Bloodthirsty

Chapter 7
Upon first impression, Pelham Public looked just like I assumed it would be from Matt Katz’s first-day-of-school nap: relaxed. But there was bullying going on—more than the snide remarks about my name.
During my second week at my new school, I left physics class early to get my lab notebook and saw this kid Chris Cho from my Nutritional Science class in the empty hallway. Cho is a freshman, but he’s so skinny and small he looks like a lost middle schooler. He has one of those faces that always looks sad, but this period he looked even more bummed than usual. Then I saw that he wasn’t alone in the hallway—he was with Chris Perez.
Chris Perez was a sophomore with a shaved head. Girls went crazy for him—partly because he was good-looking and partly because he was a badass. Everyone called him Perez. Everyone talked about him. I mean, I’d only been here a week and a half, and I’d heard several legends about him already. Perez had parked in the teachers’ parking lot. Somehow he’d convinced the principal to let him keep the spot. Perez had climbed to the top of the rope in gym class. Perez had set off the fire alarm. Perez had bigger balls than anyone at Pelham Public. He was notorious at Pelham because he got in trouble a lot. Wait, correction—he should have gotten in trouble a lot. But when teachers caught him marking up the desks with ink pens or stealing from the school store, he’d play the sympathy card. He’d tell an elaborate story about his parents crossing the border and struggling to speak English, and he would get off scot-free.
But Perez didn’t seem like a sympathetic character now. He swaggered up to Chris Cho and nudged him in the ribs with his fist.
“Hey, buddy!” Perez said in a loud, unpleasant voice that let me know he wasn’t Cho’s “buddy” at all.
Cho lowered his head and tried to walk past Perez down the hallway. But Perez sidestepped easily and blocked Cho’s way.
“Nuh-uh-uh.” Perez shook his head. “Gotta pay the toll.”
Cho looked up with a blank face. I was watching from my locker down the hall, but Perez moved so quickly toward Chris Cho that I didn’t know what had happened until I saw Perez hold Cho’s wallet up above his head.
“Let’s see what we have in here,” Perez said. Lowering the leather wallet, he pulled it open with both hands. “Ten… eighteen bucks. Not bad today, Cho.”
Perez removed five bills from Cho’s wallet before letting it drop to the floor. He folded the bills in half and put them in his pocket. Then he clapped Cho on the shoulder like a teammate and walked away.
As I walked past Cho, he was picking up his wallet from the hallway floor. I reminded myself that vampires didn’t care about petty human interactions. I was a vampire, therefore I didn’t care about what was happening to Chris Cho. I didn’t feel bad for him—or feel empathy for him—at all.
In Jenny Beckman, I had my first female friend.
Being close to a girl—I mean, literally being within three feet of a girl—was new to me.
The motto at St. Luke’s dances was “Leave room for the Holy Spirit.” Our dean and chaperones would tell this to any guy who was dancing too close to a girl. I’m not sure anyone was concerned about the Holy Spirit being there as much as they were worried about St. Luke’s guys rubbing their khaki boners all over those poor girls. As for the Holy Spirit, I’m pretty sure if He could be anywhere in Heaven or on Earth, He would not have chosen to sweat it out beneath that lame disco ball and spill Kool-Aid down his dress shirt like the rest of us.
I was never told to “Leave room for the Holy Spirit.” Of course, I’d attended only two dances at St. Luke’s—the first one freshman year, when I was hopeful about meeting girls, and the last one sophomore year, when I collected tickets. I didn’t dance at either one, and I actually got closer to a girl when I was collecting tickets. I shared the ticket table with a suspicious student government leader from St. Mary’s who accused me of stealing from the cash box. I recounted the crumpled five-dollar bills and cigarette butts in the cash box while, in the center of the dance floor, Luke yelled himself hoarse and pumped his fist in a circle of girls. Luke is unafraid to look like an idiot, so he’s a great dancer. He’s also unafraid to get physically close to girls, which is the main reason I’ve avoided dancing for sixteen years.
Now I had Jenny around, all the time, with no room for the Holy Spirit. I got to see all her quirks and emotions up close and personal. And Jesus, she had a lot of emotions.
“I can’t believe Kayla Bateman got out of gym today,” Jenny was saying. “It’s, like, put on a sports bra. I’m pretty sure you can play dodgeball with big boobs. They’re, like, extra protection.”
Kayla Bateman apparently has some medical condition where her boobs won’t stop growing. It’s, like, a type of gigantism for boobs. She’s the Andre the Giant of boobs. Although I’d seen Kayla talking to our male gym teacher, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the doctor’s note that got her out of class.
After three weeks of friendship, I had already decided that a lot of Jenny’s frustrations in life derived from the fact that Kayla Bateman had enormous boobs and Jenny had no boobs. Well, not no boobs. I definitely still would have looked if she flashed me. Jenny had small boobs. Jenny would never admit that she was jealous of Kayla, but I picked up on it anyway. I have more sensitivity than the average male Clearasil user.
Personally, I thought a great solution would be to take some of Kayla Bateman’s boobs and give them to Jenny. Like, just lipo-suck Kayla’s chest and inject it into Jenny’s. It was the perfect solution. The girl who had too much would give to the girl who had too little. It was a redistribution of resources—a sort of Boob Communism. Boob-unism. Jenny would be happy with bigger boobs, and Kayla’s chiropractor would probably be glad that she wasn’t hauling those things around anymore.
Thinking about boobs in abstract economic terms was nothing new for me. I’d thought about boobs in more contexts than Karl Marx thought about poor people. But talking about boobs with someone who had boobs (even small ones like Jenny’s)—I’d never done that at all. That was revolutionary!
But I had to remember there were both boys and girls at this school. We were swimming around in a pool of our own hormones and pheromones. There was sex everywhere. Even between the students and the teachers! This one teacher, Mrs. Anderson, had senior boys coming to her classroom every period to propose to her. It was all because she had these perfect, round breasts. Those breasts were the subject of much speculation in our school—namely, were they real or fake? Jason Burke was assumed definitive when he declared Mrs. Anderson’s breasts “too good to be true.”
Jenny wasn’t my only friend at Pelham Public. It was hard not to get to know the other people she had introduced, considering I had seven classes a day with most of them. During our first physics lab period, Jason Burke asked me to be his partner.
“I didn’t want Ashley Milano,” Jason explained.
Not the most flattering motive for friendship. But good to know I ranked over Ashley Milano… and Nate the Nose-picker.
Ashley Milano, in turn, called out to me one day as I walked into AP literature.
“Finn, sit your ass down,” she called to me. “You have to hear this story.”
Someone has noticed me! I thought joyfully. Someone had noticed me… and my ass! Even with Jason, Kayla, Matt Katz, and Jenny there, Ashley’s audience wasn’t complete. She needed me, too.
As Ashley Milano’s story—which, like most of her stories, involved a senior boy and speculations about rhinoplasty—dragged on, I realized I was so busy actually making friends that I kind of forgot to be distant and mysterious. I mean, I’d planned the whole vampire thing to give a reason why I didn’t fit in with everyone else; why I wouldn’t make friends; why I would be so different. But I wasn’t that different, and I was starting to make friends. Dammit! My plan was foiled!
To keep myself on track, when Ashley Milano’s story dragged on, I locked my creepy eyes on her face and tried to “glamour” her into shutting up. Concentrating intensely, I visualized her lips coming together, magically sealed by my will. If Vampire Finbar shut Ashley Milano up, Vampire Finbar would be hailed as a hero. Hell, even a superhero.
It worked for half a second. She stopped the story to say, “Ew, Finn, are you looking down my shirt?”
Yeah, right. With Kayla Bateman two feet away? No chance. But clearly I had to work on my glamouring. In fact, I had to work on my vampire plan as a whole. My planned tactic had been to convince Jenny that I was a vampire first, then have her tell everybody else. Jenny was perfect: she was a big fantasy fan, she was a little needy, and she had once conducted a séance and set her hair on fire, so she obviously believed in crazy stuff. But Jenny had foiled my plan by becoming my friend. She was around too much. Vampires didn’t do these petty little human things like, say, eat or breathe. The eating I could handle—I didn’t have the same lunch period as Jenny, and I wasn’t very tempted by the frozen hamburgers in the unrefrigerated vending machines near the student lounge. The breathing, though? I couldn’t really kick that habit. And I actually tried, too.
But Jenny wasn’t getting the hint. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her outright, “I’m a vampire.” Due to her fantasy obsession, I had been waiting for her to confront me with, “You’re a vampire, aren’t you? I know you are!” and let me give my mysterious Chauncey Castle shrug. But she wasn’t confronting me.
Another reason I stalled in my vampire quest was this: I met a girl.
For my first week and a half at Pelham Public, I didn’t brave the cafeteria at lunch, retreating to my favorite place, the library, instead. Because I was the only junior taking AP Latin with the Pelham Public seniors (which was due to my sadistic Catholic teachers and their love of Latin declensions), I didn’t have lunch with any other juniors. I had lunch fourth period, when most of the sophomores and some freshmen ate.
My first day in the cafeteria, I saw a girl sitting by herself at a table, reading a book. This made me incredibly suspicious. Why? Because I thought it was a Finbar-trap. Mousetraps have cheese in them, and Finbar-traps would have shiny-haired high school brunettes in them, reading New York Times Notable Books.
Despite my suspicious instincts, I drew closer to this girl. And I felt the way my mother must have felt when she fell in love with my father through all those hockey pads and that face mask. I loved this girl even from the back, when all I could tell about her was that she had a hell of a great shampoo and had passed every scoliosis test she’d ever taken. I had to go up to her. I had to approach her. This need was bigger than my self-consciousness and my lack of experience with girls and my fear that I would spill my cafeteria spaghetti on her, which was basically the worst thing you could spill on someone.
When the girl turned, she was beautiful. She had glasses on, and behind them she had eyelashes you could count one by one like spider’s legs, and brown eyes taking in great big gulps of everything around her. Then she turned back to her book, which, as I walked up to her, I could see was Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.
“The guy lives,” I told her. “But Richard Parker dies.”
Life of Pi is about a shipwreck survivor who ends up floating on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean. He’s stuck there with a giant tiger from the zoo, the tiger being named Richard Parker. The big suspenseful hook of the story is if the guy will survive in the boat, be saved, or be eaten by the tiger. Then he gets to be friends with the tiger, so you wonder if the tiger’s gonna survive. I’d just spoiled the story for this girl.
One side of her mouth curled up. I’m impressed by people who can do one-sided things, like raise one eyebrow. This, on this girl, was even better. She had great lips.
“I know,” she said.
“Oh… I’m, uh, sorry.”
I fumbled for an apology, ironic because she’d just told me I hadn’t ruined her ending. But I’d anticipated that she would be surprised by my comment, not me by hers.
The girl smiled, but turned back to Life of Pi. I felt the full awkward weight of my own body hovering over her. Say something or leave, Finbar. Fight or flight.
“Read it before?” I asked. I was suddenly obnoxiously loud because I was excited by the possibility that she could have read it before. The only thing better than a girl who read books was a girl who read the same book twice. A rereader. This girl could be a rereader!
“What?” When the girl looked up, her short dark hair fell into her eyes.
“Is that why you knew? The end?” I explained.
“I read the last page first,” she whispered, leaning a little toward me. Then she ducked behind her own falling bangs, like she was ashamed of having ruined the ending for herself.
“Unacceptable.” I shook my head. “I’m ashamed of you, Miss…”
Turning her head to get her bangs out of her eyes, the girl flipped the book so it was facedown next to her lunch tray. That was a big move. I’d officially captured her attention more than a shipwreck and a tiger.
“Gallatin,” she said. “Kate Gallatin.”
Then she placed her hand on the place beside her at the table. And I sat down, as simple as that. Well, first I put my backpack down in an awkward place on the ground, and it blocked the back legs of the chair, so I tried to pull the chair out but failed, so then I moved my backpack, but my legs were in the way of the chair, so I stepped to the side, pulled out the chair, and then sat down. But basically, I sat down.
“I’m Finbar,” I said. “I’m, uh, new.”
Glamouring is very difficult with a gorgeous girl. I narrowed my eyebrows as I locked eyes with Kate for the first time, but then Ashley Milano’s comment about me looking down her shirt popped into my head. I didn’t want Kate to think that!
Luckily, Kate, like everyone else, ignored the intense, hypnotic stare I fixed upon her.
“I’m new, too!” she said. “I haven’t seen you in my classes. Are you a sophomore?”
“No, uh, a junior,” I told her.
“Oh,” Kate said, grinning. “So you were held back in lunch?”
I laughed out loud. She was so quick. I would have to step up my game from “Uh,” “Oh,” and my own name.
“I just couldn’t graduate to using forks,” I said.
“Some guys can’t handle their opposable thumbs.” Kate shook her head.
Again I laughed, breaking that back-and-forth rhythm of our teasing each other. She picked up the slack, saying, “You’re probably only allowed to eat finger foods. Too bad it’s pasta day.”
“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” I joked. “Do you mind smuggling a fugitive?”
Kate smiled. Except for the way my ribs were closing in—like they were cave walls and my heart was Indiana Jones—this whole conversation made me feel like I’d known this girl forever.
Except, of course, if I’d known this girl forever, I wouldn’t be a dour and cynical sixteen-year-old virgin who was pretending to be a vampire. But anyway…
“Actually,” I said, “I have lunch this period because I’m taking a weird Latin class. I mean, uh… an advanced Latin class.”
Maybe my knowledge of Latin was a really sexy quality.
“You would have been cooler if you stuck with the ‘failing lunch’ story,” Kate told me.
Maybe not.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But am I cool enough to eat lunch with you?”
“You should,” Kate said. “I’m great with this.” She flourished her fork. “I could teach you a thing or two.”
“We’ll see, sophomore,” I threatened, narrowing my eyes. Then I sat the whole lunch period with Kate, a smart, funny, literate, and incredibly sexy girl. I was so excited, I actually did forget how to use my fork.
For the rest of the afternoon, I was completely distracted. I was thinking about Kate. When Jenny came up to me at my locker, I barely registered that she was inviting me to go somewhere with her on Saturday afternoon. Still dreaming of Kate, fantasizing about doing a New York Times crossword puzzle together after blasphemous Sunday-morning sex, I agreed to whatever Jenny had asked me.
“Great!” Jenny said. “Don’t worry, we don’t have to wear costumes. And none of the weapons are real.”
“Huh?”
I froze by my locker as Jenny trotted happily away. Either Jenny and I had been hired as entertainers for a Lord of the Flies–themed birthday party, or I’d just accepted an invite to an S&M orgy.