Bloodthirsty

by Flynn Meaney

  Kate put Lolita, whose cover had a really inappropriate picture of some little girl’s plaid skirt and bare knees, back in her locker.

  “Nah.” Kate shrugged. She smiled up at me. “I like older men.”

  Oh. Wow. She liked me. She completely liked me! I, Finbar Frame, was a stud. Even if the cafeteria was serving its suspiciously ambiguous “pasta casserole” for lunch, today was a great day.

  Just then, I noticed for the first time a picture in Kate’s locker. It was of a girl with super-long hair. She actually looked a lot like Kate. For a wild second I thought Kate had a twin sister too. Not only was she smart and gorgeous and quick on her feet—Kate was a twin, like me! Even stranger, like me, Kate had a twin who was the complete opposite of her. The girl in the locker picture was wearing a really short skirt and high heels. She had her tongue stuck out and looked drunk. Nothing like the cool, collected Kate.

  “Is that your sister?” I asked, pointing to the picture.

  “Oh.” Kate looked up quickly. “Uh… that’s a friend from my old school.”

  She slammed her locker quickly and seemed flustered. I shrugged it off and followed Kate to the cafeteria.

  At lunch, something strange but kind of awesome happened.

  Well, first, one of the skater kids came up to me in the lunch line as I was selecting a Snapple and said, “Hey-ooo, it’s LC from The Hills.”

  “I don’t even have my sunglasses on,” I told him.

  “Whatever, dude,” the skater scoffed.

  Kate, ahead of me, scooped some spaghetti and meatballs onto her plate.

  “What was that about?” she asked, nodding at the skater.

  Oh, right. I’d told Kate I couldn’t be out in the sun, but I’d tried to make it sound as manly as I could. Like I’d spent so many hours rock climbing with my raw muscles exposed and climbed so close to the sun that even my alligator-tough flesh had had all it could take. To keep this impression up, I’d avoided Kate whenever I was wearing my Hollywood shades.

  “Those guys just like my sunglasses,” I told Kate.

  “What sunglasses?” she asked.

  Never mind.

  Okay, this wasn’t the awesome thing that happened. The awesome thing happened after Kate and I sat down with our spaghetti. The awesome thing was that these two freshman girls came over to our table.

  “Hey, Finbar.” The girls giggled in unison.

  “Um…”

  How did these girls know my name? I’d never seen them before. And they had really, really tight pants on. Not that that’s relevant, but how did girls find such tight pants?

  Anyway, simultaneously, each girl extended a piece of garlic bread.

  “You want some garlic bread, Finbar?” they asked.

  Just to set the scene, they each said this in the same way one would ask, “You want some help with those pants, sexy?”

  I looked to Kate and shrugged. Although she looked amused, I reassured myself that she was concealing her jealousy by taking a bite of meatball. Or maybe she knew I’d never go for a girl in pants that tight.

  “Garlic bread?” I repeated dumbly.

  “Yeah,” one girl said. “Nice and garlicky.”

  “Oh. Uh… no thanks,” I told her.

  She thrust the bread right against my face. I jerked my head back.

  “You sure?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, though.”

  I was completely puzzled until I heard the freshman girls’ conversation as they walked away.

  “He was totally scared of the garlic!” one squealed in delight.

  “He so is what they said he is!”

  A vampire! I so was a vampire! I swirled my spaghetti around my school-safe spork in triumph. Jenny knew I was a vampire and told Kayla Bateman. Kayla Bateman knew I was a vampire and told Ashley Milano. Ashley Milano knew I was a vampire and had probably published it on the bathroom wall. Now even freshman girls knew I was a vampire.

  I looked over at Kate, who was calmly sipping her Snapple Green Tea like she was in some damn zen garden. As if she wasn’t sitting across from a spine-chilling, bloodthirsty beast who got her heart pumping in more ways than one. Kate did not know I was a vampire. She hadn’t even heard I was a vampire. Why didn’t Kate gossip? More importantly, why didn’t Kate ever use the third stall in the girls’ bathroom?

  The meatball on my plate put a new thought in my head. Maybe because I ate human food in front of Kate every day, she didn’t believe I subsisted on the blood of unwilling victims. Damn lunch. Damn pasta casserole! Damn Hebrew National hot dog day. Damn my humanity!

  “I think those girls have a crush on you,” Kate observed calmly.

  “I don’t know,” I said pointedly, swirling spaghetti around my plastic fork. “I wouldn’t give GARLIC to someone I had a crush on. It almost seemed like they wanted to see how I reacted to GARLIC. Like, as if I were someone who had a thing about GARLIC.”

  Shrugging cluelessly, Kate didn’t seem the least bit scared of me.

  When I walked back to my locker with Kate, Jenny was waiting. She looked a little pissed off, and I wondered if Ashley Milano had spent their entire third-period trip to Double D lecturing Jenny about how many calories were in whipped cream.

  “Do you have lunch with Kate, like, every day?” Jenny asked me when Kate had left.

  “Yeah, basically,” I said.

  “But you don’t see her outside of school, do you?” Jenny probed.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Hey, are we still reading that geisha book in English?”

  “You know, she wears her sweatpants over her jeans,” Jenny told me.

  “The geisha?” I asked, puzzled. “I thought they wore those red—”

  “No!” Jenny said impatiently. “Kate. I’m in Ultimate Dodgeball gym class with her, and she doesn’t actually change her clothes. She just puts on sweatpants over her jeans.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Which probably means she’s, like, really sweaty,” Jenny told me. “Kate’s probably really sweaty and gross.”

  I closed my locker and swung my backpack up onto my shoulder.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  As we walked down the hall, Jenny said, without looking at me, “I don’t think she’d understand you.”

  “What?” I looked down at Jenny.

  “You know.” Jenny gestured to my face, then put both her index fingers up against her lips and turned them down. Fangs. Or walrus.

  “I don’t think she’d understand what you are.”

  Oh, right. I was a vampire. Well, I wasn’t worried about Kate understanding that. I was busy hoping she would find out! So I just shrugged at Jenny.

  “Besides,” Jenny added huffily, looking away again, “Kate’s, like, four pounds too heavy for her jeans. So it’s good she covers them up with sweatpants.”

  As I followed Jenny into class, I thought about her weird obsession with people’s jeans. She was always telling me if other girls were too big or too small for their jeans. And the weirdest thing was, she knew how big or how small by the pound. Kayla Bateman was six and a half pounds too big for her jeans, according to Jenny. How the eff did she know that? As for Jenny, she had to order these special jeans from Japan that were made for flat-assed Asian girls. Yeah, I’d heard all about it.

  As Jenny pouted into her folders and binders, which were all Eragon-themed, I felt bad for her. As unmanly as I may be, sometimes I’m glad I’m a guy. It means I never have to get that bummed out by other people’s jeans.

  It was the night after Halloween, which I’d celebrated quietly by seeing a horror movie with Jenny, telling her, “I don’t understand the big fuss about all this scary stuff, about fangs and monsters,” and also by texting Kate while she gave out candy with her parents and by avoiding Ashley Milano’s reality TV costume party.

  At the dinner table, my mother announced to our family, “Luke is failing math.”

  Luke had about half a burge
r jammed in his mouth but managed to express himself by rolling his eyes.

  “What’s this?” my father asked, oblivious as usual.

  “I went into school to speak with Luke’s teacher today,” my mother said. “His average is a fifty-six.”

  “What’s that out of?” my father asked.

  It’s pretty obvious my dad had gotten into Boston College only because he was a varsity athlete.

  “I hate proofs!” Luke finally swallowed and spoke. “They’re so dumb. I shouldn’t have to write a paragraph in math. The only good thing about math is I don’t have to write stuff.”

  “If he doesn’t bring his average up to a C,” my mother said, “he can’t play basketball this winter.”

  My father gasped. My mother had such huge tears in her eyes you would have thought Lysol had been discontinued. This was a monumental problem. Where else could Luke use his talents for knocking people over and running really fast and breaking guys’ noses and making it look like an accident? If Luke couldn’t play sports anymore, his only choice would be to join the Mafia.

  “What math class are you in?” I asked Luke.

  “I’m in Math B,” Luke said.

  “Finbar, could you work with him?” my mother asked, leaning into me. She gripped my arm like she was Leonardo DiCaprio and I was a lifeboat.

  “I didn’t take Math B,” I said.

  “What about the kids in your class?” she asked.

  I thought about my precalculus class. I guess most of those Pelham Public kids had taken Math B last year. But currently, we were all pretty lost in math. Matt Katz was probably the smartest, but he was too busy resurrecting Tupac to help Luke. In terms of people who I wouldn’t feel awkward asking to my house to tutor my brother, I knew Jenny best, but she was only pulling off a C through the mutual efforts of me and her statistician father.

  Of course, there was Kate. She loved math. And she was taking Math B right now, so she would be doing exactly what Luke was. In fact, she would be such a perfect math tutor for Luke that I felt guilty for not suggesting her. But I wasn’t ready for Kate to meet my family. I was almost as worried that my mom would scare Kate away as I was that my handsome brother would attract her back.

  My dad turned to Luke and said, “You’ve just got to focus….”

  Luke swallowed his last French fry and jumped up to scrape his plate above the garbage. He began humming loudly to drown out the conversation. I believe it was an R. Kelly song.

  “Paul, it’s harder for him,” my mother said quietly.

  Luke hummed louder, like screaming with his lips pursed. Yup, he was definitely humming “Trapped in the Closet.”

  “Well, maybe we should look into a new medicine.”

  “No!” Luke slammed his plate onto the dish rack next to the sink so hard it bounced back up.

  “Luke, the plate!” From my mother.

  Luke caught the plate and spun around. “I hate that medicine stuff.”

  “Sweetheart…” My mother’s voice was calm, trying to soothe him—and preserve the wedding china that had somehow survived her wild son’s childhood.

  “I’m not fucking with my heart again,” Luke said. “Then I won’t be able to play sports at all. Just—let me deal with it.”

  “Luke—” my mother attempted.

  “No!”

  My mother’s worst nightmare came true: Luke threw the plate on the ground. Unfortunately it didn’t shatter into a million tiny pieces, which would have been much more exciting to watch. Instead, it sort of cracked, and the top part tipped over and clanked against our kitchen tile. Don’t get me wrong, my mother still began to sob, but it wasn’t as cool to watch.

  Luke stormed upstairs and I watched in amazement. Usually he was pounding up those steps soaked in pheromone-filled sweat and exercise endorphins, singing a Rihanna song at the top of his lungs. Luke hadn’t always been an easy kid to raise, but he had always been a happy one. While I was often moody and irritated and prone to shutting myself in my closet, displaying many signs of a future serial killer, Luke was always moving, smiling, always happy, always busy. But of course Luke was happy, I’d always thought. He was good at sports, girls liked him, and he had a hell of a tan. What was not to be happy about? Now for the first time, I wondered if Luke was actually happy because he decided to be happy. I wondered this because for the first time I realized that between his grades, his failed medications, and his frustration at not being able to sit still—it might not always be easy to be my brother.

  chapter 14

  The first Monday in November, none of us skipped physics lab. But many of us would later wish we had.

  Our teacher, Einstein in Drag (henceforth called Einstein for short), had gotten us all excited about this particular lab. It was a competition among two-person teams to see who could build the best roller coaster out of these plastic toy pieces. Once you built it, you had to race toy cars along the track. What, you may ask, made it the “best” roller coaster? Basically, you got lots of points for each fancy-schmancy addition: a really high peak, a really sharp turn, and, the king of all kings, the loop-de-loop. Oh, and you lost a hell of a lot of points if your car went off the tracks, because that meant that your riders died. However, you didn’t lose all your points, which showed how sadistic our teacher was.

  And let me tell you—when you’re making a roller coaster, it’s damn hard not to kill people. In fact, I’m scared to ride a roller coaster ever again. Jason Burke and I were complete failures at the really sharp turn and the loop-de-loop. The really sharp turn threw our car violently across the room each time, and the loop-de-loop resulted in our car just dropping straight down to the ground. So we decided to focus on one high peak and named our coaster Everest. We decided our ride would be all about marketing.

  Unfortunately, we couldn’t even master that one high peak. Every time it approached, the car would roll backward. But at least no one died.

  At the lab table next to ours, Matt Katz was building an epic roller coaster called the Ball Screamer. The name was weird, but the roller coaster’s motto was simple: “You’ll scream your balls off.” On Matt Katz’s team, Matt was the visionary, and Kayla Bateman, his partner, did all the dirty work. First, Kayla had to count out all the pieces they needed to build Matt’s scrawled-blueprint masterpiece. Then, after she’d discovered they were forty pieces short, Kayla had to steal pieces from other groups. We were each only supposed to have fifty. I let Kayla have five of ours. She could be persuasive somehow.

  “All right!” Einstein waved to us from the front of the classroom. “By now, your coaster should be working. And you should have recorded the average velocity of your car.”

  I frowned at Jason. He shrugged.

  “I’ll be watching for cars going off the tracks,” Einstein continued. “It’s go time!”

  Matt Katz directed Kayla. “Get at the end of the coaster to catch the car.”

  “Get them in place now. And when I blow the whistle… GO!”

  Jason fumbled with our car at the start of our track. Everest built momentum on a series of small hills. “Go!” Jason and I cheered urgently, guiding the car with our eyes like it was a bowling ball. “Keep going! Faster!”

  The car directly disobeyed us. It barely attempted the big hill before stalling and falling lazily backward, like an old man sinking into his couch.

  Jason groaned. “Do you think we’ll fail?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “We didn’t kill anyone.”

  We turned to watch the Ball Screamer, which was still going because it was extra long from all the stolen pieces. Matt was watching it like a crazy person, his face bright red, his fist clenched.

  “Yes!” he’d cry out each time it made a turn. “Yes!” When it made it over a hill, Matt Katz got so loud that the whole class turned to look. And Einstein was loving it. She watched in wonder as the Ball Screamer looped its loop—and didn’t drop!

  “An A, Mr. Katz!” Drag Einstein proclaimed.

&n
bsp; Matt Katz was thrilled. He was so thrilled, in fact, that he forgot about Kayla, who was still waiting at the end of the roller coaster. Kayla was only mildly interested in the loop-de-loop, and she didn’t watch it carefully enough to realize that the car had really gained a lot of velocity. As all physics students know, velocity is speed in a certain direction. The Ball Screamer’s speed was headed in the direction of Kayla Bateman’s face.

  I realized the car was about to fly into Kayla’s face and cringed, and Ashley Milano realized and gasped, but neither Ashley nor I was faster than the Ball Screamer. It hurled the toy car into Kayla’s face.

  Instantly, Kayla raised her hand to her cheekbone, where the car had hit. Most of our physics class was laughing, and someone said, “Too bad it didn’t hit her in the tits; she wouldn’t’ve even felt it.” I smiled rather than laughed, because in my pre-vampire life I probably would have been the one hit in the face. Still, it was pretty ridiculous to be injured by something called the Ball Screamer.

  Then Kayla dropped her hand and we all saw that (a) she was crying and (b) she was bleeding. There was a deep gash under her eye and bright red blood was running down her face where tears should have been. Her hand had blood on it, too. I felt sick to my stomach, which probably made me very similar to the imaginary riders of the Ball Screamer.

  “You’re BLEEDING!” Ashley Milano shrieked.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I’ll get some gauze,” said Einstein, rushing to her desk.

  “I’m bleeding?” Kayla said anxiously. Then she raised her hand to her face and shrieked. “Oh, God, I’m bleeding!”

  Then the class began to buzz with indistinct conversations, and THEN—everyone turned to look at me.

  “What?” I asked. I actually asked it out loud. What was I supposed to do about Kayla’s injury? I wasn’t taking First Aid class. First Aid class was the only class wussier than Nutritional Science.

  Then Kayla turned to look at me, too. And she let out the most incredible scream. Seriously, a horror-movie scream. It reverberated through the classroom and hallways. It was louder than any fire alarm I’d ever heard.