Bloodthirsty

by Flynn Meaney

  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. Fuck 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.

  chapter 9

  A combination of factors led me to use the word cock in my seventh-period AP literature class.

  I’d been at Pelham Public for a month and a half now. And, for all that time, in the back of my mind I’d been ruminating about how sexual vampires were. I mean, isn’t sex the reason the vampire trend has lasted so long? Back in the day, Dracula seduced all these pale, ruffly virgins. Now, Chauncey Castle’s pale face glowers from Bloodthirsty posters on walls all over the country, fixed on teenage girls in their beds. And the girls love it.

  Beyond the attraction factor, vampires are supposed to be really good at sex. Hence all of the talk about “the only thing harder and more powerful than Chauncey Castle’s fangs.” And hence all the action that made Virginia White’s breasts “shiver,” “quiver,” and “tremble” in every damn chapter of that book.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what it meant to be good at sex. I’d always assumed my first sexual experience would be kinda like my trip to the Touch Tunnel in the Museum of Science and Industry. I’d plunge in blindly. I’d feel my way around while more experienced personnel watched and laughed from an infrared camera. And I’d hope to emerge before I ran out of oxygen.

  In fact, I felt really uncomfortable with the idea of sex. It didn’t help that, at St. Luke’s, guys had this game where they would concoct ridiculous and fictional sexual terms, claim they were real but obscure, and taunt each other with them. Actually, usually they would taunt me with them, as I was a target who didn’t have the balls to admit I didn’t know what something meant. For example, Johnny Frackas would call across study hall:

  “Hey, Fagbar, I bet you don’t know what a pickle flip is.”

  A pickle flip? No, I didn’t know. In my head I’d file furiously through every Maxim magazine I’d ever stolen, or try to picture pages of my anatomical encyclopedia. I’d rack my head generating possible moves and positions and perverse acts that could constitute a pickle flip.

  Well, the verb to flip generally means to rearrange from facedown to faceup. Or vice versa. Or, used in a more gymnastic sense, flip could mean a full three hundred and sixty degree turn of the body. Like a somersault. Pickle was pretty obvious. Pretty alliterative. Pickle equaled, well, you know. But I couldn’t do a somersault with my…

  “Hey, guys!” Johnny Frackas would call out, interrupting my lengthy pause. “Fagbar doesn’t know what a pickle flip is!”

  My face would turn red, and I wouldn’t have anything to say in return. And why not? Because I assumed that every guy in the room knew something I didn’t.

  That was how a bunch of Catholic schoolboys taught me an important lesson about sex. All you have to do to make people think you know about sex is talk about it a lot.

  Although I planned to put this theory into action and bring sex into a conversation—the more people in the conversation the better—I hadn’t found the right opportunity yet. Whenever I was with a group of guys and girls from class and we broached that subject area, either some other guy made a dumb dirty joke and swiped my chance or I didn’t notice the opening to bring up sex until it was too late. To be fair, I had been busy lately, and distracted, mainly by physical exhaustion.

  Luke’s training regimen was killing me. He woke me up every morning at 5:45 AM. Luke begins his own strength training by lifting 130 pounds—that is, by lifting 130 pounds of reluctant Finbar out of his warm bed. Then we both do cardio—running three friggin’ miles around our neighborhood when only people dumb enough to own dogs are awake. Then it’s back upstairs (and every step fucking burns. Why do our stairs have so many damn steps?). Then it’s so much weight lifting you would think the two of us were filming a Total Gym infomercial in our bedroom. I’m not sure that my body is made for exercise. Since starting this whole thing with Luke, I’d suffered sunburn (yes, sometimes even before the sun rose. Life—and UV rays—are cruel), shin splints, a strained bicep, a twisted ankle, a sweat rash, and a groin pull. With that last injury, Luke tried to administer some first aid, and I think we accidentally violated some New York State incest laws.

  I had also been getting busy because of Kate. No, not getting busy with Kate. Wrong preposition. But I had been getting a lot closer to her. We ate lunch together almost every day. She told me she wanted to start an investment club at our school.

  “You can make money off these online stock market games!” Kate told me. “Well, if you beat those douche bags from the high school of economics.”

  Well, I definitely wanted to beat those douche bags from the high school of economics. Mostly so I could impress Kate. So I wasn’t going to admit how bad I was at math. Math is supposed to be one of those things guys are good at. So I checked out A Kid’s Guide to Stock Market Investing from the library. I also asked Matt Katz for advice, because apparently his dad was a successful investor.

  “Sure, I’ll ask Dad for some stock names,” Matt Katz told me. “He’s good. He earned so much last year he bought my stepmom a whole new face.”

  While Kate got me interested in the investment club and even made math a little bit sexy, I recommended books for her to read and admitted to her that I like poetry.

  “Really?” she smiled. “I never knew a guy who liked poems.”

  Except for those homos from the Dead Faggots Society, I finished in my mind. That’s what Johnny Frackas had called me after my poem was published in the St. Luke’s Lit: “One of those homos from the Dead Faggots Society.”

  “Which poets are good?” Kate asked. “You should tell me which ones to read. Remember I’m a beginner.”

  “Yeats and Frank O’Hara are awesome,” I began. “And H.D., and Jeffrey McDaniel is really funny and stuff. But if you like more traditional kinda rhymey stuff, definitely do Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

  “Shakespeare?” Kate tilted her head with mock thoughtfulness. “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s a pretty good writer.” I grinned. “Doesn’t get the respect he deserves.”

  And, actually, it was poetry that provided me with my sexual opening (haha). Mrs. Rove’s introduction to our poetry unit gave me the opportunity to dirty-talk the pants off my seventh-period literature class.

  On a dull rainy Tuesday in mid-October, our AP literature teacher announced, “This is Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ ” Mrs. Rove kind of looked like Hillary Clinton, but she had this huge Escalade in the teachers’ parking lot, so she must have had a secret gangsta side. Or a stockbroker husband.

  My classmates turned their heads from the drug deal going down in the parking lot and groaned in remarkable unison. Even AP students hated the poetry unit. But me, I stopped doodling fangs in the margins of my looseleaf and looked up expectantly. This was my chance to dominate English class and flaunt my vampire intelligence and confidence. “To His Coy Mistress” was one of my favorite poems! Actually, it was part of my favorite genre of poems, which could be called Poems Guys Write to Get Girls to Sleep with Them. Maybe I like poetry for the same reason I like really clever rappers, like Nas and Talib Kweli and A Tribe Called Quest: because I secretly hope I can develop the verbal skills to seduce a woman. Sure, right now I can barely remember my name around hot girls like Kate, but I’m more likely to develop verbal skills than biceps.

  “Mr. Kirkland, please pass on those poems,” she called out. “Mr. Kirkland!”

  Mr. Kirkland, aka Nate the Nosepicker, woke up and then passed the pile. He forgot to give himself a copy.

  “Now that you’ve had a few minutes to read this o
ver for a first impression,” Mrs. Rove said, “can anyone tell me what this poem is about?”

  Ashley Milano thrust her hand upward.

  “Time’s wing-udd chariot,” Ashley Milano pronounced carefully. “That’s a symbol! It stands for… like, how everyone’s getting old really fast.”

  Ashley Milano knew symbols. Her intelligence stopped there, but she knew symbols.

  “Great, Ashley. We’ll definitely be discussing symbols later on,” Mrs. Rove said. “But can anyone give me the general synopsis of the poem? What is the narrator saying? Why did he write this?”

  Matt Katz gave a huge snore that pulled his head off his chest. It was so loud he woke himself up. Kayla Bateman was sighing loudly to advertise her frustration at not being able to button her cardigan over her chest. Jason Burke scratched a tic-tac-toe board onto the corner of his poem. Only Ashley displayed any interest—she was hunting down and viciously stabbing at symbols and metaphors with a red pen.

  “What is the goal of this poem?” Mrs. Rove asked again.

  Silence. I took a final survey of the room. No one was going to speak up.

  So I spoke up, without even raising my hand.

  “Sex,” I said clearly.

  Matt Katz’s snore turned into a choking cough. Jason Burke reached over to clap him on the back. Two girls in the corner painting their nails with Wite-Out widened their eyes at each other and giggled. Ashley Milano’s mouth dropped open. I’d never heard her be quiet for so long.

  “Mr. Frame?” Mrs. Rove said.

  She sounded stern, but I heard interest in her voice, too. She gestured for me to go on.

  “The speaker of this poem wants to have sex,” I explained.

  “Whaatttt,” Jason Burke drawled in disbelief.

  “The speaker tells this woman that if they were both going to live forever, he’d take a lot of time and be romantic,” I explained patiently. “But they’re not, so he won’t. He wants to have sex right away.”