Bloodthirsty

by Flynn Meaney

  So one day in mid-October, at the lockers only a few feet down from mine, Ashley Milano was going on and on about how I couldn’t have really caught Chris Perez in the hallway, couldn’t have really pinned him against the locker, couldn’t have choked him without getting my ass kicked.

  “And Finbar doesn’t have any bruises or a black eye or anything,” Ashley Milano said. “And we would see if he did, because he’s really pale.”

  “He’s pale for a reason,” Kayla whispered ominously, her voice carrying over her own breasts.

  Ashley ignored that. “And Finbar would never win. Chris Perez skips, like, three classes a day to go to the fitness center. He’s in crazy good shape.”

  “But I’ve heard Finbar’s, like… freakishly strong,” Kayla said.

  They both looked over at me in wonder. I happened to be having trouble getting my locker open, which was ironic. When I did finally open it, I did it with a flourish and then kind of flexed. Awkwardly, of course.

  “Finbar’s really tall,” Ashley admitted. “But his muscles don’t look that big.”

  “But he’s got these crazy reflexes,” Kayla continued. “Finbar can sense danger.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Kayla fished a pack of Tic Tacs out of her cleavage and shook a few into Ashley’s hand before continuing her explanation.

  “It’s like Twilight,” Kayla said. “You know how Edward stops the car just before it hits Bella in the parking lot? Finbar is like that.”

  Kayla winked a bunch of times.

  “Is there something wrong with your mascara?” Ashley asked.

  “No,” Kayla said pointedly. “I mean, Finbar is like that.”

  Ashley gasped. “Like…” She leaned over to whisper something into Kayla’s ear. Kayla nodded vigorously and both of them shrieked. Then they turned to look at me.

  At that exact moment, I happened to be unwrapping a stick of Doublemint. I folded it nonchalantly into my mouth. Then I threw the wrapper on the ground, littering carelessly.

  “He’s so cool,” Ashley sighed.

  * * *

  The second most unexpected reaction to my actions came about a week afterward, when I was leaving my Latin classroom. It was senior lunch period, and the hallways were crowded and noisy with people fighting over who got to drive and if they still wanted to go to Burger King now that the menu listed how many calories were in everything.

  “Yo, Frame!”

  I heard this call amidst all the brouhaha but continued down the hallway completely undisturbed. I didn’t respond to Frame. Frame is a football player’s name, a name that’s shouted in locker rooms and across fields. Frame is a name for rooms full of sweaty men. My brother, Luke, was Frame. So I didn’t turn around.

  Then, I realized that Luke, owner and dominator of the name Frame, was ten miles south in the Bronx. I was Frame.

  Pelham Public’s assistant sports director, this guy Coach Doakes, who has taken self-tanning way too far, was hurrying his pumpkin-colored self after me down the hall. I swear to you I thought he was gonna track me down and chew me out for pussying out of gym and taking Nutritional Science instead. I was preparing an argument on how much I’d improved my quality of life by learning about the acai berry.

  “Frame,” Coach Doakes said seriously. “Word is you’re a hell of a runner.”

  “Huh?”

  Word? What word? Oh, probably the words of every kid who’d heard that poetry scholar Finbar Frame had somehow scared the shit out of Chris Perez.

  “I’d love to see you run,” Coach Doakes told me.

  I looked at him, panicked. I thought he meant right then. I looked ahead of me and estimated how many freshman girls in ponytails I’d have to mow down to prove my athletic worth.

  “What?”

  “Tryouts for the track team are in ten days,” Coach Doakes said. “I’ve already got a lot of sprinters. Muscle guys. What I need is endurance. Long-distance guys. Long, lean guys like you. With a frame like Frame. Ha! Get it?”

  “Yeah.” I gave him a queasy laugh.

  “So you wanna run track?”

  A vision of myself as the baby daddy from Juno, all short-shorts and bony shoulders, bounced disturbingly through my head. Any extracurricular that required tighty-whities made me wary. Then another thought made me wary. The sun. I imagined my pale exposed flesh baking and sweating in the sun for three hours every afternoon. I couldn’t be out in the sun for that long. If I were, people would start to notice that I wasn’t sparkling like Edward in Twilight or bursting into flames like Chauncey Castle from Bloodthirsty. They would know that I wasn’t a vampire. Oh, and I’d break out into hives. That too.

  “I’m not really… great… with the sun,” I told Coach Doakes.

  The coach didn’t look at me like I was crazy, which most people did when I talked about the sun like it and I were in a rocky romantic relationship.

  “Frame, I’m talking winter track,” Coach said impatiently. “Indoor track.”

  “Oh, psh,” I breathed out, relieved. “Sure. Great.”

  “Great!” He clapped me on the back. “See ya at tryouts!”

  Wait, what? I was so excited at avoiding the sun that I joined a varsity sport? I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. And I wasn’t even wearing the short-shorts yet.

  The best reaction to my violence, though, was not my ambush varsity recruitment. The best reaction came the day after the fight happened. I still had some sore hamstrings from that unexpected hallway sprint (a sad comment on my physical fitness—and on Luke’s ability as a personal trainer), so I was squatting and wincing as I dropped books onto the bottom of my locker before lunch.

  “Hey, Tony Soprano,” someone said.

  I looked up and, despite my pain, smiled. It was Kate.

  “What’s that?” I asked Kate.

  She was hanging on the open door of my locker, and I stood up quickly so it wouldn’t look like I was looking up at her boobs. Which I had been, but only briefly and respectfully. Ouch, hamstrings.

  “I hear you’re kicking ass around here,” Kate said. “Should I be scared?” She drew away from me, pretending to tremble. “I wouldn’t want to provoke your rage.”

  “No rage here.” I held my hands up in surrender.

  I didn’t want Kate to think of me as Chris Perez did—mentally unstable. That wasn’t attractive.

  “I just think Chris Perez is a jerk,” I explained, shrugging.

  “Me too,” Kate said. “In chem class the other day, he spilled hydroxylic acid on me.”

  “Were you okay?” I asked. “Did it burn you or something?”

  “Hydroxylic acid is water,” Kate said, grinning.

  Oh. Dumb Finbar. How did I get that A in chem last year?

  “But he got my jeans wet,” Kate continued. “And I had to borrow a pair of shorts from Audrey Li.”

  Audrey Li was a famed sophomore slut. “Oh, so you have scabies now?” I asked.

  Kate laughed. “Pretty much,” she said.

  She stared at me for a second. Then she poked me in the shoulder.

  “Does this provoke your rage?” she asked.

  Her index finger poked my pale skin repeatedly, ranging from my shoulder to my collarbone. She asked repeatedly, purposefully annoying: “Does this provoke your rage? Does this provoke your rage? Am I provoking your rage?”

  I was not provoked. I just stood there, laughing, calm, as people passed the open lockers, went through their lockers, trudged by in backpacks, turned into classrooms, walked out the doors. And in the midst of all this normalcy, I leaned toward Kate, shaking my head, and then an extraordinary thing happened.

  Kate had been poking the back of my neck, but then she used her fingers to pull me forward. There was no ambiguity about what she was doing, no question, none of the hesitation that characterized my whole life, and especially my love life.

  Kate kissed me.

  My first thought was, She’s giving me CPR! That’s how little sexua
l experience I have. Then I realized that I was not having a heart attack. This girl was voluntarily pressing her lips to mine. And she wasn’t even trying to hide the kiss. People were watching—out of my peripheral vision, I saw half of Mrs. Anderson’s fan club walk by. A whole bunch of guys were seeing me, Finbar, making out like a pimp.

  After all these things ran through my head, I realized I had to kiss back.

  I had barely lowered my lip to below hers when she pulled away. But I really don’t think she pulled away out of repulsion. I’m pretty sure that was the natural ending to the kiss…. Right?

  “Let’s go to lunch,” Kate said, like she kissed guys every day during fourth period by the lockers, and then went to eat chicken patties. Like this was normal. Instead of what it was to me, which was… incredible.

  chapter 13

  So you may ask, “Hey, Finbar, what’s up with you and the sun? Do you still have a beef?” (Yeah, I’m now allowed to use “beef” when not referring to hamburgers. I beat up Chris Perez! I have street cred.)

  Well, the answer is: I cannot defeat the sun. I can defeat Chris Perez, but I cannot defeat the sun. My first few days at Pelham Public I hiked from my crappy parking spot to my first period class. During those ten minutes outside, I didn’t shrivel up and die or anything. But I did get a little itchy. And I didn’t want to be known as that Itchy Kid. I’d be classified in the Untouchables along with Nate Kirkland.

  So I retrieved my eighty-year-old-man sunglasses from the doctor and wore them to school every morning. I also wore this big sweatshirt that I stole from Luke and pulled the hood up over my head. Because of my whole incognito look, those skater kids who drew on their shoes mocked me every morning. They always sat on top of cars in the parking lot. They were always there, no matter how early I arrived. For guys who skipped every class, they were ridiculously punctual.

  “Hey, it’s the international man of mystery!” they’d call out to me.

  Or “Hey, Mr. Hollywood!”

  I would just duck my head and wave, as if I were in Hollywood and they were nonthreatening papparazzi.

  By staying inside during lunch and slouching in the darkest, creepiest corners of all my classes (which was pretty vampiric anyway), I avoided any itching incidents. Before I realized it, I fell into a routine. And soon it was late October and cold enough that I actually needed my sweatshirt.

  One morning Matt Katz told me, “I love this, man. When the weather gets cold.”

  He gestured outside, to the lovely autumn trees dropping dark red leaves on Mrs. Rove’s Escalade. Wow, I thought. Matt Katz is deeper than I thought. He really sees the beauty in nature. And all kinds of nature, not just that one type of grass…

  “Yeah,” Matt Katz continued. “I get to wear my jacket with the big pockets!”

  He flipped his jacket open to reveal two large pockets on the inside. Besides all the contraband he had stashed in there, which I won’t mention for legal reasons, he also had two different iPod Nanos and a bunch of Werther’s Original hard candies.

  It was also in October that we realized that our physics teacher, who looked like Albert Einstein if he were a drag queen, was too busy crashing toy cars into the walls and measuring their velocities to notice if we showed up to our lab period. One day Jason Burke, Ashley Milano, and Jenny decided to take advantage of this by going to Dunkin’ Donuts (or, as Ashley had dubbed it, Double D) third period instead of drawing vectors for forty-five minutes.

  “Hey, Finn,” Jason called to me on my way to the physics room. He jangled his car keys at me. “Come to Double D with us. Blow off lab.”

  I kind of froze in my tracks. This was a dilemma. On one hand, I had worked hard to establish myself as a guy who, as my admirers would say, “didn’t give a shit.” The badass Finbar who schooled Mrs. Rove about poetic erections wouldn’t care if he got in trouble for skipping physics lab.

  On the other hand, it was really sunny out today. The kind of sun that would make me break out like a biblical leper. I kind of gave a shit about that.

  “Uh, nah, man,” I told Jason. “I’m good, thanks.”

  “Come on,” Jason said. “You can’t get in trouble. You choked a guy and Dr. Hernandez just, like, asked you on a gay date.”

  “He didn’t ask me on a gay date!” I said.

  “Did he take you into his office alone?” Jason asked.

  “Well, yeah, but…”

  “Did he offer you candy?” Jason continued.

  “Just a breath mint,” I said.

  “Aha!” Jason said. “The plot thickens.”

  Jason and I had kind of become friends. We started off teaming up on projects in physics lab (until he started cutting class), but then he started telling me more personal things. Like how he was hooking up with both Kayla Bateman and Ashley Milano. Not both of them at the same time, though that would have been a much better story. Like a Playboy story. But he just took turns hooking up with them. First Kayla for a few weeks, then Ashley for a few weeks. According to Jason, each girl had both pros and cons. Kayla had… well, two large pros… but aside from that, she was apparently “kind of a snore,” i.e., she wouldn’t let Jason do anything more than kiss her. Ashley could get pretty wild. They’d hooked up in all these weird places around school, like the bullpen of the baseball field and the photography darkroom.

  “How do you pull it off? Hooking up with two girls?” I asked him once, genuinely impressed. Kayla and Ashley were both pretty good-looking. Plus, they were friends with each other. Wouldn’t they notice they were sharing Jason?

  “Well, here’s the secret,” Jason told me. “Sometimes I just suddenly stop hooking up with both of them. Then they get mad, and they join forces against me. That keeps their friendship going.”

  Wow. Jenny had been right when she told me Jason was smarter than he looked.

  Now it was tough to avoid his invitation to cut class, and he and Ashley were waiting for me to come with them. Jenny was waiting, too—waiting to see how I would get out of this. She knew it was too sunny out, and I think she almost wanted me to blurt out my secret to prove she knew more about me than anyone.

  “Um,” I said. “Well. Actually. I have this thing where… I can’t go outside when it’s really sunny.”

  “What?” Jason asked. “Like, when there’s an eclipse?”

  “No, like, a regular day,” I said. “Like today. It’s like… my skin… reacts badly. To sun.”

  Ashley Milano gasped. Actually, it was kind of a combo squeak-gasp. The noise conveyed so much astonishment that I knew. I knew that Jenny had told Ashley I was a vampire.

  Just in case I wasn’t sure, Jenny whispered pretty obviously to Ashley, “I told you so.”

  Jason didn’t notice all the vampire gossip. Instead, he suggested, “I think Finn just wants to stay and hang with Kate.”

  Maybe Kate and I were big news around school. Maybe everyone was talking about us and speculating about our relationship. I had noticed some people smiling when they saw us together twice in one day, but most of the sophomores who saw us eat lunch together seemed to assume that because we were both new to Pelham, we knew each other from somewhere else. I wanted juniors to be talking about us, smiling at us, too. “Did you hear about Finn and Kate?” That was what I wanted, even more than everyone talking about me as a vampire. That was why I wanted everyone talking about me as a vampire: I wanted a girl.

  “Right, sophomore Kate!” Ashley said. “She totally likes you, Finn! I read it in the gossip column.”

  “We have a school gossip column?” I asked.

  I’d read the school newspaper a few times, mostly to criticize it and thus appease Jenny, whose pieces always got rejected by the douche bag editor. I’d never seen a gossip column. There was a perverted “guess the body part” photo display that constituted the Science Section, but apparently a gossip column would have been inappropriate.

  “The gossip column is self-published,” Ashley said with dignity.

  “By yo
ur self,” Jenny scoffed.

  “On the girls’ bathroom wall,” Jason added.

  “How’d you know that?” I began to ask Jason. Then I saw him and Ashley exchange guilty looks and stopped pursuing that subject.

  “And, like, nothing in your gossip column is true,” Jenny said pointedly, crossing her arms.

  “Let’s go,” Jason said, tossing his car keys in the air and snatching them with one hand. “Finn—enjoy Kate.” He added in a low voice as he passed me, “I recommend the third stall in the girls’ bathroom.”

  In physics lab, I had to do a whole lot of vectors by myself. And while “vectors” sound like something that superheroes would shoot out of their eyes, they aren’t as cool as they sound. They’re really just arrows you draw on paper. I didn’t care, though. I was in a great mood because everyone knew that Kate and I liked each other. Which meant that it was true that Kate liked me and not just something I’d created in my desperate mind.

  It only takes a small dose of self-confidence to get me high on it, because I’m not used to having any. And I was drunk as hell on self-esteem when I met Kate at her locker for lunch.

  “Lolita!” I greeted Kate’s latest book.

  As part of her quest to read classic novels, Kate had picked up Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.

  “A classic and timeless story of an old pervert,” I pronounced like a college professor.

  Kate laughed, then said, “I’m actually having trouble getting through it.”

  “Creeped out?” I asked her.