Bloodthirsty

Chapter 15
All my high school life, I’ve had this hypothesis that you can’t go to a party unless you have a reason to be there. I’ve never actually been to a real party. I’ve only been to those sweet sixteens where the guy’s mom makes him invite everyone in the class, even the kids who don’t speak English. But I think at real parties, house parties, you have to have a reason to be there. For example, Luke is on the football team. This means that he gets invited to a lot of victory celebrations, especially because he usually is the reason for the victory. Also, he’s very strong. So he’s useful in lifting kegs and breaking open back windows to flee the cops and such. Also, when Luke goes to a party, girls go to a party.
Other guys have different reasons. Often the biggest schmuck in your class will have the greatest house and the most wonderful absentee parents, so he’ll get to throw the parties. That’s a hell of a reason to be at a party—when it’s in your own house. Then there’s the kid who’s got the older brother or creepy uncle who buys the beer; he’s the supplier. Then there’s the kid with all the stolen hip-hop music on his iPod; he’s the DJ. If there’s a kid who’s kind of on the border, a kid who’s a backup on the basketball team, a kid who’s a little overweight, a kid who wears boat shoes without socks, there’s one quality that can endear him to other guys and hot girls alike: “But he’s, like, so funny.”
And girls? No. Girls don’t need a reason to be at a party. Girls are the reason to be at a party.
The week after Halloween, Luke invited Kate and me to a football party in New Rochelle, which was halfway between Pelham and Kate’s town of Larchmont. Every other time that Luke had invited me to a party, I had refused to go. But now everything was different. Now, beyond having my brother as the kickass running back, I had a reason to go. I was bringing a girl.
The party house was huge, right on the water, with a big front porch and big backyard. It was Luke’s teammate’s house. Luke had been there before and showed us around. The party was already in progress when we arrived, i.e., most people were already drunk. There were girls trying to dance in the living room even though they couldn’t hear the music over their own laugher. The tallest one tried to break-dance to a John Mayer song. When her handstand failed, she spilled Smirnoff Ice down her push-up bra. Then she began to cry, and the other girls surrounded her in a kind of emotional huddle.
The iPod DJ was pretty nerdy; he had these thick, black-rimmed glasses that weren’t even hip in the Rivers Cuomo way. Score, I thought, I’m cooler than someone at this party. But, although he looked wimpy, he put up a pretty good fight when a girl lectured him with a pointing finger and a sloshing cup. “You should not play any Chris Brown songs,” the girl told the DJ. “I’m serious. Like, as a woman.”
“I’m sorry.” The DJ shook his head. “ ‘Forever’ is just too good to pass up.”
“ ‘Forever’ was the single that was out when the whole thing happened!” The girl was outraged. “That’s, like, the worst one to pick.”
“Yeah, but I made up a dance to it,” the DJ said. He stood up and popped and locked and dropped a little bit. He was actually a pretty good dancer. I was still cooler than him, though.
On the back porch, guys in black puffy North Face jackets were smoking cigarettes and acting shady. In the garage, the juniors and seniors were playing beer pong. I’d heard some senior guys at St. Luke’s talk about beer pong, and I’m pretty sure Luke had played once or twice, but I didn’t understand the game. How could you drink beer while playing ping-pong? That’s how I thought you played, holding a bottle of beer in your left hand and your ping-pong paddle in your right hand.
But the beer was in red plastic cups, not bottles, and the cups were grouped together in triangle shapes on the surface of the ping-pong table. There were no paddles, but there were ping-pong balls—the guys just used their hands to throw the balls into the cups of beer. There were only guys playing. It looked like this was a “no girls allowed” zone. Backed two cautious feet from the testosterone-laden and splintered wood table, the girls stood in twos or threes, in jean skirts, gnawing at the rims of their own red plastic cups. Somehow, even though they didn’t play, the girls knew a lot about the rules of the game. But how many rules could there be for throwing a ball in a cup?
“His elbow was a millimeter over the edge of the table! That shot doesn’t count.”
“His partner didn’t say he was ‘heating up’ after the second shot sunk but before the opponent’s turn began. He won’t get the ball back upon sinking a third consecutive shot.”
Apparently, there were more rules than I thought!
“Do you know how to play beer pong?” I asked Kate as we stood on the sidelines watching, holding red plastic cups. Ours contained Mountain Dew, though; Luke had poured our nonalcoholic drinks in the kitchen while he got himself a beer.
Kate shook her head.
I quickly resolved to go home that very night and learn beer pong. Once I was a master, I could beat seniors, and Kate would be impressed. So how would I get good? Luke would practice shots with me. I’d find a piece of wood for a table and we could sacrifice Luke’s desk, which he never used anyway, to practice. We’d fill cups with water. I figured we’d get about two weeks of practice in before my mother discovered the cups in triangular formation and assumed we had joined a satanic cult. Yes, we were rehearsing for a game that involved drinking beer, and we were underage, but I knew my mom’s mind would leap first to satanic cult.
Of course, I had never even had a beer. Maybe you had to learn how to drink beer before you learned how to play.
Or maybe if you drank too much beer, you couldn’t play at all: none of these guys were actually getting their ping-pong balls in the cups of beer. So it was a pretty boring game to watch. The only entertaining thing was watching girls try to chase and retrieve the stray balls from the cobwebbed corners of the garage without bending over too far in their short skirts.
“Is this cup of water really used to clean the ball?” Kate asked, peering over the edge of the table at a red cup of water with a dirty clump of hair floating on its surface. “I don’t think it’s working.”
“We probably got swine flu just by watching this game,” I said. “Should we go see if the iPod DJ is still playing Chris Brown?”
“I think we should go to the kitchen and see your brother do a kegstand,” she said. “He’ll make it into an Olympic sport.”
Kate led the way up the basement steps, and I had my hand on her back, possessive yet cool about it, when—Bang! The door swung open in front of us and hit a beam of the garage wall. This wasted kid who couldn’t even see in front of him stumbled into the garage. Kate and I both backed up, because he stumbled down all three basement steps. Then he stopped, turned to us, and rocked back and forth, back on his heels, forward on his toes. Back on his heels, forward…
Rocking Chair pointed to Kate, his finger reaching forward out of his drunken stupor.
“Hey,” he said. His eyelids drooped down over his eyes. “I know you,” he told Kate.
Kate stood still, like she was hoping not to be noticed. Thinking this kid didn’t even know who he was pointing to (or where he was), I led the way up the stairs again, took the first step, but—
“Katie,” Rocking Chair said loudly, over the sound of a runaway beer pong ball and the girls shrieking over it. “Katie Gallatin.”
“Kate?” I began. How did this creepy guy know Kate? This chest-filling, defensive, masculine thing took hold of me. Possession. As Bill Compton from True Blood always snarled in his fiercest Southern drawl, Kate was mine. Why was this loser even speaking to my Kate?
Tilting back, Rocking Chair snickered and said, “I don’t recognize you with your clothes on.”
I’d never seen Kate unsure before. Now she seemed flustered, even nervous. Her hand rose to adjust her hair, her glasses, and she looked down at the basement floor.
Rocking Chair only got louder. He called out, “Hey, I went to school with this girl in Larchmont.” He pointed to Kate. “This girl was the biggest slut. Katie Gallatin was the biggest—”
“Hey!” I stepped in front of the shrunken, uncertain Kate. I almost tripped on the first basement step, but didn’t. I was a big strong man. I was protecting the girl I loved—or, the girl I liked a hell of a lot. I was freakin’ Edward Cullen staring down a werewolf.
Rocking Chair simply stepped to the side and kept speaking to Kate.
“Go get another drink, Katie,” he told her. “Pass out and get the cops called to this party.”
“Hey!” I said louder. Maybe my first “hey” hadn’t been loud enough.
The nervous, buzzy feeling through my body wasn’t quite the same powerful rush I had felt with Chris Perez. There, I’d been alone, no one except Chris Cho to see me make a fool of myself. Here I was surrounded by cool juniors and seniors from another school.
But I had to defend Kate. I didn’t have to kick this guy’s ass, just keep him separated from my girlfriend. I mean, the girl who is my friend. And who kissed me in the hallway, but may or may not have been romantically interested in me. But probably was.
So when Rocking Chair rocked a little too far forward, I extended a hand between us. He barely registered my movement. In fact, the kid was pretty out of it. He was looking like one of those after-school specials where your brain turns into scrambled eggs because you accepted a joint from a sketchy tempter at a chain-link fence. His eyelids were slipping lower, lower. He was about to pass out—
He punched me in the nose. Caught totally off guard, I was knocked off the first step. I fell to my hands and knees on the basement floor.
“F*ck you, Swanstein!” someone in the basement cried out. “You sucker punched that kid!”
“You’re a douche bag, Swanstein!” someone else said. I heard the beer pong ball bounce away, abandoned, heard some heels shuffle over in the sawdust. I heard two different girls ask if I was all right; neither was Kate.
I could hear things going on, but I couldn’t see. Everything went black and numb for those two seconds after the punch. Then the full impact of pain thrust through my face like the blade of a sword, from my nose deep into my skull. The sword of pain stayed plunged in my face; it took up residence there and throbbed. Jesus. Christ. In my head, those words repeated in time to the throbbing. Jee. Zus. Christ. F*ck that stoner! When I was able to get up from my knees, I swore, I would Chris Perez him and more. I would go straight for the blood supply and I wouldn’t let go. I would…
My fury forced my eyes open. This was a moment where I expected to turn into the Hulk. Seriously, rip the seams of my polo shirt and let that little…
Oh, God. Oh my God. Blood. When I raised my chest and looked down, it was spilled over my shirt, arms, and hands, like someone had thrown a bucket of paint at me. There were black fisted clots in it, there were dark swirls pooling at the insides of my bent elbows as I raised my hands from the ground and drew them in toward my body. God. God. And I felt wet and cool at my nose—which meant the blood was still flowing. I raised my hands to my face and the blood flowed through my fingers. It was a volcano, erupting again and again, unforgiving.
I gave my intestines a mental pep talk: stay cool, guys. Keep it tight. No need to puke here in front of everyone, really, it’s all right. I closed my eyes until I felt I could stand, trying to ignore how wet and sticky and covered I was.
When I stood up, Kate was gone.
I looked around, confused, scanning the whispering girls and the senior boys shaking their heads, but not registering any of their faces. I barely noticed that someone had gotten Luke; I heard him pounding down the sawdusted stairs. He was heading not for me, but for Rocking Chair kid, who was inexplicably bent over by the closest part of the beer pong table. What was wrong with him? No one had punched him!
“What the f*ck, Swanstein?” Luke demanded. “I’m talking to you.”
Luke gave him this cold stare and Swanstein looked up from the ground. And, get this—Swanstein was crying.
Luke was merciless, though.
“You f*cking lay a hand on my brother again,” Luke threatened. “Or you p-ssy punch any kid anywhere, and I’ll really give you something to cry about. Did you hear me?”
Swanstein seriously had tears coming down his face! I watched in amazement. Seeing girls cry makes me very uncomfortable, but a fellow male in tears, in public, was pure fascination. I wanted to get a front-row seat and put on some 3-D glasses for the show.
“Did you hear me?” Luke barked louder. The party went still and silent. Luke enunciated every word. He said, “I. Would. Kill. You.”
One of Luke’s lazier friends told Swanstein, “You weren’t even invited, man. We just called you for weed.”
The word weed perked up one of the senior guys, who remembered why my Rocking Chair aggressor was there in the first place.
A merciful jean-skirt-clad girl came down the steps next to me, holding two paper towels. She handed them to me, but then backed away, clearly grossed out.
But Luke came over and stepped right on the bloody sawdust in front of the first step. He tilted my head up, his knuckles under my chin.
“You all right?” he asked.
I felt dizzy. “Yeah. Lots of blood, though…”
“The head always bleeds a lot,” Luke told me. “Remember when I fell from the chandelier?”
I smiled through my nausea. “Yeah.”
“And from that third-story window?”
“Yeah.”
“And from the flagpole of our Montessori school?”
“I remember.” I managed a small laugh. “But I’m surprised you do.”
“Frame!” one of the seniors called from the beer pong table.
We both looked up.
The senior laughed. “I forgot there were two Frames. Luke Frame, that is. Next game?”
“I’m gonna play with Finn,” Luke said.
“Nah,” I interrupted. “I’m going to find Kate.”
“ ’Kay,” Luke said. “But when you come back, find me. We’ll switch shirts.”
“What?” I asked. “I’m covered in blood.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “But Mom will be less freaked out if it’s me. I’ve come home covered in blood before.”
Kate wasn’t in the living room, or the kitchen, or anywhere near the bathroom, where some girl was throwing up and another girl was choreographing it. “Here, you tie her hair back. You get a glass of water. You get a garbage bag.” Kate wasn’t in the backyard either when I stepped past the suspicious North Face congress. I walked down the driveway to get to the front yard, and there she was, at the end of the driveway, standing beneath a street lamp with her arms crossed.
She looked cold—she hadn’t brought her jacket. I looked down. I looked like I’d wandered off the set of a Tarantino movie. No jacket to give her.
“Kate!” I called.
She turned briefly. In the light of the street lamp she had reached, her eyes looked big and wet. She wasn’t crying yet, but she was close. Oh, God.
I jogged across the damp lawn to her.
“Are you okay?” she asked numbly, in a strange monotone.
“I’m fine,” I said. “What happened? Who was that guy?”
“Swanstein,” Kate said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “We went to Larchmont together. But I left because…”
I stood, waiting patiently, cold, wet, bloody.
“I got in trouble,” Kate said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I drank too much at a party and I had to get my stomach pumped. The cops came to the party and everyone got in trouble. Everyone at school hated me for it.”
Even the last part she said coldly, steadily, rapidly, and without emotion.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Kate continued, confessing at a faster and faster rate. “At Larchmont, I was a party girl. I wanted everyone to know who I was, so I started drinking more than all the other freshman girls. And doing more stuff with guys…”
Doing more stuff with guys. What stuff? I felt sickened at the thought of pickle flips and other foreign acts.
“Wait.” I realized something terrible. “That picture in your locker. That wasn’t your sister.”
Kate bit her lip.
“That was you.”
A guy came out of the house and performed an interpretive dance of how I was feeling right now. He stumbled down the steps, fell down, and puked all over himself.
“You lied to me,” I said to Kate, planting my feet in the gravel between the paved driveway and the street.
She looked at me desperately, hands at her sides, unable to speak.
“You said you came to our school to take AP classes,” I continued, louder. “You said you didn’t drink.”
“Finn…”
“I thought you didn’t care about parties and beer and all that b.s. high school stuff,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Finbar,” Kate said. “But, I mean, to be fair, you kind of lied to me, too.”
“What?” I went from disbelieving to angry very quickly.
Kate crossed her arms over her chest, and I couldn’t tell if it was a defensive move or from the cold.
“Well, you’re not a vampire,” she told me.
“Jesus, Kate.” I rolled my eyes and stomped at the curb. “That is so ridiculous. That is so completely different.”
“Why?” Kate challenged me, stepping closer.
“I never told anyone I was a vampire,” I said, looking down at her. My position on the curve of the pavement gave me extra height above her as she stood in the street.
“But people believed you were.”
“And I believed you!” I yelled back, so suddenly and forcefully that Kate rocked back on her heels.
That was exactly the point. I’d believed Kate. Of course, on the outside, she was beautiful and confident, which I saw at first glance. But then we got to know each other. And she told me that she loved math. That she didn’t know that many people at school. That she liked to read. That she stayed home on Friday nights to watch movies. And I thought, as beautiful as she was on the outside, on the inside she was kind of sensitive. Maybe a loner. Maybe like…
“I believed you were like me,” I spit out. “You made me believe that.”
I don’t know how she reacted. I looked down at my sneakers instead, and I couldn’t look back up. I was pissed off and I pushed gravel from the ground into the toe of my shoe, tearing the rubber.
Still, in a final, painful, lame nice-guy gesture, I asked Kate, “Do you need me to walk you to the train?”
I asked it detachedly, my arms crossed. Dumb move. I smeared extra blood all over myself.
Kate shook her head. “My sister’s coming. She’s going to pick me up.”
I trudged back to the house. Still wet with blood, I looked as if she’d really ripped my heart out of my chest—and then thrown it back at me and stained my shirt. The worst part was that this was how it was supposed to be. I mean, Kate belonged out on Friday nights, at parties, doing pickle flips and kegstands. She belonged with other guys. I, meanwhile, belonged on the couch next to my mom, waiting for the Bennet sisters to get married off. Parties, beer, rule-breaking, romance—these weren’t things for me. The worst part was knowing the whole thing had been a joke.
Actually, the worst part was that I stepped in that kid’s vomit on the way back inside.
Back inside to say good-bye to my brother, to leave forever his world, to return home to the safe boundaries of my mom-sanitized walls, my whiny amateur poems, my fantasies.
“Hey, Finbar!” Luke’s shadow on the front steps was holding a beer. “Time for our game!”
Okay, I guess my sailor bedsheets and the Bennet sisters could wait. I had to wait for Luke’s bloodless shirt anyway. And so I played beer pong. And drank real beer. And, actually, I did well. Beginner’s luck, I guess. I sank quite a few cups, and we beat two different teams.
I guess a guy with vomit on his feet, blood on his shirt, and tears in his eyes is pretty intimidating to an opponent.