Bloodthirsty

Chapter 17
It took me a full week to notice that Luke was actually pretty depressed. Ever since the house party in New Rochelle, he had been so down that he didn’t even throw things at the ceiling at night. He would just sigh, roll over, and go to sleep. While Luke habitually treated our stairwells and house siding like a playground, he only climbed through the second-story window once that week. And we legitimately needed his help to unlock the door.
“So how’s, uh, Math B going?” I asked him one day when he was studying at my desk (his was, as usual, covered in sweaty clothes). Usually Luke wasn’t really attentive when he was studying. I was impressed with his concentration today. He wasn’t studying, but he had been doing a rubber-pencil trick for, like, fifteen minutes straight.
“Fine,” he said, and shrugged.
I probed, pushed, and prodded sensitive points to find out why he was upset. This technique I’ve learned from my mother.
“Are you gonna fail?” I asked.
“Doubt it,” Luke said. “I got a B on the last test.”
“Luke! That’s crazy good!”
“Yeah.” And then he sighed again. What was this sigh? I’d never heard Luke sigh. Then a thought occurred to me. Luke was acting calmer.
“Did you go back on meds?” I asked him suddenly.
He turned around in my wooden desk chair and raised an eyebrow. Then he shook his head. “No.”
Twin brothers are kind of like seesaws. When one of us goes down, the other automatically goes up. I don’t mean that I was happy to see Luke upset. Rather, when I observed that he was upset, I became more upbeat in order to cheer him up. Or became more annoying in order to distract him.
“Hey,” I called to him from my bed. “You got a little beard growing there?”
Was my brother really too depressed to shave? What was this?
I stood up and walked over to Luke. Indeed, he had kind of a beard. He had a quarter-inch of stubble.
“Ooh, sexy beard,” I told him. “It’s kind of… red.”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
Luke’s hair was a lighter brown than mine. But his beard was kind of reddish-brown.
“You’ve got your Irish side showing,” I told him. “Very nice. Can I touch it?”
“Nah,” Luke said. “Don’t touch it.”
I reached out for his cheek. He slapped my hand away with those cheetah reflexes that have made so many high school football rivals cry. I reached again, quicker, and he missed.
“Ooh, sexy,” I said, rubbing my brother’s face.
See? I get pretty silly when Luke’s not Luke. One of us has to be crazy at all times to justify my mother’s paranoia.
“Sexy like a cactus.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Luke said. “Let me do this math stuff.”
“C’mon, Luke,” I said. “What’s up with you?”
He turned this mournful, hound-dog-like face to me.
“All right, here it is,” he said, lifting my desk chair. He turned the chair around and sat back down for the big reveal.
“I’m in love,” Luke said.
I burst out laughing. “No, you’re not. You’re drugged up!”
“I’m in love,” Luke repeated mournfully.
“You’re pissed off because you’re in love?” I asked him. “What are you, that little kid from Love Actually?”
Luke looked like himself for a minute.
“You really watch too many movies with Mom,” he told me.
“Who’s this girl?” I asked him. “Was she at the football party?”
Luke nodded.
“Was she the girl who was grinding so hard on you she got rug burn?” I asked.
“No,” Luke said.
“Was she the one who took a tequila shot off your stomach?”
“No.”
“Was she the one who took eight pictures with you and then cried because she dropped her digital camera?”
“No, not that one,” Luke said. “I didn’t actually talk to her at the party.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “She wasn’t busy arguing about Chris Brown songs, was she?”
“No,” said Luke.
“Phew.”
“She didn’t stay long,” Luke said. “She doesn’t really like parties. And she doesn’t like football, so I can’t get to her that way.”
“Well, what does she like?” I asked.
“Books,” Luke said glumly. “Wait!”
Jumping up from the desk, Luke knocked my chair over. He had his energy back. I felt the need to issue a tornado warning for the tristate area.
“You can help me!” Luke said. He literally jumped up and down. Our floorboards creaked in protest.
“Finn, you can help me! This girl likes books! You must know her!”
“How would I know her?” I asked.
“Oh, come on,” Luke said. “All you people who read know each other.”
“People who read books?” I said. “No, we don’t all know each other. But maybe I’ll start a Facebook group.”
“Finn, this is brilliant!” Luke was still pumped. “You can definitely help me out! She’s your kind of girl. She’s smart, she’s quiet, she’s terrible at kegstands….”
“One time,” I groaned.
“But you can help me!”
I shook my head. “I have my own girl problems, Luke.”
“You owe me,” Luke told me. “Come on, help me out! I’ve helped you with girls before.”
I scoffed. “You invited me to one party with Kate,” I said. “I got punched, and she left.”
“I’ve been helping you get girls all your life!” Luke wheedled.
“All my life?” I questioned. “Kate was my first girl!”
“Hey, what about…” Luke racked his brain. “Hey, what about, remember that librarian you liked when we were little?”
I feigned ignorance. “Librarian? I don’t remember.”
Luke rounded his hands out from his chest. The universal sign for “big boobs.”
“All right,” I admitted. “Yeah, what about her?”
“Remember that time you had a broken ankle and the fire alarm went off in the library and that librarian carried you out, all, like, wrapped in her arms?” Luke asked, with a surprisingly accurate memory. “She carried you out, man.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. I did remember. The librarian had picked me up and held me to her chest as we evacuated beneath the flashing fire alarm. I’d felt so safe and nonflammable between her breasts.
“So what’s that got to do with you?” I asked.
“I knew you liked her,” Luke said. “So I set that up.”
“You pulled the alarm?” I asked, shocked.
“No!” Luke protested. Then he grinned. “I set the fire.”
I laughed out loud, which I shouldn’t have, because setting a fire in a place full of paper is a dumbass thing to do. But Luke did it, and it didn’t end in disaster because he’s protected by all the good luck I didn’t inherit.
“Well, I guess I could tell you some things to read.” I shrugged. “Do you know what kind of books this girl likes?”
“Um…” Luke looked away. I’d never seen him look embarrassed or awkward before. Oh, wow, finally—there was the family resemblance.
“She likes werewolf books,” he mumbled sketchily.
“Wait, Luke,” I began suspiciously. “You hate beards. They itch inside your football helmet. And there’s no way you want people to know you’re a redhead. You look like a leprechaun.”
“Yeah, well…” Luke continued mumbling.
“I know what you’re doing!” I crowed in triumph. “You’re—”
“All right!” Luke said. “All right! I know! I’m kind of—”
“YOU’RE BECOMING A WEREWOLF!” I yelled. Then I cracked up in hysterical laughter.
“I’m not becoming a werewolf,” Luke corrected me. For once, he cared about semantics. “I’m just… rocking a werewolf look. I mean, I’m not gonna bite anyone.”
“You’re so copying me!” I protested. “I became a vampire, and I didn’t bite anyone!”
I knocked Luke on the shoulder, which was dumb, because he felt pretty much like a concrete wall.
“I’m not copying you!” Luke said. “A werewolf is totally different than a vampire! You’re creepy all the time. Mine is just, like, a monthly thing….”
“Like PMS?” I suggested.
“Shut up!”
I laughed at Luke, and I walked away, saying, “Man. You’ve always wanted to be just like me.”
That Sunday, I was supposed to go running with Jason Burke in preparation for our first winter track practice on Monday. It didn’t happen. Jason had a hook-up-related injury. While he was getting with Kayla Bateman at a party that weekend, she climbed on top of him and he got crushed by her breasts. I’m serious. His doctor told him he cracked a rib.
“I may have told my mom that you elbowed me on the track,” Jason added when he called me up to cancel our workout.
“What the hell, Jay?”
“Well, I couldn’t tell her the truth,” he said, which was fair.
Because Jason couldn’t go running, I decided to ditch the workout altogether and go to the library. Actually, I’ve done this a few times. Whenever my personal trainer, Luke, assigns me a solo run, I tend to run as far as the end of our block, and then, when I’m out of his sight, walk to the library. Luke has no idea.
Today I walked up the steps to the redbrick library and greeted Agnes and one other librarian who knows me by name. Sadly, these were some of the few women left in my life, now that I was no longer anything with Kate.
Today was a poetry day, I decided. The poetry section was in the same mildewy corner where I’d been busted reading Bloodthirsty. The book I sat down with now was far less scandalous: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Yeats is this Irish poet who never got the girl, the girl being a hot Irish revolutionary named Maud Gonne. He wrote a ton of poems about her, but it never worked out between them. She liked more manly, non-poem-writing dudes. He couldn’t be someone he wasn’t. I sympathize.
Although to be honest, I was kind of relieved I wasn’t a vampire anymore. It was annoying to come up with philosophical answers for things. It was a pain to avoid eating or drinking in public. And I hadn’t successfully “glamoured” one person, not even Agnes when I tried to “glamour” her into excusing my late fees. I was thinking how relaxing it would be to stop my whole vampire thing, even contemplating taking class naps like Matt Katz, when I looked up and saw Kate walking toward me. She was wearing this too-big sweatshirt that went over her hands (my neurotic mind told me it was an ex-boyfriend’s. Some guy she used to “do stuff with” back in the day. Shudder. Drop that thought). She came over to my table but stood a foot back from the chair opposite mine.
“Hi,” Kate said. She spoke even softer than you were supposed to in the library.
“How’d you know I was here?” I asked immediately.
“I was tutoring Luke,” Kate said. “He said you said you were out running, but you’d probably end up at the library.”
I was so surprised I gave myself a paper cut and dripped a little blood on a self-loathing poem.
“What? But Luke didn’t…”
“He knows you better than you think,” Kate said.
“So why’d you come?” I asked.
“Well, among other reasons…”
Kate examined my face, but I didn’t warm to her and I didn’t smile. She continued, “I had to return something. A book.”
A small leather book dropped out of the sleeve of Kate’s sweatshirt. The gold-engraved letters were familiar to me. The Sonnets of William Shakespeare. I had told Kate about Shakespeare’s sonnets at one of our lunches.
I looked at the book instead of Kate. I wasn’t ready to forgive her. While I was looking down, she took the seat across from mine and opened the book.
“I think this one has some of my favorite lines,” Kate said, slowly turning the pages. “Sonnet twenty-nine.” Her lips pouted a little as she carefully pronounced the old-fashioned words:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state…
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d…
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state…
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
“I think I like it,” Kate explained, “because it’s about… not liking yourself. And wanting to change. Wanting to be popular and other stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. Until you find someone who lets you be yourself. Which is even better than being a king… or, you know, a queen.”
“Thanks for the analysis,” I said. “But I’ve read it.”
When I met Kate’s eyes across the table, she leaned forward. She set the leather book of sonnets beside my book. Her hands in their balled-up sweatshirt-fists slid across the table so they were closer to my hands.
“I didn’t lie to you, Finbar,” Kate said. “I lied to everyone at my old school. I pretended to care about parties and kissing random guys. I don’t. I kept that picture in my locker to remind me how much it sucked to care about all that stuff. I pretended with them. But I didn’t pretend with you.”
I lifted the leather-bound book from the table, flipped through its pages, but didn’t read a word. I saw Kate’s fists tighten in her sweatshirt, heard her holding her breath.
“What’s this guy’s name again?” I asked, flipping back to the title page of the book.
Kate looked confused for a minute, then she let out her breath and allowed herself to smile.
“Shakespeare?” I continued. “Hmmm, never heard of him.”
“He never made it big,” Kate teased, shaking her head. “Kind of an emo, underground guy.”
“Ahhh.” I nodded. When I saw Kate smiling across the table, I couldn’t help but smile too. She got what I was hinting by reviving our lame Shakespeare joke.
“So you forgive me?” she asked.
“I guess it’s only fair,” I said, putting the Shakespeare book down again beside my Yeats. “I mean, I didn’t always give you a totally… accurate picture of me, either.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kate tilted her head against her sweatshirt hood. “I knew Finbar couldn’t be your real name.”
Rolling my eyes, I said, “God, I wish that were true.”
“So who’s the real Finbar?” Kate challenged as she sat down and rested her head on her hands to listen.
“Well, for one thing.” I scratched my fingernail into the wooden table. “I’m allergic to the sun. I watch Kate Hudson movies with my mom. Every librarian in this building knows me by name. I’m scared of your dad’s cooking, I’m intimidated as hell by you, and I am definitely not a vampire.”
Kate laughed and reached her oversize sleeves across the two books to rest them on top of my hands, which were, of course, freakishly cold. She didn’t ask about my sun condition; she didn’t question my taste in movies; she didn’t mock my librarian fetish. She just said, “I’ll tell my dad to go with burgers on Friday.”
“Friday?”
“We wanted to have you over again,” Kate said. “My sisters and brother want to meet my boyfriend.”
Jealousy and nausea surged through my stomach. I stuttered, but just before I spoke, I realized Kate was talking about me.
“Uh, boyfriend?” I repeated dumbly.
Although Kate shrugged like it didn’t matter, I could see her fingers tense and curl around her sleeve.
“If you want,” she said.
And I said, “Cool.”
It was that simple. Kate’s sweatshirt may have been someone else’s, but Kate was mine. We left both books on the table and I gave Agnes the librarian a wink as Kate and I walked out together. I wasn’t the stud my mother’s notes had predicted, I wasn’t the vampire heartthrob Ashley and Kayla had hoped for, and I wasn’t the muscled Finbar 2.0 that Luke’s training regimen had aimed for. I was just the guy driving Kate home. But that’s exactly who I wanted to be.
“By the way,” I told Kate as I opened my passenger door for her, “Luke’s a werewolf now.”
“What?” she asked.
“He’s pretending to be a werewolf to impress a girl.” I shook my head. “Sorry bastard.”
“I’ve got to say, though,” Kate said critically, “I could never believe you as a vampire. But I could really see Luke as a werewolf.”
“Oh, yeah?” I bared my teeth menacingly at her. “Wait till I turn you.”
Kate laughed.
“Don’t tell your mother about Luke being a werewolf,” she said. “I have a feeling she’d freak out about fur on the furniture.”



acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following people:
My agent, Daniel Lazar, for guiding me through the publication of my first book, and somehow making every step of the process easy and pleasant.
My editor, Elizabeth Bewley, for her thoughtful suggestions and advice, and everyone at Little, Brown who fell in love with Finbar Frame.
My family and friends, especially Lucila Farina, who inspired me with her love of vampire pop culture, and Christine Becker, who thought Bloodthirsty was hilarious before she read even a word of it.