Bloodthirsty (11 page)

“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. 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.