Bloodthirsty

Chapter 8
Late Saturday afternoon, I picked up Jenny in my Volvo, and we drove to the Seventeenth Biannual East Coast Fantasy Fest. To me, the convention center was like a zoo where the animals walked around free, shaking one another’s hands and taking photographs together and drinking coffee. As I did when I was at the zoo, I wanted to look in too many different directions at once. Just when I’d focus on something new and strange, trying to understand it, some other thing would shimmer or flutter or screech by, and I’d turn my head. As a result, I bumped into about four different people—or creatures—within my first five minutes in the convention center.
There was a guy with horns the color of foreskin curled around his head who jumped out at me first. From a distance, the mask that covered his entire head was so similar to the color of his actual skin that it seemed an outgrowth of him.
Two men with beards down to their knees made peace signs at everyone who passed. A Round Table’s worth of knights in full armor lifted their face guards to sip from cans of Diet Pepsi. An angry little gargoyle with cracking blue-gray body paint was crouching around the ground and I accidentally tripped over him.
“Watch it, bitch,” he snapped.
“Jesus,” I said to Jenny, pulling myself back on my feet.
“C’mon, not everyone’s that mean,” Jenny said.
She was right. A group of girls in cottonball blond wigs and flesh-colored bodysuits blew me kisses.
Awkwardly, I waved back at them.
“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?” Jenny asked eagerly.
A sweaty mustachioed man in slippers and a green Robin Hood hat lunged in front of us, brandishing a real and rusted sword. His foe was a six-foot-five man in a full-bodied felt dragon costume. The blade missed my aorta by about six inches.
“Whoa!”
I made a face at Jenny, like I was thinking, It’s worse than I thought. But in reality, these crazy people around us both embarrassed and kind of impressed me. They embarrassed me because I couldn’t imagine walking into a public place with some horned mask or body paint. I would never even tell two hundred strangers that I liked to read, much less that I liked to read books about witches and dwarves. I thought about how the standard high school boy writes “I don’t read” under Favorite Books on his Facebook profile. Why? Because, whether it’s true or not, that’s the safe, conformist response. But not one of these Fantasy Fest-ers was a conformist, and they impressed me because of that. I was fascinated with the thought and time they’d put into their costumes, with the enthusiasm of Lord of the Rings fans debating metaphorical issues in Elvish, with the warmth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Buffys embracing each other after months apart. One dedicated Harry Potter Dumbledore had grown a beard down to his knees. It must have taken him two years to grow that beard. Of course, he was, like, seventy years old. I guess by the time you’re that old, you don’t really care what people think of you. Or maybe none of these fantasy fans cared what people thought of them. Maybe that was what impressed me—their ability to put the weird things about themselves out in the open.
Speaking of people who put weird things about themselves out in the open, Jenny was tugging me across the convention center. She’d come to the Fantasy Fest mostly to get her book signed by Carmella Lovelace, the author of Bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only Bloodthirsty fan in attendance. When we turned the corner, we saw a hundred-person line. About fifteen percent of those people were girls dressed in slutty white dresses to look like Virginia White.
When one Virginia with lame cleavage saw the book in Jenny’s hand, she said, “Better get in line, girl.”
“We’ve been here since noon,” added another, who had ketchup down her dress as fake blood.
Jenny smacked me on the elbow as we headed for the back of the line.
“Ow! What?”
“We should have come earlier,” she admonished me.
“I told you that I have a sun sensitivity,” I told Jenny. “We couldn’t come at noon.”
“It’s not even sunny today!” Jenny told me. “It’s about to rain! And why are you so sensitive to the sun, anyway? What’s up with that?”
A blond girl with hair like feathers jumped out of the line toward me. Because of my recent experience with the sword guy and the felt dragon, it was understandable that I jumped back and kind of shrieked like a girl.
“Hi!” she squealed. “How are you?”
The blond girl pulled me in for a hug, pinning my arms at my sides. Jesus, girls were really friendly at these things. Either that or my mom’s notes were right and I was a stud.
When she pulled away, though, I saw it was the blonde from the train. The girl who had started all of this by mistaking me for a vampire. Apparently she had branched out beyond her own creepy vampire book, Nocturnal Terror, to the more sexy Bloodthirsty.
“How are you feeling?” Blondie asked in a low voice, leaning toward me.
Jenny listened intently.
“Oh, fine,” I said politely. “How are you?”
“I’m sorry I called you out that day on the train,” Blondie said in the same low voice. “I shouldn’t have revealed what you were in a public place. I understand why you got so pissed. I’ll be more subtle from now on.”
“Oh, okay, well, thanks,” I said, hoping Jenny was picking up possible hints from this, but more strongly hoping to escape this psycho.
“Are there any others here?” the blond girl hissed.
“What?” I asked.
“Other vamp—”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean…”
A boy, probably twelve years old, walked by sulkily with his hands in his pockets. He was dressed like Edward Cullen from Twilight—reddish streaks in his hair, all this powder on his face to make him pale.
“No real ones,” Blondie finished for me, her voice low and intense.
“How do you guys know each other?” Jenny asked, looking up from me to Blondie like a child trying to decode a grown-up conversation.
“Does she know?” Blondie asked me.
Jenny looked up expectantly. I felt intensely awkward. I felt even less comfortable with the idea of telling Jenny my fake vamp status than I had in school. And explaining Blondie would force me to say it.
“We have to go to the back of the line,” I commanded Jenny.
“Finbar!” Jenny wailed. “Carmella Lovelace just got here! I can see her beehive hair!”
“We should really…”
But it was too late. A jumpy brunette had joined my one-girl bleach-blond fan club.
“Is this him?” the brunette asked conspiratorially. She pointed to me, and I was startled to see that a rubber glove had transformed her hand into a large green claw.
“Shhh!” The blonde’s hiss dissolved into giggles.
“This is him!” the clawed brunette called to another girl.
The third girl came towering over with frightening force. She was clearly the only Amazon woman in suburban New York. The girl had me by about five inches. Hell, she had Yao Ming by five inches.
“The vampire!” she hissed excitedly.
It was only when the Amazon bent at the waist to hug me, and I ducked, that I could see Jenny’s reaction. Beneath her carrot-red roots and goth-black streaks, Jenny’s mouth had dropped open. She held the cover of Bloodthirsty and looked from it to me. Her mouth didn’t shut. Seriously, she could have swallowed a fly.
Meanwhile, I was in a frightening high school girl huddle, my eardrums flooded by high-frequency screams, dispossessed from my own body as it was examined like I was a Jonas Brothers impersonator at a suburban mall.
“Look at his skin!” one marveled, stroking my forearm.
Another grabbed the same arm from the first girl and flipped it over.
“You can see all of his veins,” she said. Her manicured finger traced a blue line down into my palm.
A sense of déjà vu flooded me. When had this happened to me before? A crowd of girls pressing upon me, desperate to touch me? Oh, wait. That had never happened to me before. But it had happened to Luke. Maybe we had the twin ESP thing going. And clearly, both of us were very desirable.
But my smugness was fleeting. After six or seven girls lined up near me, feeding my ego, I saw the first guy.
My first thought was that he was joining the girls in admiring my body. Which I guess would be fine, as long as he looked and didn’t touch. Then Jenny called out desperately:
“Finbar! Watch out!”
Oh, shit. Now I knew why there were guys coming after me. I had forgotten how close we were to the vampire slayers table. Apparently in this alternate universe, Buffy was not the only vampire slayer. There were also adolescent boys, and even full-grown men, who hated vampires. I knew this, because the vampire slayers table had a huge vampire doll hanging from a noose above the table. When last I passed, the guys at this table had been eagerly debating the merits of silver chains and wooden stakes as vampire-killing weapons. Now they had stopped talking theoretically. There was someone in their midst for whom they’d waited their whole fantasy lives: a real, live (well, dead, but you know) vampire.
And oh, shit—it was me!
I grabbed on to the biggest thing in sight to protect me—the Amazon girl. I actually felt pretty safe inside all those girls. Safe enough to peek around Blondie and see that the vampire slayers’ wooden stakes were made out of cardboard. One of them even had “Best Buy” visible through a wash of brown paint. So these guys weren’t going to actually kill me. I could calm down. The vampire slayers weren’t that tough.
But there were more joining the ranks. All the Jacobs had come over from the Twilight table. In Stephenie Meyer’s books, Jacob is a jocky high school dude. Now, that alone would have me waving a white flag. But Jacob happens to be a jocky high school dude… who turns into a WEREWOLF. And guess who happens to be the mortal enemy of the werewolf? Who does Jacob want to hunt down in the woods and tear apart limb by pale puny limb?
The vampire.
Of course, these Jacobs couldn’t really turn into werewolves. But they were charging at me like they thought they could turn into werewolves. And besides that, Jacobs were way cooler than vampire slayers. They were the kind of guys who came to a fantasy convention to collect weapons and hit on girls. And, you know, join a furious mob about to beat down a pale kid.
I turned and took off, frenzied, seeking the nearest exit sign. With the Jacobs involved, the mob was really gaining on me.
I slammed the door open, took a brief breath while surveying the parking lot, and then sprinted around the back of the building, panting like I’d just climbed Mount Gundabad.
“I have a compass!” I heard a vampire slayer say from around the front of the convention center.
Uh-oh. It was only a matter of time before they multiplied two pi by the radius of this building, which was a geodesic dome, and found me 180 degrees around the back. Wait, hold up. That’s it! This building was a geodesic dome! (Okay, you’re right, a guy who knows what a geodesic dome is shouldn’t mock anyone for using the number pi. FYI—a geodesic dome is a building that looks like a golf ball.)
But I felt suddenly light and free. Because I had remembered this time the whole Alexandria fire squad had been called to our middle school because Luke had scaled a building and was camped out on top. The building he scaled was our indoor track, which was a geodesic dome. The fantastic thing about geodesic domes was that you could climb them.
Okay, not anyone could climb them. Luke could climb them, being the 80 percent ape that he is. It was a little more difficult for me considering I had zero climbing abilities and wasn’t wearing a belt.
But I reached up the base of the dome and found a hand-hold, and then found a ledge for my foot. I began to climb, fueled by the need to escape the Jacobs and the vampire slayers and those Bloodthirsty fiends. For one thing, I’d never been in a fight in my life. For another, if I were in a fight, it would become clear I wasn’t a vampire. I didn’t have super speed, super strength, or any kind of physical coordination.
Plus, one extra nasty little detail: I’m scared of blood. I hate blood. That’s one reason I try to avoid fights, violent team sports, and, come to think of it, CSI in any of its many incarnations. And, if I passed out at the sight of blood, everyone would know I was not a vampire. Being scared of blood wasn’t exactly good for my street cred. Or whatever the vampire version of street cred was. Coffin cred?
Oh, why had I given in to fantasy violence? Why hadn’t I brokered peace? Why hadn’t I suggested, “Let’s all join hands and sing the Ewok song from Return of the Jedi ! All species are welcome here!” Why had I even come to this Fantasy Fest? Why had I decided that becoming a vampire would result in less people wanting to beat me up?
Too scared to climb down, I crouched on top of the geodesic dome for an hour and a half. Twenty minutes into that time, it began to rain. The whole time I was anxiously anticipating my reunion with Jenny, during which, I was 99 percent sure, she would ask me, “Are you a vampire?” Had I been better with vampire attitude, she would have gotten the message that I was a vampire but didn’t want to talk about it. But I was never good at sending out cool and subtle signals—see my date with Celine for another example. Instead, all of my vampire behaviors and encounters so far, from my glamouring Ashley Milano’s boobs to my mom’s drug talk, had elicited the question, “What the hell is wrong with you, Finbar?”
I had set out to give an impression, to intrigue, to fascinate, to attract, even to seduce. I hadn’t set out to lie. I would have to tell Jenny the truth. And then this whole thing would be over. This snobby poet T. S. Eliot once said, “This is the way the world ends—not with a bang but a whimper.” This was how my vampire world ended—not with me getting banged, but with me on a weird roof, soaking wet, and with my pants sliding down my ass. Definitely reason to whimper.
When people started to leave the convention, I moved across the roof toward a position above the exit doors and watched people leave. Whoa. More than a few fantasy characters who had arrived separately were now going home together, looking pretty cozy. I didn’t even want to think about what a guy in a fur coat and a girl with a goat’s head would do on a first date. Oh, wait! There was Jenny!
“Jenny!” I hissed from my dome.
She looked up, puzzled.
“Jenny!” I hissed louder.
Then a group of vampire slayers headed to their car (wow, a new Land Rover. One of them must have a killer day job) and I ducked down again.
“We really scared the shit out of him!” one of the slayers said, highly satisfied. “Hell, yeah!” another agreed. They high-fived like jocks.
When the slayers had passed, I called, “Jenny! Help me down!”
“Finbar?” Jenny called. She stomped off the parking lot pavement and into the mud. She looked down miserably at her muddy shoes, and then furiously up at me.
“What the hell are you doing on the roof?” she yelled. “And why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
I pointed down to the ground by a skinny tree.
“My phone fell down,” I told her.
Jenny looked up at me and raised an eyebrow.
“My pants fell down, too,” I said uncomfortably, trying to hike my jeans up in a subtle way.
“Would you come down?” she asked me.
“I’m waiting for the Jacobs to leave!” I told her.
“They left,” Jenny said. “They went off to eat some red meat or something. Come down!”
Jenny helped me down from the dome, and she dug my cell phone out of the mud. She even looked away when my damp jeans got caught on a rain gutter. As we dashed to my car in the rain and I unlocked the passenger door for her, I was thinking what a good pal Jenny was. That is, until I turned the key in the ignition and she wouldn’t let me leave the parking spot. She locked her hand over mine around the gearshift.
“Tell me the truth,” Jenny demanded dramatically, her voice even louder than the pounding rain on my Volvo.
“What?” I shoved my wet hair out of my face, avoiding her eyes.
“I mean, you’re skinny,” Jenny began. “You’re pale. You can’t go in the sun.”
“Well, that stuff is all true,” I told her. “But look, Jenny, I can’t tell you…”
The words “I am a vampire” just couldn’t form on my lips. My mother had drilled too many commandments and vivid images of the flames of hell into my head. Then, while I was reflecting on my Catholic inability to lie, divine inspiration struck.
“I can’t tell you,” I said with passion. “Because it would just be too dangerous.”
If I told Jenny I was a vampire, I would burn in hell. Dangerous. If I told Jenny that I wasn’t really a vampire, then word could get out that I was pretending to be a vampire, and surely someone would kick my ass for that. Dangerous.
Jenny’s eyes were huge, her face serious. She nodded, heavy with the weight of my secret. Obviously, she believed it would be dangerous because I was, in fact, a vampire. She looked down in awe at my skin touching her skin.
“Your hand is freezing.” She spoke slowly, as if under a spell. “Wow.”
I nodded sadly, as if cold hands were a necessary part of my life… or my lack of life. I wondered, though, why my hands were actually so cold all the time. Maybe I should get that checked out.
Because I was covered in mud and had a tear in my pants, I came into my house through the back door. When I did, I found Luke with a nonstick spatula poised menacingly in his hand and half a cheeseburger hanging from his mouth.
“What the hell?” I asked. “Were you gonna hit me with that?”
“Sorry,” Luke said. “I thought you were breaking into the house. Mom’s paranoia is really contagious.”
“Yeah, whatever, Hamburglar,” I told him. “Where is Mom?”
“Seven thirty mass,” Luke said. “Where were you? And… what happened to you?”
Because climbing a geodesic dome was Luke’s idea, telling him about my dumb climb and my pants falling down and my phone getting all muddy might make me irrationally mad at him. So instead I decided it was time to tell him my secret. After all, my brother loved me. He would accept my new lifestyle choice. Sure, some people believed what I was doing was morally wrong. Some more conservative media portrayed us as evil menaces, preying on children, wooing others to our nasty way of life. But I was sure my brother would accept me as a vampire.
“What?” Luke asked when I told him. “How did this happen?” Then he narrowed his eyes like he did before mowing a rival down on the football field and asked, “Did someone bite you, bro?”
“I mean, I’m not actually a vampire,” I told him. “This girl Jenny who I was with today, she thinks I’m one. So I just kind of… went along with it.”
“So supposedly,” Luke said, “you’re just walking around with the rest of us, but you’re a vampire?”
“Yeah. That’s the idea. I mean, that’s her idea.”
“What do you do about the fangs?”
“What?”
“Did she ever ask to see the fangs?”
“No!” I protested. “I’m a nice vampire!”
“Things like that pop out involuntarily,” Luke said. “Like when Ms. Alexander tutored Sean O’Connor, and he got a huge—”
“All right,” I interrupted. “But your fangs don’t pop out involuntarily when you don’t have them.”
Luke stood there and thought for sixty seconds, which was a long time for him.
“You need to be faster,” Luke decided.
“What?”
“Faster. Stronger.” Luke began to sing Daft Punk by way of Kanye West. “Harder, better, faster, stronger…”
I gave Luke a disparaging look, one to prevent him from dancing.
“Look.” Luke flung a quarter of his cheeseburger across the room for emphasis. “Vampires are fast. And strong. Like, abnormally fast and strong. Like, Usain-Bolt-meets-Incredible-Hulk. Get it?”
“Whatever, Luke, I’m fast.”
“You need to be…” Luke clapped his hands and made a whoosh sound.
“No one’s testing me on being a vampire,” I said.
“I bet you a thousand dollars.” Luke hopped up onto a kitchen chair. “You’ll come to a vampire situation where you have to be fast.”
How I wished I could raise one eyebrow at a time.
“And that’s when you’ll thank me,” Luke said, grinning.
“Thank you for what?”
“Finbar Frame,” Luke announced, “I am going to be your personal trainer.”
“Jesus,” I groaned. “You are not.”
“I am,” Luke said. “I’m going to be your personal trainer. And you’re going to be a brick wall. You’re going to drive that vampire girl crazy… what’s her name again? The vampire chick? Sookie?”
“Jenny,” I said. “But she’s not, like, my vampire girl….”
“A girl.” Luke sighed nostalgically. “Jesus, Finn, you’re spoiled. F*ck Fordham Prep. I haven’t seen a girl in a year and a half!”
I decided that if Luke really made me work out with him, I would punish him by telling him all about Kayla Bateman and her unusual boobs. Then he’d really be jealous of me.