Bloodthirsty

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.
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 p-ssying 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 sexual 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.