Bloodthirsty

Chapter 4
I think my twin brother, Luke, is a superhero. He can sprint like a cheetah. He can do the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds. He can catch something, throw something, and swat at a fly all at the same time. He can do no-look passes to the shooting guards on the basketball court. Actually, he can pass to himself on the basketball court. He has the reflexes of a Marvel comic character and the speed of a hermaphrodite Olympian.
Our pediatrician thinks Luke has a hyperactivity disorder. Luke can’t read more than one Chapter of a book at a time. He can’t finish standardized tests. He walked out on the PSAT last year and went to see an action movie instead. Then he walked out on the movie. Luke can’t eat dinner without standing up and running around the table. He doesn’t do great in school, and he makes some people impatient. During our childhood, three elementary school teachers, a zookeeper, and a museum guide at the World’s Largest Ball of Paint all quit their jobs and not by coincidence. (My mother was sad when that zookeeper left the children’s zoo. He was gonna give her advice he’d learned from raising baby baboons.)
In eighth grade, increasingly concerned about Luke’s bad grades, my parents put Luke on a drug for ADHD. Three months into taking it, Luke collapsed midcourt during a CYO basketball game. I’ve never seen so many rosaries pulled out of so many purses so fast.
An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. The medicine had sped up his heartbeat, and there was so much blood rushing around his body that he got dizzy and passed out.
My mother has been neurotic about our health since she was knocking on her stomach and yelling “Are you dead in there?” at our nine-week-old fetal selves. So you can guess how much she freaked out about Luke and the ambulance. She never let him take that ADHD medicine again. In fact, she never let him take a Flintstones vitamin.
So how did she react when the weaker of her offspring arrived at the gate of Fordham Preparatory School wrapped in bandages?
“You look horrible!” my mother wailed.
“Hello to you, too,” I told her.
“What’s wrong with you?” my father asked eagerly.
I’m a pale and creepy virgin? Nope, not what he was asking.
“It’s an allergic reaction,” I reassured them. “It’s temporary.”
I was super thrilled when I saw that it was a pretty girl who was ripping the game tickets at the Fordham gate, seeing as I was wearing my best James Bond formalwear: my swim trunks, a t-shirt that showed off my man-nipples, and a Y2K supply of Ace bandages.
“Go Rams!” the ticket girl told me, making an admirable effort to focus on school spirit and not my arms.
She was a brunette, too. Brunettes are my favorite. Eff my lack of luck. Not only did I look like a freak, but when I sat down in the bleachers, I was one of the few kids with parents instead of friends. I was sandwiched between my dad, who was wearing a new Fordham Prep hat (my dad doesn’t wear flat-brimmed hats because he’s a rap star. He wears them in a very uncool way), and my mother, who kept accidentally smacking me in the face as she pointed to Luke on the field.
“Look, he’s drinking water!” she’d say. “Look, he’s lacing up his shoes! Look, he just spit! Oh, Luke”—my mother shook her head at her son from fifteen rows up—“that’s not very polite.”
My parents and I first spotted him with a cluster of other white-padded guys under a floodlight. Luke was playfully hopping from foot to foot. Other players were doing various homoerotic things that belong in the locker room: slapping each other’s asses, giggling over secret handshakes, etc. One leaned over to slap Luke’s ass, and my mother was proud.
“Look!” my mother said happily. “He already has friends.”
As the announcer introduced the other team, Holy Cross, I ignored the field and looked around the bleachers instead. How were there so many girls here? Fordham was an all-boys school. But girls were everywhere. There were girls in groups, leaning in toward one another to share secrets beneath wide eyes. There were girls in groups with boys, projecting their laughter into the face of the right boy, pitching their voices higher than the other girls, seeking attention. There were girls who really liked football, who climbed down the bleachers to sink their flip-flops into the mud by the fence and press themselves closer to the action. These girls were watching boys like my brother.
And Luke was something to watch. Fordham had decided on a running game that night. I think they wanted to show off their new Indiana running back. After all, the whole world revolves around Luke. When he was introduced at his new school, there were whistles and shouts like the High School Musical cast was on a mall tour.
Luke really was great, though. Dodging between defenders’ shoulder pads, making sharp cuts and kicking up field dirt with his cleats, finding the open space and dashing into it just before it shut, letting the green-uniformed chests collapse into a pile behind him. I’d seen all of this before—Luke’s dodging, darting, sprinting, and slipping-between. Luke had used these same tactics as a child to escape from my mother in crowded shopping malls and airports. You’d think my mother would have become Jerome Bettis trying to keep up with her son. Actually, she gave up most of the time. Then she’d send me after him. I’d usually find a sleeker route, along the wall, avoiding the people and obstacles I knew I couldn’t hurdle or intimidate. I would catch up to Luke using speed alone, not skill. This lack of coordination explained how I’d ended up headfirst in a bin of peppers—and why only one of us was a football player.
In the first half, Luke completed three touchdowns. The other team, Holy Cross, was pretty good, though, and they were only a touchdown behind. Their defense geared up in the second half; they had two guys key in on Luke for most of the plays—a short-and-tall doofy pair who resembled Crabbe and Goyle from the Harry Potter movies. On the last play, though, Luke had a really showy run. He hurdled like a Kentucky Derby horse and won out in the end with pure chest-heaving speed. Then he did a victory dance that made me embarrassed to be his brother.
After the victory dance, Luke’s teammates mobbed him and ripped off his helmet. They swallowed him up in a giant sloppy pile of man love. Somehow, by the time I had made it down the bleachers to congratulate him, that crowd of sloppy teammates had been replaced by a mob of girls. Jeez! Where had they all come from? He’d only been at this school four days! Further, this school didn’t have any girls! But here they were, sporting plaid skirts of various uniform shades and sweatshirts that listed the entire roster of girls’ schools in the area: Ursuline, Holy Child, Sacred Heart. My brother is magnetic north for Catholic schoolgirls.
And they were finding any excuse to touch Luke, even though he was so sweaty he looked like he’d survived a tidal wave. The fortunate girls who had arrived early were staking out the prime territory of Luke’s bicep. Others used flimsier excuses: one girl’s manicured nail traced the 5 on the front of his jersey; one authoritative hand rearranged his sweat-soaked hair. One girl even bent to tie his shoe.
Luke waved at me from inside his circle of girls.
“Brother!” he said. “Thanks for coming!”
“You slaughtered them, bro,” I told him.
“And people said Holy Cross was good!” He laughed. “Piece of cake.”
Girls began asking Luke questions mostly about his feats of strength and how much he worked out. It was a flirtatious little press conference. “How much can you bench-press? Could you bench-press me? Will you?”
One girl, a brunette, observant—much more my type than Luke’s—looked me up and down and asked, “Are you a reporter for the school paper or something?”
I shook my head. “I’m Luke’s brother,” I said.
“Oh, his little brother?” She broke into a smile. “Awww.”
She looked at me like someone who had the potential to be cute one day.
“Oh, uh, no,” I said. “We’re… twins.”
Her pupils flashed from the bandages around my toothpick arms to my sunken-in chest and the goose bumps emerging on my legs beneath my swim trunks to my super-pale face and eyes.
Then this brunette said an obvious, truthful, and terrible thing.
She told me: “You two are nothing alike.”
When I didn’t leave the house for three days after the football game, my mother worried that I was antisocial. My mother has suspected me of antisocial behavior since last year when I didn’t cry during The Notebook. After her prodding, I managed one tear. I didn’t tell her that the tear came from the fact that I was home on a Friday night watching a Nicholas Sparks adaptation with my mother.
During the last few days of August, I used the excuse that the doctor had said it was too sunny for me to go outside. This also conveniently got me out of mowing the lawn. It also excused me from scoping out our seventeen-year-old neighbor, whose family was Italian and renting a house for the summer, and who Luke claimed sunbathed topless. I was so embittered by my recent experiences that I didn’t want to see another teenage girl as long as I lived. I didn’t even want to see another teenage girl’s boobs. When it became early September, and also got rainy and overcast, though, I had no more excuses (neither did the topless girl, who buttoned up and went inside, much to Luke’s dismay). To appease my mother, I decided to go to some museums in Manhattan. I looked forward to losing myself in mummies, dinosaurs, and other species who were past their self-conscious teenage years.
Unfortunately, my seat on the train was directly facing three teenage girls. Didn’t girls in New York ever go to school? Oh, wait, school hadn’t started for me either. Well, I could just look out the window. Oh, wait. I didn’t have a window seat. Oh, well. If I had to look ahead, I would focus on the books the girls were reading and not on the three pairs of crossed legs beneath them.
The first book cover had the typical Fabio-style romantic male lead. He had blond hair longer than the woman’s and a piratelike shirt ripped open to reveal pectoral muscles that were bigger than hers, too. He was a guy who could speak five languages and perform award-winning sexual maneuvers. He was a seducer.
I could never be a guy like that.
On the second novel cover, the guy was swinging an ax dangerously close to the woman’s face. She was still smiling. He was a clean-cut kind of guy, with a flannel shirt and bulging biceps, like the Brawny paper towel man. He could handle a canoe or a grizzly bear, and catch and grill a fish for dinner. Like that guy on the Discovery Channel who scoops the insides out of buffaloes and then sleeps inside them.
I could never be a guy like that.
The third book cover was different. First of all, the book was called Bloodthirsty, which didn’t seem very romantic. The letters of the title were enormous and red and dripping with blood. On this cover, the girl was featured prominently. Although she was wearing a white lacy dress and making the sort of innocent face you see on kids in juice commercials, she had some pretty intense cleavage. The Grand Canyon of cleavage. I admit that I leaned forward to examine this a little closer (hey, it’s literature!), but then the guy on the cover caught my eye. No, not in that way. In fact, he wasn’t sexy at all.
The Bloodthirsty cover guy was lurking in the distance behind the girl. He had bad posture. His arms were crossed. He was brooding. His skin was the color of paper. And his eyes… He had eyes like mine! They were spooky, crystal-ball blue. Why was the cleavage girl with him? What was this guy’s secret?
The Brawny book girl looked over at the Bloodthirsty girl. She smiled and said, “I love that book.”
The sexy pirate book girl looked up to see what the other two girls were talking about. “Oh, me too!” she chimed in. “How sexy is the guy in it?”
The girls all moaned in unison. Really sexy, urgent moans. Somewhere a sound guy for a porn movie was kicking himself that he missed it.
“He is SO sexy!” the Bloodthirsty girl emphasized.
But why? I thought. I was bursting to ask them out loud. If the guy they were talking about was the guy on the cover, what was sexy about him? He was thin! He was pale!
“He’s so brooding,” the first girl said.
Wait, I was brooding! In fact, I was brooding right now!
“He’s so smart,” the second girl said.
I’m smart! I’m smart! I can give my PSAT scores to prove it.
“He’s so thoughtful,” the third girl said.
Thoughtful? No one’s more thoughtful than me! Hell, I’ll chase you down the street with the first edition of your favorite book!
What was happening here? Either brooding, smart, skinny, and pale had suddenly become sexy and karma was paying me back for the time my priest suggested I use self-tanner so I wouldn’t blend in with my altar boy robe, or I had stumbled upon my own personal fan club. I’d dreamed of this day before. I would call them “Fanbars.”
“I know,” the first girl said. “I love vampires.”
Wait, what was that? Excuse me? Pardon? Had I heard right over the conductor’s announcement that “a crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch”? Had this girl said she… loves vampires?
“I started with Bloodthirsty,” the second girl said. “After that, I read all the Twilight books. And once I finished them, I read everything about vampires. I’m obsessed with vampires!”
That was it! It all made sense now! Girls loved vampires! How had I forgotten about the Twilight craze? Robert Pattinson and his pale mug everywhere? His accepting Hottest Dude awards or Best Kisser awards or whatever awards Nickelodeon and MTV thought up?
So that meant that the blond girl from the train car hadn’t been insulting me by calling me a vampire. She hadn’t thought I was a bloodsucking killer. She had thought I was a bloodsucking killer with sex appeal.
And she hadn’t sat next to me because she was deranged. She wasn’t deranged. She was attracted to me! Okay, some might think those are the same thing.
Optimism and a sense of power flooded me, a sense of power that’s pretty unusual when you’re six-foot-one and weigh only 130 pounds. Maybe I couldn’t be a Brawny paper towel man or a bodice-ripping foreign lover. Frankly, I couldn’t even unhook a bra. But when it came to being pale and dead-looking, when it came to being old-fashioned and a little bit strange, I could ride this trend like no one else.
I would become a vampire.
When a storm broke over the electrical lines of the train, it seemed the perfect time to christen myself. The early fall heat sparked into a sharp sliver of lightning, small through the train window, and I became a new man. A brave, fearless, fearsome man. A bloodthirsty man.
I stood up and (silently) declared myself: Finbar Frame, vampire.
Then the train conductor walked through and told me to sit down. He also gave me a suspicious look, like I’d been inappropriately touching people. I think he sensed my newfound power and was threatened by it.
But I did sit down.