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He blushes, and a muscle in his jaw twitches. The twins gawk. He tosses the camera to me, and I make a lucky catch.

“May I see that?” Rane asks.

I hand it over.

“Let’s eat,” says A.J., “and then we’ll watch the movie.”

Conrad heads somewhere, the library, probably, to borrow a heavy candlestick from Colonel Mustard. Danielle and Denise start to chatter about getting into college. Danielle looks at me and starts a question: “How many community service hours —”

“— do you have?” Denise finishes.

I shake my head. “None.”

“Oh, you need as many as you —”

“— can get. Don’t you, Rane?”

He holds the camera up, and I can tell he’s used one before. He shoots while he answers, “It looks good on your college apps.”

The twins flank Colleen, who’s piling food on her plate. “How about —”

“— you?”

Colleen pauses, “How about me what?” She’s taller than they are, and she looks like somebody from another part of the continent. Or world. Or galaxy.

“How many hours —”

“— of community service do you have?”

Colleen pretends to think the question over. “Well, I went to a nursing home and gave a bunch of old guys hand jobs once — does that count?”

Rane catches it on film, getting the twins’ expressions, then Colleen’s smirk. When she reaches for a deviled egg, he zooms in on the droopy neckline of her dress, hoping for a peek at her breasts. The only ones I’ve ever seen up close and personal. And maybe the only ones I’ll ever see.

Should I be mad that Rane’s scamming on her, and with my camera to boot? I don’t think so. Colleen can take care of herself. And I don’t blame him for looking at her. I do it all the time.

Conrad comes back, waits until the twins make room for him, then sits between them and starts to text again.

A.J. points to a pile of DVDs. “Somebody pick one.” Then she asks me to help her with something in the kitchen. My pulse goes up a notch or two: that move is in every French farce — meeting in the kitchen, making out in the pantry, a maid in a little skirt with eyes for the husband.

More tile in there, a wicker basket of oranges. A whole basketful. Nobody could eat that many oranges. Brass pots and pans hanging on a wrought-iron rack over the stove. An open window with a breeze. Yellow light pours in, a yellow somewhere between tawny and cream. I want to look out the window and make sure there isn’t a cinematographer in the gazebo, or some guy with a dimmer board dialing in the perfection.

A.J. arranges some tall blue glasses on a tray. “Where did you find her?”

She sounds totally curious, but not mean.

I tell her, “Colleen goes to my school. And we just kind of ran into each other at the movies one night.”

She moves the glasses around. “Why is she so snarky?”

I shrug. “Ask her.”

“She ticked Conrad off.”

“She read his mind.”

She starts to cut up a melon, really taking her time about it. “Conrad’s okay.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m serious. That
Black and Tan
video he shot was really good.”

“Is that what he called it? The Black and Tans were Brits who beat up on the Irish.”

“Right, but he meant to evoke Rodney King and the Hispanic guy.”

“And everybody who watches YouTube knew that?”

“Obviously some of them did.”

We stand there. I barely know her, and we’re arguing over Conrad. Does she stand up for all her friends, or is Conrad somebody special? Finally I tell her, “You’d better carry those glasses; I’ve been known to spill things. I’ll hold the door.”

She puts a hand on my good arm. “I’m glad you came. Colleen, too. It’s just . . . It’s hard to explain. I’ve known Conrad forever.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve known all those guys. Rane and I learned to ski together. The twins and I were in preschool. They’re really, really smart. They’ve already got early admission to Yale.”

Out in the other room, Colleen’s sitting by Rane, and Conrad’s between the twins. They’re talking about vampires.

Denise says, “If a vampire comes across a sack of rice —”

Danielle adds, “— he has to count every grain. And if you want to find a vampire’s grave —”

Denise steps in, “— you need a virgin boy on a virgin horse. You lead them —”

Back to Danielle, “— through the cemetery, and the horse will stop at the vampire’s grave.”

Colleen says, “Oh, so the horse has to be a virgin. No wonder I couldn’t find that pesky grave,” and everybody laughs except Conrad, who looks up from his iPhone to tell us, “Vampire movies are political. It’s always one class feeding on another. Doesn’t matter if it’s F. W. Monroe or Catherine Hardwicke.”

The twins nod and file that information away, probably for their first essay at Yale.

“It’s not Monroe,” I say. “It’s Murnau. F. W. Murnau. When he made
Nosferatu,
he pretty much used the Bram Stoker novel as the script. Mrs. Stoker ended up suing him.”

Conrad says, “I beg your pardon?”

“I said he almost plagiarized —”

“Not that. The director.”

“Oh, that. His name isn’t Monroe.”

Conrad scoots forward on the brown leather couch. “I’m pretty sure it is.”

Colleen sets her plate on the big coffee table. She digs in her purse and throws a twenty beside the grape leaves. She looks at Conrad. “Want to put your money where your pretty mouth is?”

He just shakes his head at her effrontery, but he comes up with the money and tosses it, wadded up like a Kleenex, beside Colleen’s, which is not only smoothed out but creased down the middle. I wonder if somebody tucked that into her mother’s thong last night. And did she give it to Colleen, or did Colleen just take it?

A.J. looks up from her phone, where she’s asked the omniscient Google for the answer. “It’s Murnau, Conrad.”

“Well, crap!”

Rane, outdoorsman and peacemaker, suggests, “Let’s just watch Bela Lugosi.”

Colleen shakes her head. “I know that movie,” she says. “He’s tall, dark, and thirsty, and she’s a stupid twit who sleeps with her window open in Transylvania. Let’s gamble some more.” She looks at Conrad. “You against Ben, honey buns. Twenty bucks a pop, and your idolaters here will make up the questions, which have to be about tonight’s topic — vampires.”

Idolaters.
Underneath the tats and the attitude is a really smart girl. If I’m a tree that’s been hit by lightning, Colleen is a tree that grew the wrong way. Buffeted by high winds, maybe. Relentless high winds.

The twins are positively quaking with excitement. They look at A.J., who shrugs and says, “Okay, I guess.”

Colleen winks at me and licks her lips. I’m nervous but totally up for this. In a fight, it’d be easy for Conrad to knock me down. Or literally run circles around me, if we had to race. He’s probably smarter than me about everything else in the world except movies. Nobody knows more about movies than I do. This is the fight at the O.K. Corral, as far as I’m concerned.

A.J. goes to one of the drawers in a big, antiquey-looking desk and comes back with yellow pads and thick black pens.

She says, “The rest of us will make up questions using Wikipedia or Screen Rant. You two write your answers down and hold them up when we say to.”

Conrad points at Colleen. “No input from her. I don’t trust her.”

“I’m just the banker,” she says.

The twins come up with the first question.

“From
The Lost Boys —
” says Denise.

And Danielle finishes, “— name any four principal actors.”

I watch Conrad write fast and then hesitate. It doesn’t take me long. Then we wait.

Colleen taunts him. “Any time in this century.”

I eat another stuffed grape leaf. Conrad’s money still looks like a cud. It doesn’t mean anything to him. There’s always more where that came from.

“Time’s up,” says A.J.

Conrad pouts. “I’ve got three!”

Colleen reminds him, “But to win you had to name four.” She looks at me. “Who are they, Ben?”

“Jason Patric, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, and Kiefer Sutherland. Among others like Jami Gertz and Dianne Wiest.”

Colleen grabs for the cash. “Next?”

The others huddle, then A.J. asks, “In
Nosferatu,
what was the vampire’s name, and who played him?”

Conrad and I write fast.

When A.J. asks, “Ready?” we both nod and show our answers: Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck.

“Tie,” says Colleen, tossing out another bill. “Double or nothing.”

More huddling. A.J. taps her iPhone a couple of times. Then she asks, “In
Shadow of the Vampire,
who played Max Schreck?”

I can see Conrad’s pen poised over the lined notebook, and I know he doesn’t know.
Shadow of the Vampire
is a cool movie where the guy playing the vampire might really be a vampire.

Colleen sinks into the couch and puts both arms along the back of it. Ed, her old boyfriend, used to sit like that, daring anybody to get even an inch into his space.

Sometimes she stumbled around after Ed like one of Dracula’s pale brides, and he fed off her, in a way. In vampire lore it’s not necessarily blood they’re after. It’s life essence. And she’s got gallons of that.

“Time,” says A.J.

I hold up my notebook and say, “Willem Dafoe.”

Conrad rips a blank sheet of paper out of his notebook and hurls it toward the windows.

Colleen tosses out another twenty. “Tell me when you’ve had enough.”

“Bite me,” Conrad snarls.

“You wish.”

I wear him down. He doesn’t even know
Near Dark,
a terrific Kathryn Bigelow film, but we tie with
Love at First Bite.
I get the question about
Cronos,
and we tie again with
Horror of Dracula,
a Hammer film with Christopher Lee and the great Peter Cushing.

He doesn’t remember that Josh Hartnett was in
30 Days of Night
and just freezes on
From Dusk Till Dawn,
the stupid Robert Rodriguez movie about a bar where the pole dancers are all vampires.

And then he’s broke.

Colleen stands up and tells me, “C’mon, baby. We’ve done all the damage we can do here.”

At “baby,” A.J. does a classic double take. She’d clearly never thought of me as “baby” material before. Just a gimp with a limp who could still hold a camera.

I hold out my good hand to Conrad. “That was fun.”

He keeps his powerful mitts to himself. “I’d know all that useless bullshit, too,” he says, “if all I did was sit in my room all day.”

I nod. “That’s how I did it.”

A.J. follows Colleen and me to the door. “Not quite the evening I planned,” she says, “but that isn’t really a complaint.” She looks at Colleen. “Nice meeting you. Really. I mean it.”

“I know you do. I’m an interesting person with many fine qualities. C’mon, Ben.”

I wish A.J. wouldn’t watch me hobble all the way to the car, but she does, standing in the open door with the light behind her. I have to admit — she and Conrad make the perfect Abercrombie & Fitch couple.

Colleen starts the car, then lets it idle while she digs around in her purse and finds a joint. Which she immediately fires up. So I ask, “Is this your idea of clean and sober?”

“Lighten up,” she says. “Old Conrad didn’t know what hit him. You mopped the floor with his privileged ass.” She reaches, pulls me to her, and kisses me hard. Her breath is thick and smoky. “That kind of stuff gets me hot.”

We make out in front of A.J.’s house for a few minutes. I wish everybody would come out and see us. I don’t want them to think I’m just the handicapped kid and Colleen’s my sexy attendant.

But pretty soon, she puts the car in gear and we speed away.

“You like A.J., don’t you?” she asks.

“She’s nice. The last time anybody asked me to a party, I was five years old and I had to wear a pointy hat.”

She says, “Guys like you don’t go to her private school. You know that, right?”

“Gimps don’t?”

“That’s right. Gimps don’t. She’s curious about you. But that doesn’t make you gimpalicious. That doesn’t mean you’re boyfriend material.”

I like dueling with Colleen. Compared to her, Conrad was a walk in the park. I tell her, “I thought I was
your
boyfriend.”

“That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”

Colleen hangs a hard right and glides to a stop. The houses all around us are big and mostly dark. Only a light on here and there. Maybe a maiden with her window open, reading by candlelight, half afraid she’ll hear the rustle of wings and look up and there he’ll be.

Colleen turns the engine off, lights another joint, leans against the door. Sprawls, actually. There are buttons on the front of her dress, and she undoes two of them. She tugs, then peers down. “Oh, my God. Forgetful old me. No bra.”

I take out my camera and tell her, “Don’t move, okay? Don’t do anything else. You’re perfect.”

“Give me your hand,” she says. “The sick one. He never gets any action.”

I love the way the smoke looks pouring out of her nostrils, curling and making letters in the air I can almost recognize. She’s got one arm up over her head, the joint between two fingers.

“C’mon, baby. What are you waiting for?”

I can do it — get those maimed and innocent fingers over to her. And I can hold the camera, too. And it watches her lead that hand between the buttons and into her dress.

“Can you feel that, Benjamin?”

I nod, too dry-mouthed to really talk. But I manage to croak, “Yes.”

She widens her eyes and delivers the next sentence like a mad scientist: “It’s alive. Alive, I tell you!” Then she laughs and pulls me toward her. Almost onto her, plenty close enough for her to get her hand in my hair and start kissing me.

And that’s what we’re doing when a car pulls up behind us and a whirling red light makes the whole scene look like a bloodbath.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, we’re sitting on a bench in the police station while the cops who brought us in joke around with each other and do paperwork. I’ve got my head in my hands. Colleen just takes everything in.

“This place is a gold mine, Ben. I’ll go over and stand by the Wanted posters, and you take my picture.”