Bloodthirsty

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.
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.
“What’s going on here?” Einstein asked.
I wanted to know myself. I stared at Kayla, completely bewildered. But when I met her eyes, I saw this raw, primal fear. Where had I seen this look before?
Chris Perez. Chris Perez was scared of me like this. He was scared of me because I’m a vampire.
Kayla couldn’t even speak. She pointed to me with a trembling hand, and Einstein, scurrying back with gauze in hand, asked, “What? What did Finbar do?”
For my part, I backed away nonthreateningly. I made every “safe” gesture I could think of. I held my hands up where Kayla could see them, like I was surrendering to the police. I crossed my hands in front of me, like I was an umpire above a runner sliding into home plate. I kept my distance from Kayla. But I was still looking at her. And I was still seeing all that blood gushing out of her face. Oh, God, that nonstop blood. Don’t think about how creepy it is. Don’t think about how disgusting it is.
But, only five feet from the door—my escape—I passed out.
As I became conscious slowly, I realized I was in the nurse’s office. I could smell the scent of disinfectant and of girls faking migraines to skip gym. I also became aware of the doubtfulness that anyone believed I was a vampire anymore. Vampires didn’t faint like Southern belles at the sight of blood. Shattering my own vampire myth could possibly be a good thing at this point. I meant to frighten guys like Chris Perez, but I didn’t mean to frighten girls. I meant to attract girls.
“Finn?” Jenny whispered.
I opened my eyes and squinted. Jenny looked extra pale under the lights. And she looked legitimately worried, like I was a soap opera character in a coma.
“Hey,” I said.
“Are you okay?” Jenny asked.
“Totally fine,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
“You kind of freaked everyone out,” Jenny said.
“Did I?” I asked. “What happened?”
“No, no, no,” Jenny reassured me. “Kayla got stitched up. And she’s not scared of you anymore.”
“What?” I tried to sit up. Some blood rushed to my head. Jesus. “How is she not scared of me anymore?”
“Ashley and I explained it to her,” Jenny said. “You know, the reason you passed out.”
“What?”
Once again, I was completely confused. Ashley and Jenny, Jenny, my biggest vampire groupie, had told Kayla that I was scared of blood and wasn’t a vampire?
“Sure,” Jenny explained. “We told her that you don’t… you know, eat your meals… in school.”
“What?”
“Well, isn’t that why you don’t have lunch with the rest of us?”
“Uh…”
“So,” Jenny chirped brightly, “we told her you just passed out because you’re hungry!”
I had to recover super fast from my fainting spell, because I had an important night that night after the roller coasters. I was going to dinner at Kate’s house.
She’d claimed it was because her dad was a really good cook.
“He ordered all these new weird pots and he’s cooking Thai food,” Kate said. “Do you like Thai food?”
I was from Indiana. I’d never eaten Thai food.
“Yeah, I like it,” I said.
“Good!” she said. “Come over tonight at, like, eight? You can meet my mom.”
“Oh, okay, cool,” I said, completely thrown. “Is… anyone else coming?”
“None of my siblings are home,” Kate said. “So it will just be us and my parents.”
“Oh,” I said. “Cool.”
“Is that okay?”
“Cool,” I said again.
As I got dressed, I reminded myself that the more times you use the word cool in a five-minute conversation, the less cool you are. And I couldn’t afford to be uncool tonight.
This was a very important night. This was a make-or-break night for me. Impressing Kate’s parents could be a big step toward making me Kate’s boyfriend. Actually, it was a make-or-break night for me because I didn’t know if I was Kate’s boyfriend. We’d gone out to a movie, and she’d acted like we were just friends. But I’d met her dad when I dropped her off. Then she’d kissed me in the hallway. The kiss wasn’t even as important as where the kiss took place. This wasn’t a back-porch, beer-smeared, hidden, drunken, mistake kind of kiss. It had been deliberate. It had been public. It had declared to people, “We are together!”
But were we together? As I drove to Kate’s house, I stole glances in the rearview mirror, made serious faces, and asked my dashboard, “Where is this relationship going?” I practiced the words out loud: “Kate, would you be okay with calling me your boyfriend?” No, that seemed misogynistic and controlling somehow. It should be, “Can I call you my girlfriend?”
No. All of that sounded lame. It sounded desperate. It sounded like I was trying too hard, which is exactly what I’d done wrong with Celine. As I pulled into the driveway, I resolved not to make the same mistake with Kate and her family.
It was Kate’s dad who opened the door. We’d only met very briefly last time after the movie. Now I reasserted my impression with a super-firm and manly handshake.
“Mr. Gallatin,” I said. “Thanks so much for having me.”
“Nice to see you, Finbar,” he said. “Here, come meet Janice.”
I shook hands with Kate’s mother—more gently. Both of Kate’s parents were tall and thin. They were pretty old, too. They had white hair and they weren’t even trying to hide it, the way my mom hid her gray hair by dyeing it and my dad covered his bald spot with baseball caps that fooled no one. Kate’s mom, Janice, wasn’t a MILF, but that was preferable for me. MILFs kind of scare me. I don’t know how to work garter belts and stockings. So a regular mom was preferable. Although, to give Kate’s mom the benefit of the doubt, she probably was a MILF back when Kate’s three older siblings were young. And if she had grandchildren soon, she could definitely be a GILF.
Oh, Jesus, what was I doing with all these lustful thoughts? Kate’s parents were Catholic just like mine. Everyone knows Catholics have, like, X-ray vision for sexual thoughts. For example, freshman year at St. Luke’s we had this amazingly hot English teacher, Ms. Alexander. She was a great teacher—in fact, I stopped thinking about her chest long enough to comprehend dangling modifiers—but she quit by November. This is because she had X-ray vision and could see all the perverted things we were all thinking about her.
Or maybe she got a hint from Johnny Frackas’s “10 Goals for My Life” essay, which Sean O’Connor had stolen and written in a #11: “Do Ms. Alexander up the ass.”
Anyway, I didn’t want the Gallatins knowing all the thoughts I had about Kate. Not that I thought about #11. No way! What do you think of me? But I’m not gonna say I didn’t think about Kate when I was in bed. Or in the shower. Or in the kitchen…
“You like it spicy, Finbar?” Kate’s mother asked, poking her head out of the kitchen.
Huh? Spicy? I was startled in the living room where I was sitting on the couch next to Kate, clutching a glass of Pepsi. I began to sweat.
“Your Thai food?” Kate’s mom asked. “Do you like it spicy?”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. “Sure.”
Kate raised her eyebrow at me. She could tell I was nervous.
Kate’s parents popped in and out of the kitchen as they cooked. They were pretty easy to talk to. They asked me all about our move from Indiana. It turns out Mr. Gallatin had grown up in Illinois, and used to go white-water rafting not too far from Alexandria. Kate’s parents had all these cool hobbies. They went camping and they had a kayak. They did things I’d only seen in Eddie Bauer catalogs. They asked if my parents had any hobbies. I don’t think extreme cleaning is a sport yet, so I said my mom didn’t.
“But my dad’s thinking about taking up surfing,” I said.
When Kate and I went into the dining room, I kind of regretted being so casual about the whole “do you like spicy food” thing, considering I usually ate food that was the same color as my skin. You know, popcorn, baked potatoes, unsauced chicken breasts. Now I was staring at a veritable after-school special of different colors and shapes climbing all over each other in joy. The steaming pot that Mr. Gallatin set on the table was a dish that he called Dragon Curry.
The Gallatins didn’t say grace, so I couldn’t put off this meal any longer. There were hunks of chicken on my plate covered in green and red flakes. The chicken smelled spicy, but maybe just those red and green flakes were spicy. When no one was looking, I scraped off the red flakes first. Then I began on the green, but Mr. Gallatin turned to speak to me and I panicked and popped the half-naked chicken into my mouth.
“So what makes a sophomore like Kate cool enough to hang out with you, Finbar?” Mr. Gallatin asked.
“She’s—” I began. But the Dragon Curry flavor hit me.
I couldn’t swallow. It was so, so freakin’ hot. But I couldn’t be rude, either, and spit the chicken out. When I opened my mouth again, the sting of my own breath made me gasp.
“Hot!” I exclaimed. “Oh, God, hot!”
Silence ensued. There had been the usual pleasant dinner noises of forks clinking on plates, ice in glasses, and of course the deadly hiss of the Dragon Curry in its lair. Now there was silence. Kate’s father had asked me why I liked her and I had said, “She’s… hot.” Actually, I hadn’t said the word hot, I’d ejaculated the word hot. I couldn’t look at Kate’s parents.
But I did glance briefly at Kate, turning my head with a tensed neck. Kate was laughing, silently, with her mouth full.
Mr. Gallatin spoke up.
“Well, Finbar,” he said.
I looked up in dread, my face as red as the flakes I’d scraped from his chicken.
“You need some hot sauce on that?”
Kate’s father and Kate both laughed at his joke, and I attempted to simultaneously laugh and sigh in relief, but Kate’s mom rolled her eyes.
“You know when we were dating and I laughed at your jokes?” Mrs. Gallatin said to her husband. “I was faking it.”
Now I laughed aloud. In that moment, Mrs. Gallatin was so unexpectedly bold and straightforward. She was so much like Kate.
“Maybe some rice will absorb the heat,” Kate’s dad said more practically. “I’ll go get some.”
When Kate’s dad returned with rice, he said, “In all seriousness, Finbar, we’re glad Kate has found a friend like you.”
Well, I thought smugly. More than a friend. Your daughter kissed me in the hallway. With a little bit of tongue.
Of course, I didn’t mention this.
Kate’s father continued, “Someone who…”
Someone who is sexy? Dark and mysterious? No, he wouldn’t say that. Someone who really cares for Kate? Someone who’s become very close to our daughter? Was this leading into the boyfriend/girlfriend talk?
“Someone who’s interested in schoolwork,” Kate’s father finished. “A really nice kid.”
My death knell had rung. Boom, boom, boom. Done, done, done. No more chance with Kate. That was the worst thing he could have possibly said! Wow, this dad was crafty. That comment was the verbal equivalent of a chastity belt. I wish he had said: “A kid with rampant acne.” “A kid with incurable halitosis.” “A kid looking at five to ten years in the state penitentiary.”
Nothing could have ruined my chances faster with a high school girl than being labeled a nice kid. I thought this would be the night I found out whether or not I was Kate’s boyfriend. Well, I guess I’d found out. A nice kid isn’t a boyfriend. A nice kid is a friend.
Of course, I nodded and smiled. I hid my disappointment.
“Now for dessert,” Kate’s dad began. “We have another Thai specialty. An extra-spicy—”
Kate’s mother interrupted, rolling her eyes. “We have ice cream. But Kate, why don’t you show Finbar the Bat Cave while we clean up? You can eat dessert later.”
Kate’s “Bat Cave,” which was their name for the basement, really rubbed the salt in the wound of our nonexistent romance. It was the coolest place in the world. My non-girlfriend was Batman. And I was her Alfred, pale and dependable. But seriously, back to this basement. They had a full-sized pool table, an air-hockey table, even a skee-ball machine. I was envious of Kate and her brother and sisters. And whoever would be Kate’s boyfriend. I was pretty envious of him for a lot of reasons.
“We have the best movie channels,” Kate told me when I went to sit next to her. Damn. What soft leather.
“I watch, like, six movies every weekend,” she continued. “Oh my gosh, Bloodthirsty the movie is on. Have you ever seen it? This movie is hysterical. It’s basically pornography.”
On the screen, Virginia White, played by an anorexic model in a push-up bra, was spying on Chauncey Castle, some British “serious actor” with powder all over his face, as he examined vials of blood at his desk. After unscrewing the top of one of the vials, he brought it to his mouth and drank it. Virginia gasped and Chauncey turned around to catch her spying.
I turned to Kate and said, “I thought girls loved Bloodthirsty.”
“They just like this movie because it’s rated, like, triple X and they’re not allowed to see it.” Kate rolled her eyes. “It’s forbidden.”
I tried to look dark and dangerous. “Do you like forbidden things?” I asked.
“No,” Kate said flatly.
“Well, what about Bloodthirsty the book?” I asked. “Girls definitely love the book.”
“The girls in your class love it,” Kate told me. “People didn’t even know Ashley Milano could read until Bloodthirsty came out. And Kayla Bateman fell off the elliptical machine because she was reading the handcuff scene.”
“Maybe she was just top-heavy,” I suggested.
“Oh my God, that reminds me!” Kate said, sitting up cross-legged on the leather. “I wanted to tell you something hysterical that I heard Jenny Beckman saying.”
Oh, God, what was it? Jenny was around me way too much. She could have said anything about me. No, calm down. Maybe it wasn’t about me. Where was this unnatural belief that I was the center of the universe coming from?
“She and Kayla Bateman were talking about you, and…”
Uh-oh. Uh-oh. It was about me. Had I been caught in a Nate Kirkland moment? But I only ever scratched my nose in public! Never picked! It had been a scratch, I swear!
“They, like, think you’re a vampire,” Kate said. She waited, smiling, expectant, as if she’d just finished the punch line of a joke.
My first thought was, Duh, of course I’m a vampire. The knowledge was pretty widespread now. Ashley Milano had even lent me the sun shield from her Oldsmobile to protect my skin when I walked to the parking lot. And the girls who had started with garlic bread had since approached me with a silver crucifix and a stick that vaguely resembled a wooden stake. While I was glad these girls believed I was a vampire, I was also kinda bummed out they were trying to kill me.
“Oh.” I pushed a pathetic laugh up from my stomach.
Kate, expecting me to give a full-belly laugh of the type perfected by Santa Claus, recognized the lameness of my reaction. Damn my weakness for smart girls.
“You knew they thought that?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I mean, I heard something,” I said. “But uh, obviously, I thought it was a joke.”
“Didn’t you think it was completely ridiculous?” Kate said, opening her eyes wide at me.
“Yeah, I guess….” I shrugged and looked back toward the screen.
Chauncey Castle was drizzling blood down Virginia’s chest and then licking it off. In between moans, Virginia told him: I know that you are dangerous. But my passion for you is dangerous, too.
“So why didn’t you tell them you’re… a human?” Kate asked. She was grinning broadly and, as she thought of me as a vampire, she burst out laughing. She even threw her head back.
“Oh.” I shrugged again. My shoulders were getting sore from all this shrugging. “I mean, there were a lot of people who thought… or assumed… like…”
“Really?” Kate said. “I thought maybe Jenny just told Kayla, because Jenny’s a little, ya know…”
“So,” I ventured weakly to Kate. “You didn’t think I was… a vampire?”
Kate laughed louder than an entire audience at The Colbert Report. Her laughter was enormous, taking up all the space in the room, and I was suddenly very, very small.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Did you want me to—”
“But,” I ventured, “what about my sun thing?”
“What?”
“You didn’t think it was weird that I can’t go out in the sun?” I nudged.
“Aren’t you Irish?”
“But you didn’t think I was… dark and mysterious?”
“You drive a Volvo.”
“Edward Cullen drives a Volvo!” I jumped up in my own defense.
“Did you buy that car to be like Edward Cullen?” Kate asked.
“No!” I said. “My dad liked the gas mileage… but, wait. You didn’t think I was a vampire? Or that I was, like, scary? Or that I beat people up all the time?”
Kate shook her head. “Not even close,” she told me with a certainty that made me depressed.
“So… but…”
I tried to think for a minute, but on the screen Virginia White’s blood was being sucked out. Her semi-horrified, semi-orgasmic moans distracted me.
“But what?” Kate prompted.
“So why did you, like, you know… in the hallway…?”
“What?”
“Why did you kiss me?” I asked. “Why do you… did you… whatever… like me, if you don’t think I’m scary or a vampire or beat people up all the time?”
“I like you because you’re not scary,” she said, still smiling. Kate raised the remote to switch off the TV, then turned to face me. “Or a vampire. And because you don’t beat people up all the time. And because you’re not an a*shole like Chris Perez.”
She put down the remote. She moved closer to me on the leather couch. She swung one knee around to the other side of my legs. She straddled me. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. She kissed me.
“Hold on one second,” I said, now speaking with difficulty considering the new direction in which the blood in my body was rushing. “Now that you no longer think I’m mysterious, will you do me a favor?”
“What is it?”
But then she tugged at her lip with her teeth, and I saw her parted teeth, soft tongue, all that pink wetness.
“It can wait till later,” I said, grinning, and leaned in.
The next time I saw Kate at school, after a hug at my locker that brought back memories of making out in the Bat Cave for an hour and a half, I asked Kate to tutor Luke. And I promised her that my mom would pay her—or, probably, canonize her, as long as she could keep Luke in the Fordham Prep varsity sports program. Of course, Kate offered to do it for free.
“I’m really interested to meet your brother!” Kate told me.
Super. Fantastic. I couldn’t wait for her to meet my hunky heartthrob brother either. Seriously.
I told my mother that I’d found Luke a tutor.
“Who?” my mother asked. “That boy Jason you’ve told me about?”
“No,” I said. “My friend Kate.”
“Kate whose house you went to for dinner Kate?” my mother asked, leaning in to me like she was a witch and I was Hansel covered in candy.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s pretty good at math.”
In my mind, I was the essence of smooth during this conversation (although I shouldn’t waste my smoothness on my mother. But I guess vampires have so much of it that I can use a little bit of smoothness on my mother). But my mom had a goofy grin on her face, and I knew she thought Kate and I were in love. My mother has a sixth sense about these things.
And so Kate came to my house two nights later. And she met my whole family: my brother, who once used our Waterford crystal dessert plates as Frisbees; my mother, five foot nothing, armed with a Swiffer mop and waaaay too in the loop about my feelings for Kate; and my father, who was still eagerly asking me for details of what it was like to be in a fight.
My dad was the first one to meet her.
“Kate!” he boomed in that cheesy sitcom-dad voice. “Nice to meet you, Kate!”
Why is it that parents repeat someone’s name eight times when they meet them? It must be their fading memories. My parents are middle-aged, after all. They’re not as sharp as they once were.
“Well, is this Finbar’s Kate or Luke’s Kate?”
Asking that was my dad’s next stupid move. Way to objectify women, Dad!
But Kate shrugged, seemingly unoffended.
“I’m usually Finbar’s,” she said. “But today I’m Luke’s. For geometry proofs. Lucky him.”
“You know,” my dad said thoughtfully, “I never had to prove a damned thing when I was in school! They told me two plus two was four, I just believed what they told me.”
“Paul! Did I just hear bad language in here? From you?”
My mother came scurrying out of the kitchen with an enormous bottle of Lysol All Purpose Cleaner. She aimed the spray nozzle at my dad like it was a gun. I swear, she would have cleaned his mouth with it if I hadn’t interrupted.
“Mom!” I called, my tense tone hopefully indicating she should behave herself. “This is Kate. She’s gonna help Luke with his math homework.”
“Oh, Kate!” my mother squealed.
My mother got overly excited and prematurely ejaculated some Lysol into Kate’s face. Right there in the front hall, I put my face in my hands and groaned.
My mother rushed to Kate’s side.
“Thank God for your glasses!” she was squeaking. “I could have blinded you!”
“I told you, the house is clean enough!” my father said.
My mother was furiously wiping Kate’s glasses on her own shirt. Then my mother put her glasses on for her. Like Kate couldn’t do it herself!
“What beautiful hair you have,” my mother cooed, like the Big Bad Wolf talking to Red Riding Hood. I was surprised Kate hadn’t bolted from my house by now.
“Mom—” I tried to form a buffer between her and Kate.
“I always thought I’d have a daughter,” my mother began to reflect. “When I found out I was having twins, they told me it was a boy and a girl.”
Oh, God no. Please let a terrorist come along and gag my mother right now.
“From the sonogram, they could tell Luke was a boy,” my mother explained. “But from the way Finbar was positioned, you couldn’t even tell he had a—”
“Luke!” I exclaimed.
I’d never been so ecstatic to introduce my good-looking, athletic brother to a girl I liked.
Luke pounded down the stairs as usual and jumped the last three. He extended his hand.
“You’re Kate, right?” Luke flashed his non-creepy blue eyes at the girl I liked. “Thanks for coming over.”
My mom steered them to the dining room, and I went upstairs to my room because I didn’t want to hang around. But I was so anxious about how Kate and Luke were getting along that I even crouched down and pressed my ear to the floor. Too bad my mother’s vacuum was sucking out all possibility of eavesdropping. Acting like Luke, I jumped around the room and then lay in his bed and threw his Nerf balls at the ceiling. I hit a spiderweb and it fell on my face. Gross.
I tried to tell myself I had nothing to worry about. I mean, really. Sure, Luke’s good-looking. Sure, Luke’s in pretty good shape. He could probably bench-press an elephant if he had to. But to be honest, my brother doesn’t have a whole lot of game. He has the pickup skills of a hurricane. Sure, he’s big and exciting and energetic, and sure, everyone talks about him on the local news, and maybe some girls get all caught up in him and follow him wherever he’s going, but Luke is a wild and unpredictable force. Not even he has control over his own power. If he set out with the intention to seduce a particular girl, he wouldn’t have the skill for it. He wouldn’t have the attention for it. He wouldn’t succeed.
Would he?
Under the very sneaky pretense of having an apple, I went downstairs. An apple would give me an excuse to spy on Kate and Luke and would prove to Kate that I was healthy. In biology, we learned that a lot of “attractive” traits are actually biologically alluring because they mean we’re healthy as potential mates. I’d just stroll in, apple in hand, wordlessly bragging about my mating ability, my strong teeth and fast-moving bowels…
But they were laughing. From the staircase landing in the front hall, I could hear them laughing. Shit. Laughing? What was funny about Math B, I wondered as I walked back to the dining room. I’d never taken Math B, but it was math, and math was never fun. Even that show Numb3rs, which tries to make math cool, is on every Friday night, because people who like math are always home on Friday nights!
Oh, no. I bet it was Luke. Luke had made Kate laugh.
“Done!” Kate cried from the dining room.
“Done! No, you beat me!” Luke cried right after her. He laughed.
I entered with the caution of a crime scene investigator. Luke and Kate were sitting side by side, but their chairs were turned more toward each other than toward the table, where the books, notebooks, and things they should have been focusing on were.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “So… what’s going on here?”
Luke snatched Kate’s paper and looked rapidly from hers back to his.
“Dammit!” He slapped his head, then slumped in his seat, pretending to drop dead. “I forgot to say that this thing equals that thing. But I know it does. So why do I have to say it?”
“You just do,” Kate said. “All the obvious stuff. Otherwise you can’t get from step one to step two. Which means, I am the champion!”
She threw both hands in the air.
“Champion of what?” I asked.
“We’re racing through proofs,” Luke told me. “Kate beat me three times in a row.”
“And loser has to copy the proof over,” Kate said. “Three times.”
Luke groaned, and Kate passed him an empty notebook and a pen. “There ya go, sucker,” she said.
While Luke copied the proof in his manic handwriting, Kate looked up, winked at me, and smiled. I smiled back genuinely and leaned against the doorway. It seemed somehow natural, Kate here in my dining room, at the table where we ate corned beef every Tuesday, below the childhood pictures in which Luke and I were wearing matching reindeer sweaters. In the second picture, he stuck his finger in my ear and in the third picture I had my face so scrunched up you couldn’t see my eyes. But I wasn’t embarrassed for her to see me as a puny, tackily dressed child. I couldn’t lose my sense of mystery because, according to Kate, I never had one.
Wasn’t it ironic? I’d made myself a vampire so I could get girls to like me. Now the one girl I cared about didn’t even like vampires. And she didn’t like me because I was moody, mysterious, or scary. She liked me because I wasn’t like that at all.
“Ready?” Luke said to Kate, ready to rip right through the pages.
She said, “Ready, set, go.”