Bloodthirsty

by Flynn Meaney

  A few weeks into school, Jenny had told me that Perez was a bullshitter and no one in his family was an immigrant. He was actually really rich. His father owned the biggest spring-break resort in Puerto Vallarta, and his mom was blond with fake boobs. She’d almost been chosen to be one of the housewives in The Real Housewives of New York City. The only true part of his sad tale was that his mother may or may not have been a stripper, but either way they’d never gone hungry.

  So was I obsessing about Perez and Cho because Perez was a spoiled liar and a jerk to steal someone else’s stuff when he was rich? Actually, that wasn’t why. It wasn’t even Perez’s behavior that bothered me most. It wasn’t how possessive he was, how he put his hands all over Cho in an odd, almost seductive manner. It wasn’t the voice he used when he dug in his pockets, this wheedling, creepy voice, like the one Harry Potter used when he talked to snakes. It wasn’t the praise he heaped upon Cho when he’d given him what he wanted.

  It was Cho’s behavior that bothered me. You couldn’t even call what Perez was doing “stealing” anymore. Cho was just handing all his crap over! That drove me crazy—how Cho shuffled down the hallway so dutifully, like Dilbert heading back to his cubicle. How he slumped his shoulders in that oversize jacket. How he didn’t even walk down the other side of the hallway. How he didn’t run. How he didn’t raise his hands to shield his face. How he didn’t push Perez away from his pockets. How he didn’t protect himself. How he didn’t even try some second-grade karate or order pepper spray off the Internet. How he didn’t defend himself.

  How much he was like me.

  I watched the robbery go down at least once a week throughout September. But I kept a safe distance at first. Sure, Cho was acting like I had at St. Luke’s—but he wasn’t me, and I wasn’t at St. Luke’s anymore. I told myself I was not only far from Chris Cho, but far from the passive, bullied guy I myself had been, that guy who couldn’t come up with an answer for Johnny Frackas. Now I was powerful. I had friends. I not only spoke up, I said “cock-tease” in English class. I told myself I should stop obsessing. But I kept obsessing. So, in October, when Perez took Cho’s cell phone, I did something.

  Cho had almost made it to his math class when Perez slammed open the door of the bathroom. He crossed the hall in three strong strides. Having left class, supposedly to retrieve my lab report, I was watching from my locker, three classroom doors down the hall.

  “Chris Cho,” Perez called loudly. “Buddy. BFF. What do you have for me today?”

  Briefly, Cho raised his shoulders, then let them fall.

  “You don’t know?” Perez said. He bent down and got right in Cho’s face, breathing on Cho’s nose and mouth. “You want me to find out? You get off on this, Cho?”

  Cho turned his head away from Perez’s breath and said something I didn’t hear.

  “What was that?”

  Perez hadn’t heard either.

  “I don’t have anything today,” Cho said.

  “Cho, don’t sell yourself short,” Perez cajoled. He took an odd sort of encouraging tone with his victim. He was giving Cho a pump-up speech.

  “You’re loaded,” Perez encouraged Cho. “You’re a very lucky kid, ya know that?”

  “I don’t have anything today,” Cho mumbled again.

  But Perez knew Cho was lying. Perez had this built-in radar for valuables. He was like one of those scanners old people use to find coins at the beach. Sensing there was nothing worth robbing in Cho’s backpack, Perez ripped it out of Cho’s hand and sent it spinning across the hallway. It landed two feet in front of my locker, but neither of them looked back or noticed me. Then Perez pulled up Cho’s jacket. Nothing worthwhile in there, either. Perez wrapped his hands around Cho’s hips and basically grabbed his ass. With one hand, he slowly pulled away his prize of the day.

  Cho’s cell phone was flat and sleek, silver with a touch screen and a full keyboard. It was a really nice phone. $350, easy. What did Perez do with these things? Sell them? Or use them himself, flaunting Cho’s stuff in his face? And what did Cho do once they were taken? What would he do without his cell phone? What would he tell his parents had happened to it?

  “Hey,” I called down the hallway.

  Cho looked more scared than Perez did. Neither of them had known I was there.

  Perez looked back only briefly. The only effect I had on him was speeding up the process. He dangled Cho’s phone in front of his eyes, let it slip from between his thumb and forefinger, and then dropped it in his own shirt pocket.

  “Taxed!” Perez said merrily, and spun off to jog down the hallway.

  Slowly and deliberately, I picked up Cho’s backpack from the floor, walked over, and handed it to him. The whole time I was breathing heavily, preparing. Then with a manic change of speed, I took off after Perez.

  When I sped up, he sped up. And even in enormous jeans with chains dragging them down and unlaced shoes, Chris Perez was fast. His pants slipped down his thighs as he ran. I got such a nice shot of his ass that I could’ve picked it out of a lineup. His sneaker soles squeaked in the empty hallway. But none of this slowed Perez down.

  The incredible thing, though, was this: I was faster. This hallway, West Corridor, was long and clear and I pushed off the waxed tile floor, blood flooding my pumping arms and my long legs. Taking powerful strides, I cut across five floor tiles at a time. Everything was sharp and focused and working together: my hands and elbows in line, my heels kicking back behind me, my body propelling me forward faster than I could think or breathe. I know that I’m not a superhero. I know that I don’t have special powers. But in that moment, I felt like I did.

  Chris Perez was running on one side, along the lockers, and I was running on the other side, along the classroom doors. But I ran at an angle. I cut across. When I caught up, I caught up at Chris’s left shoulder. I dug the palm of my right hand into his shoulder and turned him so he was facing me. Then, with both palms, I slammed him into the lockers.

  As a child, when I caught up with Luke when he got lost, I’d always pull him back. I would grab him and pull him back toward me, toward home, toward safety.

  But with Chris Perez, I pushed. I pushed him away from me and into the wall. The back of his skull cracked against the wooden beam above the lockers. The chains of his jeans clanged against one of the combination locks.

  Perez was surprised I’d caught up so fast, but he was still quick and feisty. He shoved me off him, but I plunged immediately back, forcing my fists into his neck. To hold the rest of his body back, I raised my knee to pin his left hip into the lockers. With the fist not holding the cell phone, he swung at me, but my arms were longer than his and kept me at a safe enough distance. I was taller than Perez, too, by at least four inches, and I emphasized this by looking down on him.

  “Drop Cho’s phone,” I ordered.

  “Fuck you, Frame,” he choked out hoarsely.

  I was briefly flattered that he knew who I was. It actually gave me confidence.

  “Feel dizzy?” I asked him. “I’ve got your jugular. And since you’re a dumbass, I’ll tell you what your jugular is. It’s the thing that takes blood from your brain.”

  Thank you, Mr. Muncher. Our ninth-grade biology teacher at St. Luke’s had taught us the location of the jugular vein, and also how to use the veins and arteries of the neck in a fight. My life was hell for three weeks after, as I was daily slammed against lockers while some jerk like Johnny Frackas dug his hands into my throat. I remembered the sensation, pinned up and back, trying to jerk forward but feeling first light-headed, then powerless as numbness tingled its way down my arms….

  Perez’s fingers ungripped. I felt them go loose next to my knee. Cho’s phone dropped next to Perez’s wide-legged jeans.

  Then Perez struggled suddenly, forcing his body forward. He was really strong, and he was kind of banging me around. No longer holding the phone, he had both hands free to grab at my arms, my hands. I made sure my body was far enough back that he couldn
’t get at my stomach. But I focused on keeping my hands on his neck.

  “Give back his other shit, too,” I said.

  “Who gives a shit,” Perez wheezed.

  His instinct was to be a smartass. His reflex was to refuse. But then he shut up, and his face changed. His jaw slacked. His eyelids got heavy. He was feeling dizzy, I could tell. And scared—he was scared.

  I had Chris Perez exactly where I wanted him. I felt adrenaline throbbing through me, heating my skin. I was focused and fearless. I was dangerous. I was powerful. I was bloodthirsty. This is the moment when my fangs would have come out. They didn’t, but I was still full of conviction.

  I was a vampire.

  chapter 12

  At home that night, assuming that chasing and choking a guy in the hallway would eventually elicit punishment, I decided to jump the gun and tell my parents.

  “I kind of got into a fight today,” I said at dinner.

  It’s hard to say that casually. Even though my voice was calm, my mom dropped a full bowl of salad. She had read an article on eating local, so she’d stolen a bunch of greens from our neighbor’s garden.

  “What happened?” she asked, frantically rushing over to examine me. “Where did he hit you? Do you have a concussion? You’re not going to sleep tonight. Paul, keep him awake tonight.”

  “He didn’t get your face, Finn,” my dad said enthusiastically, inspecting me for black eyes. “That’s the important thing. At least he didn’t hit your face.”

  “He didn’t hit me at all,” I said.

  “Did someone stop him?” my mother asked. “Did a teacher stop him?”

  “I stopped him!” I yelled in frustration. Why did even my own parents assume I was a wuss? “I stopped him. I hit him.”

  “Oh, Finbar,” my mother moaned. She knelt helplessly among her purloined parsley. “You’re a bully.”

  “He’s a fighter!” my father boomed, suddenly loud and boastful. “Like his old man!”

  Says the man who, as a college hockey player, performed a triple axel to avoid a confrontation on the ice.

  “What’d you do to him?” Luke asked eagerly.

  “He was being a jerk,” I said. “He was picking on a freshman.”

  My mother pulled up greens off the floor with her tongs and put them on my plate.

  “You’re falling apart, Finbar!” my mother said. “You’ve changed. You’re not even involved in anything anymore! Why aren’t you writing for the paper or working on the literary magazine?”

  “I might join this investment club,” I volunteered.

  “Greed,” my mother asserted, shoving contaminated floor-salad in my face. “Greed and violence will get you nowhere, Finbar.”

  * * *

  Pelham Public’s principal, Dr. Hernandez, took two full days to call me into his office to talk about the fight. I had been kind of sweating it out the whole time. I knew that Dr. Hernandez knew about the “fight” because of the way it had ended. Mr. Pitt came out of his class when I was still cutting off the oxygen to Chris Perez’s brain.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?” Mr. Pitt had asked.

  I pulled back right away, but the whole thing looked suspicious. We were too close to each other. I was all guilty and flushed. Perez was panting to catch his breath, and his pants were around his knees. Actually, now that I think about it from Mr. Pitt’s perspective, maybe it didn’t look The Outsiders suspicious as much as it looked Queer as Folk suspicious. Probably our teacher didn’t know what to think.

  So, anyway, I was sweating out a punishment due to my cruel Catholic upbringing. At St. Luke’s the teachers were completely sadistic. Detention consisted of standing six inches from the blackboard staring at a dot for thirty minutes without moving. If you looked away or even blinked for too long, you got ten extra minutes. Then there was the punishment called JUG—Judgment Under God. Basically, rebels were sent to sit on the school steps in the cold to wait for a lightning bolt to smite them for the horrible transgression of mismatched socks or passed gas during a prayer.

  Pelham Public High School was completely different. There was no God to judge us here. Actually there were probably a bunch of deities floating around—one fiery pork-hating god for the Jews, and also for half Jews like Kayla Bateman; a mild WASP-y god with good manners for the Protestant kids in polo shirts. But our teachers weren’t allowed to talk about any of them. Plus, there was that curious attitude of relaxation I had sensed the first day. I don’t just mean all the napping. I’m talking about discipline.

  For example, Pelham had a theater teacher who smoked cigarettes in the parking lot with students and told them about her messy divorce. When a cell phone rang during a lecture in my history class, the owner not only answered the phone but also held her finger up to the teacher and asked, “Can you keep it down for a second?”

  And once, a sophomore English teacher, Mr. Watts, found out that one of his students had spent the past eight class periods carving an elaborate design into his desk. The “artwork” read: “Mr. Watts and Dickens sucks dick.” Mr. Watts confronted the carver, telling him, “That’s wrong!” Then Mr. Watts took the knife and crossed out the last s in sucks. “This sentence has two objects,” he explained. “You need to conjugate the verb differently.” And he handed the knife back.

  Our principal was probably the source of all this relaxation. Not that he was exactly relaxed. More like confused. Dr. Hernandez stood in his doorway between classes and waved awkwardly to the students who rushed past, calling them by names that were not only incorrect but also bizarre. “Good afternoon, Jarvis,” he would say to Jason Burke. Or “Aster,” with a nod to Ashley.

  So I wasn’t surprised when Dr. Hernandez addressed me as “Phineas” when he emerged from his office to find me in the waiting room, biting my nails while sitting between his two secretaries. After he pulled his office door shut behind me, he asked, “It is Phineas, isn’t it?”

  “Close enough,” I said as we each took a seat.

  I’d never been called into the principal’s office in my life. It was a little different than I’d expected. The secretary had seemed confused and a little bit annoyed by me, and when Dr. Hernandez led me inside, he offered me five different things—coffee, tea, water, soda, and breath mints (was that a hint?)—before he sat down.

  “Well, Phineas,” he began sadly.

  I was already contemplating possible punishments. I could deal with detention, which consisted of pushing a large trash can around to different classrooms and emptying smaller trash cans into it. I could even deal with the orange juvie-looking vest they made you wear for trash duty. I wouldn’t be thrilled, though, if my punishment lowered my GPA. Somehow, though, I didn’t get the sense that Dr. Hernandez even had the power to change my GPA.

  “This sort of behavior,” he began. “Running in the hallways. Slamming people into lockers. Threatening people.”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Hernandez shook his head.

  In imitation, I shook my head.

  “I see that you agree,” Dr. Hernandez said, setting his hands flat on his desk.

  “I agree, sir,” I said.

  All he had done was list my behaviors. He hadn’t condemned them. Yes, I had run in the hallway, slammed Perez into a locker, and threatened him. I agreed completely.

  “And if you had to come in here again…” Dr. Hernandez began. A phlegmy cough seemed sufficient to complete his threat. If I had to come in here again, Dr. Hernandez would cough on me. After the cough, he looked up at me expectantly.

  “Completely fair,” I said.

  Looking around the room at Dr. Hernandez’s framed pictures, in which he was shaking hands with administrators, local politicians, and Pelham Public valedictorians and athletes, I noticed a consistent theme. The poor man always seemed a little lost. The expression on his face said, “What is that big light you’re flashing at me, and who is this person again?” Poor confounded principal. My father had much the same face in many of our
family photo albums—why were my supposed male role models so bewildered?

  Now Dr. Hernandez stood up and extended his hand.

  “It seems that we understand each other, Phineas,” he told me.

  “I think we do, Dr. Fernandez,” I concurred.

  “Huh?”

  By the time he realized my mistake, I had my backpack on and was headed for the doorway. I didn’t blame Dr. Hernandez for his lack of disciplinary action. If I’m going to give him credit, I might say that he knew that I was a good kid and Chris Perez was a bad kid who had gotten away with too much already. Maybe this was kind of a “thank you.”

  * * *

  What about Chris Perez? You may expect, as my nervous stomach expected, that he would pay me back with a beatdown.

  Chris Perez could have issued to his many followers and admirers throughout the school a death warrant for me. He could have made it hell for me to turn any corner. He could have run me over (Chris Perez was only fifteen, but somehow he had a driver’s license. Chris Perez got everything he wanted). He could have reduced me to a skinny speed bump in the school parking lot. And yet, he did nothing.

  Okay, he did some things. He muttered things under his breath, things like:

  “Your dick must be small to fit up Cho’s ass.”

  But I would just stare at him. Like I was waiting. Like he must have some better insult than that.

  Perez would look away; he didn’t like me staring at him. He said it was because I was gay, but I think he was sort of scared. The last time I had stared at him, he’d lost the ability to breathe. He’d started to go numb. Maybe he’d believed, for a split second, imprisoned in my merciless, creepy see-through eyes, that he would die.

  Now I was pretty sure he thought I was a psycho. The type of kid who, if you pushed him over the edge, would show up to school in a trench coat with the pockets full of knives. Not the most flattering perception, but it kept him away from me.

  As for everyone else, this isolated incident of violence helped my reputation tremendously. Apparently, shortly after “the fight,” Kayla Bateman was telling stories about me to people in study hall. Jenny confronted her, claiming that she knew more about me than anyone else, and if anyone should be telling Finbar stories, it should be Jenny. Anyway, Jenny and Kayla already didn’t get along because of the dichotomy in their bra sizes, and they got into a fight trying to prove they knew me better. This alone is proof of how ridiculous Kayla is, because I’ve had one conversation with her in my life, and it went: “Can I borrow a pen?” “No. My other one exploded.” But anyway, somewhere during the Fight for Finbar, laying down the trump card of Finbar knowledge, Jenny revealed to Kayla that I was a vampire.