Bloodthirsty

Chapter 5
With only seventy-two hours left before school started, I was off to a magical place that would be the source of all my vampire secrets and power. The Pelham Public Library. I still believed books could change your life, even though they hadn’t worked during my previous attempted transformations (see the still shrink-wrapped copy of Weightlifting for Wimps on the third level of my bookshelf).
Thank God for my kick-ass attention span. Between Saturday and Tuesday morning, I read the following books: “The Family of the Vourdalak,” by Count Alexis Tolstoy; Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (this one had some really cool lesbian vibes going on like 150 years before Marissa kissed Alex on The OC); Dracula, by Bram Stoker (this one I just flipped through; I’ve read it twice before. I also saw it acted out in the episode of Degrassi where Emma gets gonorrhea); Revelations in Black, by Carl Jacobi; ’Salem’s Lot and “The Night Flier,” by Stephen King; Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett; four books by Anne Rice; two House of Night books by P. C. and Kristin Cast; and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.
Getting any reading done, much less this many books in one nerdy weekend, was an impressive feat considering I shared a room with Luke. In Alexandria, we’d had rooms at opposite ends of a hallway, and I’d only heard about his cracking a wooden ceiling beam with a basketball, his using his bed as a trampoline and swinging from the window sash. In Pelham, I got to experience it firsthand.
At some point in my research, when I already had, like, twelve paper cuts, I heard Luke pounding his way up the stairs. The lamps in our room were trembling in fear of him. I swear, the kid’s a portable earthquake. I looked around quickly. All the book covers on my bed looked suspicious and creepy—knives, blood, some bare female chests. So I scooped up five of them and shoved them into the crack between my bed and the wall, where I kept all my other suspicious and creepy stuff like my Megan Fox Transformers poster (it’s life-size, and you can totally see one of her nipples).
Luke banged open the door, his white headphones blaring and his shirt soaked through with sweat. He lifted it over his head while he walked to his bed. My brother walks around shirtless more than Mario Lopez.
“Summer reading?” Luke’s pecs asked me.
Yeah, right. I’d completed the Pelham summer reading list by the fourth of July. Summer reading is my favorite thing in the world!
“Just reading,” I said.
“Hey, when are we going to the beach again?” Luke asked. “I never got to go.”
“The beach made my skin boil,” I told him.
Luke shrugged. “Mom said she enjoyed it.”
I rolled my eyes. Then I put The Queen of the Damned down on my bedspread. Although I never thought I’d say this, I was sick of reading. I decided to do what the rest of the country did instead of reading: watch TV.
“Hey,” I asked Luke, “did you ever watch True Blood?”
Luke took one of the towels we shared and rubbed it over his head, neck, and chest. Reminder: never use that towel again.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A show on HBO,” I said. “There’s vampires.”
“What happens on it?” Luke pulled a polo shirt over his head.
Retaining Luke’s attention requires a team of Mexican soap opera scriptwriters, but he agreed to watch the DVDs and followed me downstairs to the den, where we have that enormous HD television whose radiation my mother fears. I put the first season in the DVD player and got absorbed in the show almost immediately. My brother, ADHD poster child, left the room whenever no one was being killed or having really noisy sex. Luckily, there were a lot of murders and a hell of a lot of sex (maybe becoming a vampire would be more fun than I predicted). Luke was better able to pay attention when he watched while simultaneously trying to balance on this wooden board on wheels. That balance board is the first physical manifestation of my father’s midlife crisis. He bought it to work on his balance when he decided to become a surfer. That never worked out for him. Or me. Apparently delusions of surfdom run in our family.
While Luke balanced (or, rather, crashed into the couch, like, three times), I let all the information I’d read and watched come together. Every book had a different take on how vampires worked. For example—how were vampires made? Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, said it took three bites from a vampire to “turn” a human. The House of Night books said that becoming a vampire was an automatic physical change, like puberty (and God knows, I didn’t want to relive puberty. I think I would have rather turned into a vampire than get braces with red rubber bands). And what was the deal with vampires and the sun? In True Blood, sun shriveled up vampires until they dropped dead. In the Twilight books, sun doesn’t hurt vampires but reveals their super-beautiful skin. Well, I didn’t have to worry about that.
But there were a lot of “vampire rules” I couldn’t possibly follow. For example, True Blood is actually the name for this fake blood drink that Bill Compton and the other HBO vampires drink instead of biting people, which reminded me: vampires can’t eat. This led me to realize that vampires also can’t drink, or breathe. Eating, drinking, and breathing? I probably couldn’t kick those little habits. Also, according to my books, vampires freak out if they see religious symbols, like crosses or Christian statues. If this were the case for me, I wouldn’t be able to enter my own home. My mom has saints and Virgin Marys camping out all over our backyard.
But I realized, as I watched the on-screen vampires with their deep, drawling voices, their slick movements, their secret-agent reflexes, and the way they drew the attention of everybody (mostly every girl) when they walked into a bar or a party, that there was more to the vampire image than drinking blood and biting people. There was even more to vampires than those things I was good at—the brooding, the solitude, the old-fashioned determination to act like a gentleman with girls, the intelligence and knowledge of history. There was something more than that: vampire attitude.
Maybe I didn’t have vampire attitude down yet because there was one important vampire book I had yet to read. The book that had started it all. That bible of vampiric seduction: Bloodthirsty. To be honest, I was too embarrassed to buy the book, even online. Bloodthirsty was a romance novel. Ninety percent of its readers were female. If I ordered it online, I’d probably get on some sappy romance novel list and get e-mails with pictures of shirtless men with long blond hair.
But if I was using this vampire thing to get girls, I had to read Bloodthirsty. So I sucked it up and went back to the library. I strolled the romance novel aisle between two twelve-year-old girls who were giggling and asking each other, “What’s a member? Like a member of a club?” I managed to stealthily slip Bloodthirsty off the shelf. There had been seven copies of the book, and five of them had already been taken out—a good sign about the continued popularity of vampires. Concealing my Bloodthirsty between two more macho Stephen King novels, I casually strolled to check them out.
Agnes, a librarian who already knew me by name, smiled as she took my card. But when she saw Bloodthirsty, she shook her head.
“You can’t have this one,” Agnes said.
What? She was taking this mother—or grandmother—role too far.
“There’s a parental warning on this book,” Agnes told me.
“Books can have that?” I asked.
I thought parental warnings were for video games where you could steal cars and pick up anime prostitutes.
“I can call your mother and get permission over the phone,” Agnes suggested.
I looked down at the cover of Bloodthirsty, with the young woman’s breasts featured prominently.
“No thanks.”
When I first settled down in a dark, private corner of the Pelham Public Library to read Bloodthirsty without checking it out, I didn’t see why the book was so forbidden. The first chapter was poorly written, but not very scandalous. The story started off as a harmless Dracula rip-off with a bunch of cheesy dialogue. This English girl, Virginia White, is chosen to deliver a message to this rugged mountain town in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that she is a terrible messenger, can’t climb mountains, and wears white dresses everywhere, which is dumb to do in a rural place. Anyway, Virginia White ends up at the estate of Chauncey Castle, who used to be a professor at Oxford but did some controversial research into immortality and drinking blood and got kicked out. Now, everyone’s saying he’s a vampire, but dumb Virginia wanders into his estate anyway.
For forty days and nights, she had been a prisoner of his home, her lily-white wrists bound by heavy metal chains…. But now, unchained, she had become a prisoner of Chauncey’s mysterious allure, and a prisoner of her own lust. Everything about him set her girlish heart pounding. His alabaster skin.
(Attractive, of course.)
His extensive vocabulary.
(A very sexy attribute.)
And his ironic struggle to find the right words with her, in their stolen, conflicted moments of passion.
(That’s right, give the guy a break. Not even vampires understand women!)
The gay suitors of her girlhood, with their red ascots and horse races, seemed shallow compared with Chauncey.
(Hell, yeah! Ditch those jocks!)
If the rumors were true, Chauncey Castle hadn’t left the Chateau Sangre in eighty years. Yet he was, more than any man she had known, an explorer of worlds: the worlds in his leather-bound books—Perhaps an explorer of her worlds, the undiscovered worlds beneath her silk skirt, her petticoat, the satin laces of her corset…
She pressed herself against him, with nothing between them but her young, ample bosom, quivering bare and exposed like two pheasants trembling before a hunter. Chauncey’s chest, when she raised her hand to it, was cold and hard—as cold, hard, and unyielding as his own castle walls.
“I cannot feel a heartbeat,” Virginia told him, breathless. “Do you even have a heart?”
“What does it matter what I do or do not have?” Chauncey asked, averting his eyes. When they returned their gaze to Virginia, they pierced her like swords of pleasure. It was as if the two were in a lustful duel and he had the upper hand….
“All that matters is what I am.”
“What are you?”
“I cannot tell you what I am.”
(Wow, this guy is some smooth talker.)
Luckily Chauncey didn’t talk much longer. Virginia White took over the dialogue, and jeez did she have a filthy mouth for a maid from Sheepfordshire.
“Now I know where all that blood you drink goes,” she said, rubbing his engorged…
“Oh em gee.” The two girls from the romance novel section were giggling above me.
Feeling a heavy embarrassed flush, I looked up at them. They were both raising eyebrows at the page I was reading.
“Member,” one whispered meaningfully.
I scrambled quickly to my feet and closed the book, saying, “Uh, this isn’t the fitness section?”
After reading most of Bloodthirsty, I had learned eight new metaphors for erections, but hadn’t learned much about vampire attitude. I guess I needed to immerse myself in the lifestyle in order to understand the attitude. So for the rest of Labor Day weekend, I practiced vampiric habits around my family to test their reaction.
I began by reducing the amount of food I ate in public. I didn’t plan on starving myself to prove I was a vampire, but I also didn’t want to be seen winning a hot dog eating contest or anything. So when my dad grilled me a mouthwatering pound-and-a-half burger on his new grill, I turned it down.
“Just the way you like it, Finbar,” my dad announced, flipping the burger onto the toasted bun waiting on a paper plate. The paper plate was almost immediately soaked in beef juices. “No lettuce, no tomato, no ketchup, no mustard, no barbecue sauce.”
I’m a very plain eater. In addition to my sensitive soul and sensitive skin, I have sensitive taste buds. So this burger was my Holy Grail. My stomach growled and I even drooled a little bit.
But I said, “Uh, no thanks. I think I’ll just have something later.”
What a terrible weekend for my father to buy a grill the size of Peyton Manning.
I adopted a vampire lifestyle as I lounged around the house, isolating myself from others, reading a lot of books, and glowering at my mother when she ran over my foot with the Swiffer mop. Curiously, no one seemed to notice me acting any differently.
Well, clearly I needed to step up the attitude. And I knew exactly how—with a deadly stare. Legends, movies, and X-rated books say a vampire’s stare is so powerful that by merely looking a mortal in the eyes he can bend that person to his will. I tested this theory on my brother. Don’t worry, he wasn’t hurt.
Every morning of the summer Luke would leave for a run at seven AM. He’d return at eight, pounding up the staircase like a full corps of Marines, knocking the door open with a sweaty arm and ruining my REM sleep with the latest pop song blaring out of his iPod headphones. Lacking my discriminating taste in music, Luke always downloaded whatever was playing incessantly on the radio. On this Labor Day Monday, the last day of summer vacation, it was Lady Gaga, a club remix at max volume.
Usually I would throw a pillow at Luke, miss him by six inches, roll over, and go back to sleep. Today as he lifted his t-shirt to wipe his face and then did a goofy dance to the song’s refrain, I sat up and fixed my eyes on him.
“Turn it off,” I called out, loud enough for Luke to hear me.
“Huh?” Luke lifted both hands to pop out his headphones, and when they dangled on his chest, they blared even louder.
“Turn the music off,” I said.
Then Luke got the full brunt of the ferocious vampire stare, which I’d been perfecting in my mom’s makeup mirror for three days. It was designed to either (a) melt him into a puddle of his own sweat, or (b) make him totally obedient to me. Initially it worked in the second respect. Luke met my eyes and came over to my bed. It was working! My powerful gaze was pulling Luke over to me. My powerful gaze was powerful! Then Luke sat on my bed and told me:
“You have that crusty stuff in your eyes.”
Luke reached toward my face. I lifted my arm to block him, but my vampire reflexes hadn’t kicked in yet, and I was too slow. Luke poked me in the eye.
After Luke left for practice, my mother came in with the Dirt Devil, which I knew meant she wanted to have a heart-to-heart. She sat down on my bed and asked, “Is anything wrong, Finbar?”
I raised an eyebrow skeptically, but then I remembered I was practicing vampire habits. What would Chauncey Castle say?
“Is anything right?” I asked dramatically in return.
“Finbar.” Now my mother’s eyes narrowed and she gripped the cross at her neck like she was in distress. “Are you on drugs?”
“What does it matter what I am on?” I asked her. “All that matters is what I am….”
“FINBAR!” my mother shrieked, popping up off the bed. “YOU’RE ON DRUGS!”
This Chauncey Castle dialogue didn’t work so well in real life. Maybe there’s a reason Publishers Weekly called the book “skanky trash.”
“I’m not on drugs, Mom,” I said. “Where do you even come up with this stuff?”
“You’re moody, you’re not talking to any of us, and you’re eating less,” my mother said, then took a deep breath. “Are you doing pot?”
“Mom, if I were doing pot, I would be eating more.”
My mother aimed the Dirt Devil at my chest and switched it on, sucking on my black pajama shirt.
“Only someone doing pot would know that!” she yelled over the vacuum’s roar.
After my mom left, I finally hopped out of bed. I took advantage of Luke’s absence to perform an important pre–First Day of School task: decide what I was going to wear.
How was I going to dress like a vampire? I had a pretty lousy history of trying to convince people I was someone other than who I was. Look at my childhood Halloweens. Every year I’d start in August, brainstorming the scariest costume possible. A ghost, or a zombie, a mummy, or an ax murderer. When my neighbors opened the door, I’d growl, I’d wield a knife, I’d rage, I’d roar like the entire Broadway cast of The Lion King.
Still, when those Hoosier moms saw me, they’d always say, “Hi, Finbar. How are you?”
The best I ever got was a halfhearted “Aren’t you scary?” But that was usually followed by the kind of aww sound you make when you find a puppy chewing your shoe. Other neighbors, knowing how to win my mother’s heart, were too busy to be scared by me because they were taping a Bible passage to an Almond Joy. Almond Joys are already the world’s suckiest candy without sores and plagues strapped to them. Pretty soon I’d be hauling half the New Testament door-to-door like a Jehovah’s Witness.
So how would I ever pull off this vampire stuff?
I was lousy with violence. So I wouldn’t be doing what made vampires vampires: I wouldn’t be biting people. Luke had tried that back in the day, and it got him kicked out of Montessori school. My glamouring had no effect on my brother, so I wouldn’t be hypnotizing people. I was certainly not Chauncey Castle when it came to seducing people. And I still didn’t fully understand vampire attitude. So I had no choice but to work on my vampire look. In the hour left before Luke came back, I scrambled around the upstairs of our house, collecting all the sinister-looking clothes and accessories my family possessed. This included a black polo shirt Luke had since we were eight, a black button-up shirt that was too cool for my dad to wear, and a necklace of my mom’s that I thought was a fang but turned out to be Luke’s baby tooth on a string.
The necklace was ruled out first, obviously. Then I pulled the black polo shirt over my head. And believe me, that was not easy. That thing was tight. I looked like I should be raving at a club on the Jersey Shore. Except I couldn’t raise my hand above my head to rave because when I did, the sleeve ripped.
The polo shirt was out.
Next I put on my dad’s button-front shirt. It was kinda long on me (I’m pretty tall, but my dad, Tall Paul, is six-three). So when I tucked it in, the shirttail made a pretty nice bulge in the crotch of my jeans. That couldn’t be bad. Plus, the shirt was black, mature, and pretty vampy-looking. In my mom’s full-length mirror, I turned sideways and then turned the shirt collar up. Whoa. Too vampy. Like Count Whoever on Sesame Street. One ass-kicking for Finn at his new school if he wears this shirt, TWO ass-kickings for Finn… mwah-ha-ha.
Then, as I removed the bulge from my pants, I had an epiphany.
Vampires don’t care about what shirt they wear. Vampires don’t care about making impressions on the first day of school. Vampires don’t care about all the stupid little stuff that the Finbar Frames of the world care about, like being the first one out in gym class dodgeball, facing rejection by girls, and being mocked for carrying SAT flash cards in their pockets. Vampires don’t care that they can’t flaunt their tans at the beach, that they get stared at, that they’re different. Vampires don’t care what other people think. And that is vampire attitude.
At St. Luke’s, I always got to class before the second bell, which showed I cared about my grades. My name was always on the honor roll and the bylines of the school newspaper, which showed I cared about our school. I didn’t go to keg parties, which might seem uncaring, but which actually meant that I cared so much what other people thought of my dancing and my lack of beer tolerance that I didn’t dare show my face. I’d spent two years’ allowance buying snails for Celine and then chased her down the street because I cared too much. That’s why I’d ruined our date. And that’s why I’d never dated, kissed, or even danced with a girl. I cared too much about what they thought of me.
Well, the caring stopped now.
I threw Luke’s shirt and my dad’s shirt in the hamper. I got rid of Luke’s creepy tooth. I pulled my black pajama t-shirt back over my skinny white chest. For the rest of the day and that night, I wore that plain t-shirt. I wore it the next morning as I grabbed a piece of toast and ignored my mother’s plea that I should drink green tea (she’d been watching Dr. Oz). As I climbed into my Volvo and headed for my new high school, that same black shirt I’d been wearing for three days conveyed it all—coolness, apathy, and a little bit of BO.