Bloodthirsty

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 your 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.
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 burger 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 f*cking 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.