Bloodthirsty (16 page)

He gestured outside, to the lovely autumn trees dropping dark red leaves on Mrs. Rove’s Escalade.
Wow
, I thought.
Matt Katz is deeper than I thought. He really sees the beauty in nature. And all kinds of nature, not just that one type of grass…

“Yeah,” Matt Katz continued. “I get to wear my jacket with the big pockets!”

He flipped his jacket open to reveal two large pockets on the inside. Besides all the contraband he had stashed in there, which I won’t mention for legal reasons, he also had two different iPod Nanos and a bunch of Werther’s Original hard candies.

It was also in October that we realized that our physics teacher, who looked like Albert Einstein if he were a drag queen, was too busy crashing toy cars into the walls and measuring their velocities to notice if we showed up to our lab period. One day Jason Burke, Ashley Milano, and Jenny decided to take advantage of this by going to Dunkin’ Donuts (or, as Ashley had dubbed it, Double D) third period instead of drawing vectors for forty-five minutes.

“Hey, Finn,” Jason called to me on my way to the physics room. He jangled his car keys at me. “Come to Double D with us. Blow off lab.”

I kind of froze in my tracks. This was a dilemma. On one hand, I had worked hard to establish myself as a guy who, as my admirers would say, “didn’t give a shit.” The badass Finbar who schooled Mrs. Rove about poetic erections wouldn’t care if he got in trouble for skipping physics lab.

On the other hand, it was really sunny out today. The kind of sun that would make me break out like a biblical leper. I kind of gave a shit about that.

“Uh, nah, man,” I told Jason. “I’m good, thanks.”

“Come on,” Jason said. “You can’t get in trouble. You choked a guy and Dr. Hernandez just, like, asked you on a gay date.”

“He didn’t ask me on a gay date!” I said.

“Did he take you into his office alone?” Jason asked.

“Well, yeah, but…”

“Did he offer you candy?” Jason continued.

“Just a breath mint,” I said.

“Aha!” Jason said. “The plot thickens.”

Jason and I had kind of become friends. We started off teaming up on projects in physics lab (until he started cutting class), but then he started telling me more personal things. Like how he was hooking up with both Kayla Bateman and Ashley Milano. Not both of them at the same time, though that would have been a much better story. Like a
Playboy
story. But he just took turns hooking up with them. First Kayla for a few weeks, then Ashley for a few weeks. According to Jason, each girl had both pros and cons. Kayla had… well, two
large
pros… but aside from that, she was apparently “kind of a snore,” i.e., she wouldn’t let Jason do anything more than kiss her. Ashley could get pretty wild. They’d hooked up in all these weird places around school, like the bullpen of the baseball field and the photography darkroom.

“How do you pull it off? Hooking up with two girls?” I asked him once, genuinely impressed. Kayla and Ashley were both pretty good-looking. Plus, they were friends with each other. Wouldn’t they notice they were sharing Jason?

“Well, here’s the secret,” Jason told me. “Sometimes I just suddenly stop hooking up with both of them. Then they get mad, and they join forces against me. That keeps their friendship going.”

Wow. Jenny had been right when she told me Jason was smarter than he looked.

Now it was tough to avoid his invitation to cut class, and he and Ashley were waiting for me to come with them. Jenny was waiting, too—waiting to see how I would get out of this. She knew it was too sunny out, and I think she almost wanted me to blurt out my secret to prove she knew more about me than anyone.

“Um,” I said. “Well. Actually. I have this thing where… I can’t go outside when it’s really sunny.”

“What?” Jason asked. “Like, when there’s an eclipse?”

“No, like, a regular day,” I said. “Like today. It’s like… my skin… reacts badly. To sun.”

Ashley Milano gasped. Actually, it was kind of a combo squeak-gasp. The noise conveyed so much astonishment that I
knew.
I knew that Jenny had told Ashley I was a vampire.

Just in case I wasn’t sure, Jenny whispered pretty obviously to Ashley, “I told you so.”

Jason didn’t notice all the vampire gossip. Instead, he suggested, “I think Finn just wants to stay and hang with Kate.”

Maybe Kate and I were big news around school. Maybe everyone was talking about us and speculating about our relationship. I had noticed some people smiling when they saw us together twice in one day, but most of the sophomores who saw us eat lunch together seemed to assume that because we were both new to Pelham, we knew each other from somewhere else. I wanted juniors to be talking about us, smiling at us, too. “Did you hear about Finn and Kate?” That was what I wanted, even more than everyone talking about me as a vampire. That was
why
I wanted everyone talking about me as a vampire: I wanted a girl.

“Right, sophomore Kate!” Ashley said. “She totally likes you, Finn! I read it in the gossip column.”

“We have a school gossip column?” I asked.

I’d read the school newspaper a few times, mostly to criticize it and thus appease Jenny, whose pieces always got rejected by the douche bag editor. I’d never seen a gossip column. There was a perverted “guess the body part” photo display that constituted the Science Section, but apparently a gossip column would have been inappropriate.

“The gossip column is self-published,” Ashley said with dignity.

“By
your
self,” Jenny scoffed.

“On the girls’ bathroom wall,” Jason added.

“How’d you know that?” I began to ask Jason. Then I saw him and Ashley exchange guilty looks and stopped pursuing that subject.

“And, like, nothing in your gossip column is true,” Jenny said pointedly, crossing her arms.

“Let’s go,” Jason said, tossing his car keys in the air and snatching them with one hand. “Finn—enjoy Kate.” He added in a low voice as he passed me, “I recommend the third stall in the girls’ bathroom.”

In physics lab, I had to do a whole lot of vectors by myself. And while “vectors” sound like something that superheroes would shoot out of their eyes, they aren’t as cool as they sound. They’re really just arrows you draw on paper. I didn’t care, though. I was in a great mood because everyone knew that Kate and I liked each other. Which meant that it was true that Kate liked me and not just something I’d created in my desperate mind.

It only takes a small dose of self-confidence to get me high on it, because I’m not used to having any. And I was drunk as hell on self-esteem when I met Kate at her locker for lunch.

“
Lolita
!” I greeted Kate’s latest book.

As part of her quest to read classic novels, Kate had picked up
Lolita
, by Vladimir Nabokov.

“A classic and timeless story of an old pervert,” I pronounced like a college professor.

Kate laughed, then said, “I’m actually having trouble getting through it.”

“Creeped out?” I asked her.

Kate put
Lolita
, whose cover had a really inappropriate picture of some little girl’s plaid skirt and bare knees, back in her locker.

“Nah.” Kate shrugged. She smiled up at me. “I like older men.”

Oh. Wow. She liked me. She completely liked me! I, Finbar Frame, was a stud. Even if the cafeteria was serving its suspiciously ambiguous “pasta casserole” for lunch, today was a great day.

Just then, I noticed for the first time a picture in Kate’s locker. It was of a girl with super-long hair. She actually looked a lot like Kate. For a wild second I thought Kate had a twin sister too. Not only was she smart and gorgeous and quick on her feet—Kate was a twin, like me! Even stranger, like me, Kate had a twin who was the complete opposite of her. The girl in the locker picture was wearing a really short skirt and high heels. She had her tongue stuck out and looked drunk. Nothing like the cool, collected Kate.

“Is that your sister?” I asked, pointing to the picture.

“Oh.” Kate looked up quickly. “Uh… that’s a friend from my old school.”

She slammed her locker quickly and seemed flustered. I shrugged it off and followed Kate to the cafeteria.

At lunch, something strange but kind of awesome happened.

Well, first, one of the skater kids came up to me in the lunch line as I was selecting a Snapple and said, “Hey-ooo, it’s LC from
The Hills
.”

“I don’t even have my sunglasses on,” I told him.

“Whatever, dude,” the skater scoffed.

Kate, ahead of me, scooped some spaghetti and meatballs onto her plate.

“What was that about?” she asked, nodding at the skater.

Oh, right. I’d told Kate I couldn’t be out in the sun, but I’d tried to make it sound as manly as I could. Like I’d spent so many hours rock climbing with my raw muscles exposed and climbed so close to the sun that even my alligator-tough flesh had had all it could take. To keep this impression up, I’d avoided Kate whenever I was wearing my Hollywood shades.

“Those guys just like my sunglasses,” I told Kate.

“What sunglasses?” she asked.

Never mind.

Okay, this wasn’t the awesome thing that happened. The awesome thing happened after Kate and I sat down with our spaghetti. The awesome thing was that these two freshman girls came over to our table.

“Hey, Finbar.” The girls giggled in unison.

“Um…”

How did these girls know my name? I’d never seen them before. And they had really, really tight pants on. Not that that’s relevant, but how did girls find such tight pants?

Anyway, simultaneously, each girl extended a piece of garlic bread.

“You want some garlic bread, Finbar?” they asked.

Just to set the scene, they each said this in the same way one would ask, “You want some help with those pants, sexy?”

I looked to Kate and shrugged. Although she looked amused, I reassured myself that she was concealing her jealousy by taking a bite of meatball. Or maybe she knew I’d never go for a girl in pants that tight.

“Garlic bread?” I repeated dumbly.

“Yeah,” one girl said. “Nice and
garlicky
.”

“Oh. Uh… no thanks,” I told her.

She thrust the bread right against my face. I jerked my head back.

“You sure?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, though.”

I was completely puzzled until I heard the freshman girls’ conversation as they walked away.

“He was totally scared of the garlic!” one squealed in delight.

“He
so
is what they said he is!”

A vampire! I
so
was a vampire! I swirled my spaghetti around my school-safe spork in triumph. Jenny knew I was a vampire and told Kayla Bateman. Kayla Bateman knew I was a vampire and told Ashley Milano. Ashley Milano knew I was a vampire and had probably published it on the bathroom wall. Now even freshman girls knew I was a vampire.

I looked over at Kate, who was calmly sipping her Snapple Green Tea like she was in some damn zen garden. As if she wasn’t sitting across from a spine-chilling, bloodthirsty beast who got her heart pumping in more ways than one. Kate did not know I was a vampire. She hadn’t even
heard
I was a vampire. Why didn’t Kate gossip? More importantly, why didn’t Kate ever use the third stall in the girls’ bathroom?

The meatball on my plate put a new thought in my head. Maybe because I ate human food in front of Kate every day, she didn’t believe I subsisted on the blood of unwilling victims. Damn lunch. Damn pasta casserole! Damn Hebrew National hot dog day. Damn my humanity!

“I think those girls have a crush on you,” Kate observed calmly.

“I don’t know,” I said pointedly, swirling spaghetti around my plastic fork. “I wouldn’t give GARLIC to someone I had a crush on. It almost seemed like they wanted to see how I reacted to GARLIC. Like, as if I were someone who had a thing about GARLIC.”

Shrugging cluelessly, Kate didn’t seem the least bit scared of me.

When I walked back to my locker with Kate, Jenny was waiting. She looked a little pissed off, and I wondered if Ashley Milano had spent their entire third-period trip to Double D lecturing Jenny about how many calories were in whipped cream.

“Do you have lunch with Kate, like, every day?” Jenny asked me when Kate had left.

“Yeah, basically,” I said.

“But you don’t see her
outside
of school, do you?” Jenny probed.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Hey, are we still reading that geisha book in English?”

“You know, she wears her sweatpants over her jeans,” Jenny told me.

“The geisha?” I asked, puzzled. “I thought they wore those red—”

“No!” Jenny said impatiently. “Kate. I’m in Ultimate Dodgeball gym class with her, and she doesn’t actually change her clothes. She just puts on sweatpants over her jeans.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“Which probably means she’s, like, really
sweaty
,” Jenny told me. “Kate’s probably really sweaty and gross.”

I closed my locker and swung my backpack up onto my shoulder.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

As we walked down the hall, Jenny said, without looking at me, “I don’t think she’d understand you.”

“What?” I looked down at Jenny.

“You know.” Jenny gestured to my face, then put both her index fingers up against her lips and turned them down. Fangs. Or walrus.

“I don’t think she’d understand
what you are
.”

Oh, right. I was a vampire. Well, I wasn’t worried about Kate understanding that. I was busy hoping she would find out! So I just shrugged at Jenny.

“Besides,” Jenny added huffily, looking away again, “Kate’s, like, four pounds too heavy for her jeans. So it’s good she covers them up with sweatpants.”

As I followed Jenny into class, I thought about her weird obsession with people’s jeans. She was always telling me if other girls were too big or too small for their jeans. And the weirdest thing was, she knew how big or how small by the
pound
. Kayla Bateman was six and a half pounds too big for her jeans, according to Jenny. How the eff did she know that? As for Jenny, she had to order these special jeans from Japan that were made for flat-assed Asian girls. Yeah, I’d heard all about it.