-up conversation.
“Does she know?” Blondie asked me.
Jenny looked up expectantly. I felt intensely awkward. I felt even less comfortable with the idea of telling Jenny my fake vamp status than I had in school. And explaining Blondie would force me to say it.
“We have to go to the back of the line,” I commanded Jenny.
“Finbar!” Jenny wailed. “Carmella Lovelace just got here! I can see her beehive hair!”
“We should really…”
But it was too late. A jumpy brunette had joined my one-girl bleach-blond fan club.
“Is this him?” the brunette asked conspiratorially. She pointed to me, and I was startled to see that a rubber glove had transformed her hand into a large green claw.
“Shhh!” The blonde’s hiss dissolved into giggles.
“This is him!” the clawed brunette called to another girl.
The third girl came towering over with frightening force. She was clearly the only Amazon woman in suburban New York. The girl had me by about five inches. Hell, she had Yao Ming by five inches.
“The vampire!” she hissed excitedly.
It was only when the Amazon bent at the waist to hug me, and I ducked, that I could see Jenny’s reaction. Beneath her carrot-red roots and goth-black streaks, Jenny’s mouth had dropped open. She held the cover of Bloodthirsty and looked from it to me. Her mouth didn’t shut. Seriously, she could have swallowed a fly.
Meanwhile, I was in a frightening high school girl huddle, my eardrums flooded by high-frequency screams, dispossessed from my own body as it was examined like I was a Jonas Brothers impersonator at a suburban mall.
“Look at his skin!” one marveled, stroking my forearm.
Another grabbed the same arm from the first girl and flipped it over.
“You can see all of his veins,” she said. Her manicured finger traced a blue line down into my palm.
A sense of déjà vu flooded me. When had this happened to me before? A crowd of girls pressing upon me, desperate to touch me? Oh, wait. That had never happened to me before. But it had happened to Luke. Maybe we had the twin ESP thing going. And clearly, both of us were very desirable.
But my smugness was fleeting. After six or seven girls lined up near me, feeding my ego, I saw the first guy.
My first thought was that he was joining the girls in admiring my body. Which I guess would be fine, as long as he looked and didn’t touch. Then Jenny called out desperately:
“Finbar! Watch out!”
Oh, shit. Now I knew why there were guys coming after me. I had forgotten how close we were to the vampire slayers table. Apparently in this alternate universe, Buffy was not the only vampire slayer. There were also adolescent boys, and even full-grown men, who hated vampires. I knew this, because the vampire slayers table had a huge vampire doll hanging from a noose above the table. When last I passed, the guys at this table had been eagerly debating the merits of silver chains and wooden stakes as vampire-killing weapons. Now they had stopped talking theoretically. There was someone in their midst for whom they’d waited their whole fantasy lives: a real, live (well, dead, but you know) vampire.
And oh, shit—it was me!
I grabbed on to the biggest thing in sight to protect me—the Amazon girl. I actually felt pretty safe inside all those girls. Safe enough to peek around Blondie and see that the vampire slayers’ wooden stakes were made out of cardboard. One of them even had “Best Buy” visible through a wash of brown paint. So these guys weren’t going to actually kill me. I could calm down. The vampire slayers weren’t that tough.
But there were more joining the ranks. All the Jacobs had come over from the Twilight table. In Stephenie Meyer’s books, Jacob is a jocky high school dude. Now, that alone would have me waving a white flag. But Jacob happens to be a jocky high school dude… who turns into a WEREWOLF. And guess who happens to be the mortal enemy of the werewolf? Who does Jacob want to hunt down in the woods and tear apart limb by pale puny limb?
The vampire.
Of course, these Jacobs couldn’t really turn into werewolves. But they were charging at me like they thought they could turn into werewolves. And besides that, Jacobs were way cooler than vampire slayers. They were the kind of guys who came to a fantasy convention to collect weapons and hit on girls. And, you know, join a furious mob about to beat down a pale kid.
I turned and took off, frenzied, seeking the nearest exit sign. With the Jacobs involved, the mob was really gaining on me.
I slammed the door open, took a brief breath while surveying the parking lot, and then sprinted around the back of the build
ing, panting like I’d just climbed Mount Gundabad.
“I have a compass!” I heard a vampire slayer say from around the front of the convention center.
Uh-oh. It was only a matter of time before they multiplied two pi by the radius of this building, which was a geodesic dome, and found me 180 degrees around the back. Wait, hold up. That’s it! This building was a geodesic dome! (Okay, you’re right, a guy who knows what a geodesic dome is shouldn’t mock anyone for using the number pi. FYI—a geodesic dome is a building that looks like a golf ball.)
But I felt suddenly light and free. Because I had remembered this time the whole Alexandria fire squad had been called to our middle school because Luke had scaled a building and was camped out on top. The building he scaled was our indoor track, which was a geodesic dome. The fantastic thing about geodesic domes was that you could climb them.
Okay, not anyone could climb them. Luke could climb them, being the 80 percent ape that he is. It was a little more difficult for me considering I had zero climbing abilities and wasn’t wearing a belt.
But I reached up the base of the dome and found a hand-hold, and then found a ledge for my foot. I began to climb, fueled by the need to escape the Jacobs and the vampire slayers and those Bloodthirsty fiends. For one thing, I’d never been in a fight in my life. For another, if I were in a fight, it would become clear I wasn’t a vampire. I didn’t have super speed, super strength, or any kind of physical coordination.
Plus, one extra nasty little detail: I’m scared of blood. I hate blood. That’s one reason I try to avoid fights, violent team sports, and, come to think of it, CSI in any of its many incarnations. And, if I passed out at the sight of blood, everyone would know I was not a vampire. Being scared of blood wasn’t exactly good for my street cred. Or whatever the vampire version of street cred was. Coffin cred?
Oh, why had I given in to fantasy violence? Why hadn’t I brokered peace? Why hadn’t I suggested, “Let’s all join hands and sing the Ewok song from Return of the Jedi ! All species are welcome here!” Why had I even come to this Fantasy Fest? Why had I decided that becoming a vampire would result in less people wanting to beat me up?