Bloodthirsty

Chapter 2
But hold on. Before I launch into my tale of humiliation (the first of many), I’ll tell you more about the move to New York.
In August, we moved from Indiana to Pelham, New York. Pelham was bordered by the beach and the Bronx, both of which Luke and I thought were awesome. Within a week, my mother had located all Catholic churches and emergency rooms within a fifteen-mile radius of our new house. Having grown up in Boston, my mother was glad to live near New York City and reacquaint herself with all her urban neuroses—about falling in that crack between the platform and the train, getting robbed in a back alley, being tempted to join a gang with a cool handshake, contracting diseases carried by homeless men and pigeons (my mother hadn’t quite reached the level of sympathy that her oft-referenced role model, Jesus Christ, had for the poor). She equipped Luke and me with medical masks and silver whistles. After deciding we looked like SARS patients heading for a gay club, we promptly “lost” both—in a very unfortunate incident involving the Long Island Sound and a receding tide.
My dad got a raise at his new job, so we got a new car for Luke and me. A silver Volvo. Luke and I spent July learning how to drive, and we both passed our driver’s tests. I was actually a good driver. Luke was such a dangerous one that I think our evaluator passed him out of relief for having survived the test. One car for two eager teenage drivers—and for once, things worked out in my favor. I got the Volvo, sexy airbags and all, to drive to school. Luke would be taking the train to a Catholic school in the Bronx called Fordham Prep. Fordham had recruited him for the football team, and he would be taking the train every day. Fordham was a lot like St. Luke’s—a small community, uniforms, heavy focus on sports, and all boys.
In a rare moment of true empathy, my mother had realized that I needed a change from St. Luke’s School, or, perhaps, a change from Luke. She enrolled me in Pelham Public High School.
“You’ll get to meet more people!” my mother said. “It made me sad that you didn’t have more friends at St. Luke’s.”
“Mom,” I groaned. “I had friends.”
“Oh, yes, Henry Kim! I forgot about Henry Kim,” she said. “What a nice boy. He was so good at math. And the violin.”
(The worst part about my mom’s shameless stereotyping of Henry Kim, who was Korean American, was the fact that he was very good at math and the violin. Of course, he was also a star player on the varsity soccer team. But I didn’t tell my mother that, because I didn’t want her to know that Henry was better at sports than I was.)
This was my first time going to public school. This was my first time going to a different school than Luke. Most importantly, this was my first time at school with girls. But I had already met a girl in New York. Celine.
We had been talking online for four months. We’d met on an Internet message board called College Confidential. It isn’t a dating site. Usually it’s a place for high school students to post a list of extracurriculars the length of War and Peace and then ask, “Will I get into Duke?!?!?!?!?” Sometimes it’s a place for parents to advise one another on which is a more admissions-friendly extracurricular, fencing or playing the oboe.
For Celine and me, it was a place to chat about colleges with comparative lit majors. Then our relationship got more intimate, moving over to Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger. We began talking weekly, and then every other day, discussing our favorite books and degrading their crappy movie adaptations. Once she went to a reading by Jeffrey McDaniel (a performance poet we both liked) and messaged me immediately when she got home. She wrote, “I was hoping you’d be on!!!” That was a spectacular moment. I could see my own doofy grin in the reflection on the screen.
Luckily I could play it very cool through a wireless connection. Celine had actually never seen my face, because my Facebook profile had a picture of Tolstoy instead of a picture of me.
Celine was born in France but lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She went to this snooty all-girls’ school with the daughters of hotel magnates and faded rock stars and their second wives. Celine told me all these things about her life that she didn’t tell anyone else, like how her classmates threw parties at their lofts when their parents were on Martha’s Vineyard and got their malti-poo dogs drunk on Smirnoff Ice. Celine—like me—didn’t drink, which probably made us the only two teenagers in the world who weren’t chugging beer every Friday night. Celine smoked, but only clove cigarettes. Besides, it didn’t really count because she was European. And she had tried pot twice, but the first time was only to see what it was like and the second time someone had tricked her into it with brownies, which she couldn’t turn down because she had PMS (I didn’t ask more questions about that story).
As a European, Celine surely appreciated someone with sophistication, intelligence, good manners, and a broad knowledge of literature and culture. These are the exact traits I’ve developed during my years reading in the Alexandria Library, smushed between the ginormous breasts of the children’s librarian and Live Bait, the bar/strip club/fishing supply store next to the library.
Celine and I had upgraded to the intimacy of the text message after I moved to New York. We agreed to meet up in late August to hang out and get to know each other. We planned on a coffee date. But then I switched it up: instead of coffee shops, I searched online for French restaurants on the Upper West Side. I texted Celine: “Change of plans,” and I sent her the address of the restaurant. She would think I’d found a great coffee shop halfway between my train station and her apartment, but really, I would wow her with a fancy dinner from her native land at a place called Les Poissons, which had good reviews of its food but also a review that declared, “The waiters were unforgivably rude.” These two comments combined led me to believe it was an authentic French restaurant.
Yes, I know, I am a suave and romantic gentleman. In fact, this move showed me to have the elegance of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, the spontaneity of George from A Room with a View, the boldness of Harrison Ford in Star Wars, and the technological skill of Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail.
But even when you’ve got a romantic plan in place and you’re wearing a collared shirt, there’s nothing more stressful than waiting for your Internet date to show up. First I started to question myself. From “Is there too much gel in my hair?” down to “Loafers? What was I thinking?”
Then, when she was sixteen minutes late, I began to worry about her. Was she still as cute as her pictures? Maybe she’d looked like that once, but she had gained three hundred pounds. Or had gotten her entire face pierced. She was now ninety percent metal and could never return to her home country because of the airport metal detectors. Or she could be an alien. Or she could be a murderer. Or she could be a man!
Seventeen minutes into my wait, anxiety switched to primal fear. I looked rapidly around the restaurant. Who was in this restaurant to protect me if Celine burst in with a chain saw and metal face? There were two tables of older couples, and by older, I mean old enough to order alcohol legally. Then there was a table of scientists in lab coats who were toasting to some discovery. Wow, that stereotype of the mad scientist wasn’t so far off….
Until—
Oh. My. God. There she was.
I’d never understood what science classes taught you about matter, about the very physical stuff of existence, but there she was existing in real life, taking up a solid outline of space between the fancy glass doors. She wasn’t text on my computer or a snapshot taken from above by her own hand. Celine was real.
And she was perfect, in a little pink dress that showed the golden-brown skin on her thighs and all up and down her arms, her chest. What a tan! This girl was a melanin goddess!
Improbably, she walked toward me.
The men in the restaurant turned to watch her. The women in the restaurant turned to watch her. The scientists turned to watch her. Then they all watched her walk over and hug… me. Yes, me, the slumped-over boy with the sweat under his arms and his legs jiggling. I could see the scientists furiously developing hypotheses to explain:
“What is she doing with him?”
I could sense them evaluating me.
“He seems to suffer from a lack of pigmentation,” the oldest scientist would observe clinically.
“And from excessive perspiration,” his younger colleague would add eagerly.
“He doesn’t appear very fertile,” the only female would surmise. “I wouldn’t select him as a mate.”
But the scientists could suck it, because Celine came up and hugged me! As her head pressed against my chest, her dark brown hair felt like ribbons. She smelled like she wore deodorant over every inch of her body. God. Wow.
“How great to meet you!” Celine said, pulling away. “And—the restaurant! This is… well, a surprise.”
“Do you like it?” I asked, pulling out Celine’s chair for her.
“It’s certainly a surprise!” She laughed, folding her little pink skirt under her tan legs. “I thought we were just having coffee.”
“I thought we could have dinner instead.”
“Oh! Well, great!” Her voice was so high-pitched that I couldn’t tell if she was excited or faking enthusiasm in a high-decibel range.
After I took my seat, we sat facing each other like chess opponents. I was looking at the napkin I was folding in my lap, but Celine was staring unapologetically at me.
It made me uncomfortable, seeing as I’m unusual-looking. Well, not unusual looking. I’m not a van Gogh or anything. But my dark hair is kind of shocking because my eyes are really light blue. Like, really light blue. Think Siberian husky. And, as I’ve told you, I don’t have the greatest tan.
“You’re very pale,” Celine informed me.
I was startled by her saying that, just straight out.
“Oh, yeah,” I fumbled. “Well…”
“I didn’t know you’d be this pale.”
“I described myself as looseleaf…” I began. We had exchanged physical descriptions via Facebook message. I had been honest, but focused on my height—my best attribute.
“I didn’t understand the extent.”
“… covered in Liquid Paper,” I finished.
“Right. Well.” Celine sipped her water. “This is a lovely place!”
For a lovely lady, I thought. Nope. Censored. Don’t spout that weak shit, Finbar. You are already unworthy of her.
There was definitely a Beauty and the Beast situation happening here. Celine was even a French brunette who liked to read, like Belle. I could picture all these little bakers popping out of their houses singing “Bonjour” to her. Of course, I didn’t have much on the Beast. He was über-manly and could kick some ass. Also, he was abnormally hairy. I’m not even normally hairy, judging from brief and frightening glimpses in the St. Luke’s locker room…. Okay, I needed to stop thinking about body hair. And Disney movies. And how Celine was way beyond my league.
Man up, Finbar! Get in the zone! Keep your eye on the ball! Get your head in the game! Get your, get your, get your, get your head in the game…. No! Do not sing the songs from High School Musical in your head! That is another damn Disney movie! Does Zac Efron have more body hair than me?
“So,” I interrupted my own stream of insanity. “What are some places I should check out in Manhattan?”
Knowing my interests, or perhaps based on her own interests, Celine began to talk about bookstores. I was mesmerized by the movements of her mouth, picturing it on my mouth, so I didn’t speak much. Luckily Celine was content to talk, giving me the poser quotient of every bookstore on the island. It wasn’t until the waiter interrupted us that I realized I couldn’t read the menu, which was written in French.
I gestured for Celine to order first, and she pursed her lips even more to order. God, French was a sexy language. You had to make kissing faces just to speak it! Celine ordered two different dishes. They sounded sexy but later turned out to be snails and exploded duck liver.
Was there anything written in English? Or anything I would actually eat? I scrambled frantically.
“Hamburger!” I declared in triumph. “I’ll have the hamburger.”
A curt nod from the waiter. He snatched the menu from my un-continental hands.
“Ahm—burr—gare,” Celine pronounced.
Oh. Hamburger. In French.
“Om—birr—gahr,” I tried.
Celine laughed lightly. As our food arrived, the conversation turned to Manhattan’s coffee shops. “I just don’t understand what Americans have done to coffee,” Celine was saying. I never drank coffee in my life, I thought as Celine compared the expansion of the Starbucks chain to “entrepreneurial genocide.” Maybe I should start. Of course, to drink coffee, I would have to be a whole different person. A guy with not only body hair, but facial hair, too. A mustache. Maybe I should be a whole new person. If I was all sophisticated and disdainful like Celine, if I was all sophisticated and disdainful with Celine, I wouldn’t care about everything so much. I wouldn’t care about not being good at sports like Luke. And I wouldn’t worry about guys like Johnny Frackas calling me a fag. If I spent the weekend drinking coffee out of tiny cups with a French girl and sported a mustache, no one could call me a fag.
Wait, maybe they still could. Scratch that. If I had a girlfriend, no one could call me a fag. So I needed to make moves. While Celine was chewing on foie gras, I spoke up. “I have something for you,” I said.
Over her greasy-looking and expensive liver, Celine looked surprised. I removed a small package from my pocket and set it in front of her. It was a book with a ribbon wrapped around it, like a present without wrapping. I’d tied the ribbon myself.
“It’s No Exit,” I told her. “I remembered you said it was your favorite play.”
Celine looked at the cover as if it enshrined an object from an alien spaceship, something she didn’t know how to touch or open.
“But it’s not my birthday,” Celine said.
“No,” I said. “It’s just a gift.”
“For what?” Celine first looked confused, but then the confusion softened to sympathy when my eyes met hers. She didn’t get why I was trying so hard. Disappointment and embarrassment swept over me. For the rest of dinner, Celine made an effort to be nice, like I was a speech-impaired kid assigned to her camp cabin. She smiled and nodded a lot, and even reached to touch my hand a few times. But she refused coffee after dinner, and the waiter delivered the check to me. I guess he knew I would pay because this was a date, even if it was the lamest date in the world. Or maybe he just couldn’t fit a check anywhere among Celine’s many plates, each of which had cost me… wow. My dad would really regret giving me this credit card. Celine grabbed her purse and I carried the book for her.
Out on the sidewalk, Celine abruptly stopped her diatribe against some kind of shoe called a FitFlop, and I said, “Let me walk you home.”
“Oh…” Celine tried to glance at a watch, but she wasn’t wearing one. Then she pointed vaguely in two different directions. “I’m going way uptown, so I’m taking the subway.”
“I can walk you there,” I said halfheartedly.
I knew the restaurant and the gift had been too much. But I really did want to be a gentleman to the end.
“Don’t bother!” Celine’s sharp nails waved me off. “You’re completely in the other direction.”
Actually, I had no idea which direction the train station was. This was my second trip to Manhattan ever. But I said, “Okay…” and hesitated. Now it was time to say good-bye. Right here on this busy sidewalk. The whole street was lined with the tables of outdoor restaurants, so we were being interrupted by other people’s conversations and lethal amounts of secondhand smoke. God, people in New York smoked a lot.
Celine reached up, popping onto the balls of her feet, to kiss me good-bye. No, not kiss me, kiss me. She went for the cheek. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it—even heterosexual Frenchmen kiss each other like that. To me, the kiss felt like a consolation prize.
The problem was that, at the same time, I leaned down to hug Celine. My head was headed for her right shoulder. Her lips were pursed toward my left cheek. As a result—
We kissed on the lips.
Or, more accurately, we collided.
The shock pushed Celine back on her heels. My arms hung empty in front of me like I was imitating a gorilla.
“Oh, Finbar!” Celine cooed with sympathy. She gave me these rapid little pats on the forearm. “I really think we should be good friends,” Celine told me.
“Actually, that was an accident—” I began to explain.
“But nothing more than friends.”
A falafel vendor had observed our whole little soap opera, and it was clear he thought I was coming on to Celine. Now he eyed me with suspicion and turned the long pointy sticks of his sizzling kebabs in a sinister fashion.
“Just friends,” Celine repeated yet again.
Okay, okay! I didn’t need her to translate “just friends” into French and sign language. So I said, “See you around,” and walked away.
Was I going in the right direction? I had no freakin’ idea. I didn’t know New York City at all. So I removed my map from my pocket.
Uh-oh. Something else came out with the map. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, the first English edition. Shit.
Looking back now, I should have dropped the damn book in the garbage. I should have just let it go. But at the time, I didn’t want a souvenir of this awkward first (only) date.
So I doubled back.
“Celine!” I called from the end of the block. Celine was already crossing the busy street between two honking yellow cabs. She hadn’t heard me.
A Frankenstein-like mob was clawing its business-casual-clad-way out of the subway station. These New Yorkers were moving at warp speed (hey, I lost the girl, I can dork out as much as I want). So I set off with a few jogging steps in Celine’s direction. Seeing as my jog was slower than most people’s walking, I hoped no one would notice my desperate efforts to catch up.
I called, “Celine! Hold up!”
But I’d lost sight of her. There were more people on that stretch of New York sidewalk between Celine and me than there were in the whole town of Alexandria. When the crowd parted, she was a full block and a half ahead of me. In order to catch up, I set off on a bizarre obstacle course. To the right of the hundred-year-old grocery woman. To the left of an imposing businessman. A sharp angle to avoid a double stroller; a leap over a pissed-off dachshund in a dog sweater. A sprint past a drag queen in size-fourteen heels.
Celine had crossed the street already. When I reached the curb, my chest was pounding and I was out of breath (and, clearly, out of shape). But my primal side emerged. I called “CELINE!” above a honking yellow cab, all Rocky Balboa.
Celine was enjoying a little French stroll by a park where the sun was setting. There were no lap dogs or transsexuals in her path—proving once again that life was unfair. Celine was ignoring the wind, which was blowing her skirt up around her legs in an attempt at a paparazzi shot. She also ignored me when I called her name. Maybe it was for the best. If she had turned around, she would have seen her pale and sweaty Internet lover sprinting at her—and probably would have freaked out.
But she didn’t turn. I crossed the street but didn’t have time to call Celine’s name again. While I was looking ahead at her skirt, something hard tripped me up, and I lunged forward into a restaurant’s basement cellar. My shoulder slammed down three cement steps, which hurt like hell, and I tumbled headfirst right into a box of peppers. I guess landing with my head in peppers was better than smacking my head on the cement floor of the basement while my arm was pinned under me, but they weren’t even red peppers, which are ballsy and kind of cool. I landed in a bin of green peppers. Wuss peppers. How appropriate.
As I tried to push myself out of the bin, overwhelmed by the smell, a large truck backed up onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant cellar. Two men climbed out and began unloading wooden crates. They were bringing new food down. They wouldn’t have even seen me if I hadn’t tipped the bin over, spilling the green peppers everywhere, like boccie balls.
“Hey!” the first man called to the second. “There’s a kid down here!”
“I’m just leaving,” I mumbled to the two of them as I climbed the steps.
“Sure you’re not tomorrow’s white meat, kid?” the second man asked. They both burst out laughing.
Because people who mock me often do so with enthusiasm, he repeated the joke. Somehow, they found it even funnier the second time around.
I didn’t even attempt a laugh. I stood up, looking as bruised as the green pepper that had been smushed between my ass and the lowest cement step. I brushed off my nice collared shirt, apologized, and left. And the copy of No Exit? I never wanted to see that shit again in my life. I left it buried beneath the peppers.
Empty-handed, I walked the eighteen blocks back to Grand Central Terminal. Neither those long city blocks of open air nor the bootleg Burberry cologne I bought outside the train station could get rid of my pepper stench. On the 8:43 train, a man in my car kept sniffing around my seat and mumbling to his friend, “I don’t know why, but I suddenly feel like pizza.”