by Flynn Meaney
So when Rocking Chair rocked a little too far forward, I extended a hand between us. He barely registered my movement. In fact, the kid was pretty out of it. He was looking like one of those after-school specials where your brain turns into scrambled eggs because you accepted a joint from a sketchy tempter at a chain-link fence. His eyelids were slipping lower, lower. He was about to pass out—
He punched me in the nose. Caught totally off guard, I was knocked off the first step. I fell to my hands and knees on the basement floor.
“Fuck you, Swanstein!” someone in the basement cried out. “You sucker punched that kid!”
“You’re a douche bag, Swanstein!” someone else said. I heard the beer pong ball bounce away, abandoned, heard some heels shuffle over in the sawdust. I heard two different girls ask if I was all right; neither was Kate.
I could hear things going on, but I couldn’t see. Everything went black and numb for those two seconds after the punch. Then the full impact of pain thrust through my face like the blade of a sword, from my nose deep into my skull. The sword of pain stayed plunged in my face; it took up residence there and throbbed. Jesus. Christ. In my head, those words repeated in time to the throbbing. Jee. Zus. Christ. Fuck that stoner! When I was able to get up from my knees, I swore, I would Chris Perez him and more. I would go straight for the blood supply and I wouldn’t let go. I would…
My fury forced my eyes open. This was a moment where I expected to turn into the Hulk. Seriously, rip the seams of my polo shirt and let that little…
Oh, God. Oh my God. Blood. When I raised my chest and looked down, it was spilled over my shirt, arms, and hands, like someone had thrown a bucket of paint at me. There were black fisted clots in it, there were dark swirls pooling at the insides of my bent elbows as I raised my hands from the ground and drew them in toward my body. God. God. And I felt wet and cool at my nose—which meant the blood was still flowing. I raised my hands to my face and the blood flowed through my fingers. It was a volcano, erupting again and again, unforgiving.
I gave my intestines a mental pep talk: stay cool, guys. Keep it tight. No need to puke here in front of everyone, really, it’s all right. I closed my eyes until I felt I could stand, trying to ignore how wet and sticky and covered I was.
When I stood up, Kate was gone.
I looked around, confused, scanning the whispering girls and the senior boys shaking their heads, but not registering any of their faces. I barely noticed that someone had gotten Luke; I heard him pounding down the sawdusted stairs. He was heading not for me, but for Rocking Chair kid, who was inexplicably bent over by the closest part of the beer pong table. What was wrong with him? No one had punched him!
“What the fuck, Swanstein?” Luke demanded. “I’m talking to you.”
Luke gave him this cold stare and Swanstein looked up from the ground. And, get this—Swanstein was crying.
Luke was merciless, though.
“You fucking lay a hand on my brother again,” Luke threatened. “Or you pussy punch any kid anywhere, and I’ll really give you something to cry about. Did you hear me?”
Swanstein seriously had tears coming down his face! I watched in amazement. Seeing girls cry makes me very uncomfortable, but a fellow male in tears, in public, was pure fascination. I wanted to get a front-row seat and put on some 3-D glasses for the show.
“Did you hear me?” Luke barked louder. The party went still and silent. Luke enunciated every word. He said, “I. Would. Kill. You.”
One of Luke’s lazier friends told Swanstein, “You weren’t even invited, man. We just called you for weed.”
The word weed perked up one of the senior guys, who remembered why my Rocking Chair aggressor was there in the first place.
A merciful jean-skirt-clad girl came down the steps next to me, holding two paper towels. She handed them to me, but then backed away, clearly grossed out.
But Luke came over and stepped right on the bloody sawdust in front of the first step. He tilted my head up, his knuckles under my chin.
“You all right?” he asked.
I felt dizzy. “Yeah. Lots of blood, though…”
“The head always bleeds a lot,” Luke told me. “Remember when I fell from the chandelier?”
I smiled through my nausea. “Yeah.”
“And from that third-story window?”
“Yeah.”
“And from the flagpole of our Montessori school?”
“I remember.” I managed a small laugh. “But I’m surprised you do.”
“Frame!” one of the seniors called from the beer pong table.
We both looked up.
The senior laughed. “I forgot there were two Frames. Luke Frame, that is. Next game?”
“I’m gonna play with Finn,” Luke said.
“Nah,” I interrupted. “I’m going to find Kate.”
“ ’Kay,” Luke said. “But when you come back, find me. We’ll switch shirts.”
“What?” I asked. “I’m covered in blood.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “But Mom will be less freaked out if it’s me. I’ve come home covered in blood before.”
Kate wasn’t in the living room, or the kitchen, or anywhere near the bathroom, where some girl was throwing up and another girl was choreographing it. “Here, you tie her hair back. You get a glass of water. You get a garbage bag.” Kate wasn’t in the backyard either when I stepped past the suspicious North Face congress. I walked down the driveway to get to the front yard, and there she was, at the end of the driveway, standing beneath a street lamp with her arms crossed.
She looked cold—she hadn’t brought her jacket. I looked down. I looked like I’d wandered off the set of a Tarantino movie. No jacket to give her.
“Kate!” I called.
She turned briefly. In the light of the street lamp she had reached, her eyes looked big and wet. She wasn’t crying yet, but she was close. Oh, God.
I jogged across the damp lawn to her.
“Are you okay?” she asked numbly, in a strange monotone.
“I’m fine,” I said. “What happened? Who was that guy?”
“Swanstein,” Kate said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “We went to Larchmont together. But I left because…”
I stood, waiting patiently, cold, wet, bloody.
“I got in trouble,” Kate said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I drank too much at a party and I had to get my stomach pumped. The cops came to the party and everyone got in trouble. Everyone at school hated me for it.”
Even the last part she said coldly, steadily, rapidly, and without emotion.
“I’m not who you think I am,” Kate continued, confessing at a faster and faster rate. “At Larchmont, I was a party girl. I wanted everyone to know who I was, so I started drinking more than all the other freshman girls. And doing more stuff with guys…”
Doing more stuff with guys. What stuff? I felt sickened at the thought of pickle flips and other foreign acts.
“Wait.” I realized something terrible. “That picture in your locker. That wasn’t your sister.”
Kate bit her lip.
“That was you.”
A guy came out of the house and performed an interpretive dance of how I was feeling right now. He stumbled down the steps, fell down, and puked all over himself.
“You lied to me,” I said to Kate, planting my feet in the gravel between the paved driveway and the street.
She looked at me desperately, hands at her sides, unable to speak.
“You said you came to our school to take AP classes,” I continued, louder. “You said you didn’t drink.”
“Finn…”
“I thought you didn’t care about parties and beer and all that b.s. high school stuff,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Finbar,” Kate said. “But, I mean, to be fair, you kind of lied to me, too.”
“What?” I went from disbelieving to angry very quickly.
Kate crossed her arms over her chest, and I couldn’
t tell if it was a defensive move or from the cold.
“Well, you’re not a vampire,” she told me.
“Jesus, Kate.” I rolled my eyes and stomped at the curb. “That is so ridiculous. That is so completely different.”
“Why?” Kate challenged me, stepping closer.
“I never told anyone I was a vampire,” I said, looking down at her. My position on the curve of the pavement gave me extra height above her as she stood in the street.
“But people believed you were.”
“And I believed you!” I yelled back, so suddenly and forcefully that Kate rocked back on her heels.
That was exactly the point. I’d believed Kate. Of course, on the outside, she was beautiful and confident, which I saw at first glance. But then we got to know each other. And she told me that she loved math. That she didn’t know that many people at school. That she liked to read. That she stayed home on Friday nights to watch movies. And I thought, as beautiful as she was on the outside, on the inside she was kind of sensitive. Maybe a loner. Maybe like…
“I believed you were like me,” I spit out. “You made me believe that.”
I don’t know how she reacted. I looked down at my sneakers instead, and I couldn’t look back up. I was pissed off and I pushed gravel from the ground into the toe of my shoe, tearing the rubber.
Still, in a final, painful, lame nice-guy gesture, I asked Kate, “Do you need me to walk you to the train?”
I asked it detachedly, my arms crossed. Dumb move. I smeared extra blood all over myself.
Kate shook her head. “My sister’s coming. She’s going to pick me up.”
I trudged back to the house. Still wet with blood, I looked as if she’d really ripped my heart out of my chest—and then thrown it back at me and stained my shirt. The worst part was that this was how it was supposed to be. I mean, Kate belonged out on Friday nights, at parties, doing pickle flips and kegstands. She belonged with other guys. I, meanwhile, belonged on the couch next to my mom, waiting for the Bennet sisters to get married off. Parties, beer, rule-breaking, romance—these weren’t things for me. The worst part was knowing the whole thing had been a joke.
Actually, the worst part was that I stepped in that kid’s vomit on the way back inside.
Back inside to say good-bye to my brother, to leave forever his world, to return home to the safe boundaries of my mom-sanitized walls, my whiny amateur poems, my fantasies.
“Hey, Finbar!” Luke’s shadow on the front steps was holding a beer. “Time for our game!”
Okay, I guess my sailor bedsheets and the Bennet sisters could wait. I had to wait for Luke’s bloodless shirt anyway. And so I played beer pong. And drank real beer. And, actually, I did well. Beginner’s luck, I guess. I sank quite a few cups, and we beat two different teams.
I guess a guy with vomit on his feet, blood on his shirt, and tears in his eyes is pretty intimidating to an opponent.
chapter 16
I thought the world would end when Kate and I broke up. But I’d also thought the world would end when Kate told me she knew I wasn’t a vampire, or when I passed out in physics class, and it hadn’t. You may not have noticed this, but I can be a pessimist sometimes. But I shouldn’t be. I mean, I’ve had the name Finbar for sixteen years, and I’ve only been punched in the face once.
After my surprisingly kick-ass game of beer pong that night (Luke and I killed. We should have been playing for money!), I steeled myself to return home and break the news to my mother that Kate and I were no longer… whatever Kate and I had been. But I was actually able to avoid lengthy conversations with my mother for that whole week and so didn’t have that much time to sit around like a hunchback ringing the death knell of my love life. After school, I’d begun training for winter track. Jason Burke was my training buddy. I was pleased to find he wasn’t in as great shape as I’d assumed. I think his muscles were just more defined because he had a spray tan.
In my spare time when I wasn’t running, I was catching up with Jenny. I felt bad. I’d kind of forgotten about her during the whole Kate thing. And I didn’t even remember that I had forgotten her until she invited me to a book signing but followed the invitation with, “But you’re probably busy on a Saturday night. Doing something with Kate.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Kate and I aren’t really hanging out anymore.”
“Really?” Jenny squeaked in delight.
Jeez, she really wanted to go to this book signing. She sounded ecstatic. Of course, she was mildly obsessed with this book. When we met up late Saturday afternoon and took a train into the city, Jenny chattered the whole time about the author and the book. The book was a “graphic novel,” which is a term that adults have created so they can read comic books when they’re middle-aged. Except this graphic novel didn’t have any superheroes, sidekicks, or anything that should have been on a five-year-old boy’s underwear. The author was this Irish guy who drew amazing pictures of his life in Dublin, drinking Guinness, chain-smoking, cheering for his hometown soccer team, and other manly Irish things.
I think of Irish guys as real men’s men, always drinking really heavy beer without throwing up and then punching some English guy’s crooked teeth out because they’re frustrated with centuries of colonialism. And playing rugby. Rugby doesn’t have shoulder pads or helmets. My ancestors were Irish, but somehow we got more wussed out with each passing generation. Although Luke would probably kick ass at rugby.
Jenny, who from the looks of her wouldn’t survive five seconds of rugby, got a special invite to the book signing because she wrote a review of the book for our school newspaper. Usually Jenny’s reviews don’t get published because she refuses to write about any movie with Vince Vaughn or Seth Rogen in it or to profile any Disney Channel starlet caught topless via text message. But the editor liked this graphic novel review because it had so much beer in it. I think our school newspaper editor has a drinking problem. It must be the stress of his job.
Anyway, Jenny had sent the author, Gareth, a copy of her review, which he loved, so we got to meet him before the event started at a bookstore in midtown Manhattan.
“Jenny!” Gareth crowed when she introduced herself shyly. “I’ve got to thank you for that piece you wrote on me. It’s the only nice thing that’s been written about me, other than stuff on the pub bathroom wall.”
Jenny flushed.
“Seriously, brilliant stuff, though,” he said.
Jenny introduced me, and Gareth was surprised by my name.
“I don’t meet many American Finbars,” he told me.
“I’m pretty sure I’m the only one,” I said.
“The Celt stands alone,” Gareth said. “Well, I should get reading. Get good seats, but not in the front row. Ya don’t want me spitting on you.”
Jenny seemed nervous around Gareth and she hurried me away. She pulled me so fast that I didn’t have time to look where I was going, and I bumped into a different short girl.
“Finbar!” the short girl exclaimed.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi, Celine.”
Surprisingly, I hadn’t thought about Celine in a while. After our disastrous date, I had expected to stew over the humiliation for months. But I’d been so busy being a vampire and starting at a new school and getting rejected by a whole new girl that I’d forgotten about Celine.
She looked the same, small and brown and sharp-looking. I couldn’t remember why I’d thought she was so pretty. Compared to Kate, Celine looked like she’d sucked a sour lemon. She pressed that sour-lemon face to mine and gave me a lame French air kiss.
“How are you, chérie?” she twittered. “I haven’t heard from you in ages!”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been… this is Jenny. Jenny, Celine.”
“Enchanté,” Celine said affectedly.
“You, too… I think,” Jenny replied.
“We should go grab seats,” I told Celine. “Nice to see you.”
“Who was that?” Jenny hissed before w
e were even out of earshot.
“Just a girl I went out with once,” I said.
Wow. I couldn’t believe that phrase just came out of my mouth. “A girl I went out with once.” That made it sound like I went out with lots of girls. I sounded so… McDreamy. Or McSteamy. Yeah, more like McSteamy, because he got more action (yes, sadly, I do know the difference between McDreamy and McSteamy. Again, my mother’s fault).
“Did you like her?” Jenny asked.
Jenny would make a great reporter. She always asks a lot of questions. This particular question made me think, though. And when I thought about it, Celine had been elitist and obnoxious and ungrateful. She used these French phrases, probably to make me feel dumb—obviously she was still doing it. Furthermore, Celine had never thanked me for the ridiculously expensive meal I had bought her. Whether or not I had tried too hard, I deserved at least a thank you.
“Not really,” I told Jenny as we took our seats. “I mean, I didn’t like her as much as I liked Kate.”
Jenny swallowed. “Oh,” was all she said, then she shut up like a clam.
Luckily I didn’t have to talk to Celine again, because Gareth started reading and telling stories. He was really funny. All the girls in the audience were going crazy because of his Irish accent. Maybe I should pretend to be foreign, I thought suddenly. I bet I could get a lot of girls that way. Then I remembered I was still kind of busy pretending to be the last thing I had pretended to be to get girls—a vampire.
For some reason, as Jenny and I walked back to Grand Central Station to take the train home, the city seemed quieter than usual. Actually, it wasn’t quiet at all—it was midtown Manhattan on a Saturday night. But it seemed quiet to me, even as I watched the characters around us. Two self-centered women fought over a cab.
“I can’t walk! I have six Bloomingdale’s bags!” the first woman screamed.
“I can’t walk! Look at my shoes!” said the second, displaying a heel too dangerous to make it through airport security.
Two guys who looked younger than I did came tumbling out of a darkened bar called the Lace Lounge. A bouncer the size of Canada told them, “Don’t come back!” before slamming the door. The two guys proceeded to fight about what had given them away as underage.
