Bloodthirsty

chapter 1

"Turn me," Jenny demanded, looking up at me, her eyes so intense they could have bored me into the brick wall behind me. "Turn me into a vampire."

Her neck was milky white, like a blank canvas or first-day-of-school looseleaf. The few freckles near her collarbone jumped out at me like targets. Sink your teeth in, they called. Right here. One vein in particular bulged, full to bursting. The jugular. Two years ago I'd been taught about the jugular vein, how it was the largest vein in the body, holding the most blood. My biology teacher hadn't predicted that the knowledge would grow dangerous in my hands. But it had in the past few months.

I had to admit—the opportunity was perfect. Jenny was a really little person, an entire foot shorter than me, ninety-eight pounds tops. She was not only a weak and easy victim, she was also a willing one.

The setting, too, was tailor-made, the stuff of low-budget horror movies and Mary Shelley novels. Jenny and I were in a dark alley. At her feet were dead leaves, litter, and a mangled pigeon. Aside from a brief flicker of light from three floors up, nothing and no one interrupted us. There were no witnesses.

But I was really, really wishing someone would come along. Lost tourists with Southern accents, pickpockets, whoever. I prayed for someone to interrupt us. I felt insane for having started this whole thing. This whole lie.

I've reached several points in my life at which, no matter what I did, I couldn't win. Here I was again. So, hoping for inspiration, praying for a miracle, I bared my teeth, tilted my head, and nose-dived for her neck…

Wait, hold on. I must be telling this the wrong way. That whole thing made me sound like one of those bad vampires, one of those horror-movie vampires who goes around sniffing out victims, isolating them, and draining them of their blood, turning them into vampires against their will. In reality, in that alleyway I was just as scared as Jenny was—even more unsure. I was actually hopeful that someone would wander in—a cop, a homeless man, a superhero. I was so unsure in that moment because I'd never turned anyone into a vampire before.

Actually, that's not true. I was the one who turned me into a vampire.

* * *

And, actually, I became a vampire under pretty normal circumstances. Not normal like the back-alley bared-neck incident, and not normal like the circumstances in fantasy books or horror films. My wrists weren't bound by bloody chains. I wasn't in a basement with the crosses and the windows covered. No one hovered dangerously by my bared throat. No thirsty fangs were at the ready. There were no splintered coffins, no Transylvanian castle, no rabid bats. No one wore a cape. Definitely not me.

I became a vampire in the third car of a train in Westchester County, New York. I was a Catholic schoolboy from the Midwest who was raised on Kool-Aid and overdue library books. And turning myself into a vampire like I did was normal for me, seeing as I'd taught myself how to tie a double Windsor knot, taught myself the lyrics to Tupac Shakur's "Changes" in Latin, and taught myself that if I wore a double Windsor knot or recited the Latin lyrics to Tupac Shakur's "Changes" in public, I would get beat up. Okay, those last two may have been taught to me by others, against my will. But becoming a vampire—I chose that.

Characters in books and movies rarely become vampires by choice. They're usually pinned against a coffin or a castle wall and sucked dry while they writhe in agonizing protest. Becoming a vampire hurts. Or, in my case, is a pain in the ass. To "turn" voluntarily, you'd have to be on the verge of death, or so sick of the pathetic human being you are that you'd throw away your mortality for any kind of change. Looking back, I had definitely reached this brink, this point of desperation and self-disappointment. And now I'm trying to remember how I got there.

Maybe it started with the move to New York.

I grew up in Alexandria, Indiana. Well, I shouldn't say "grew up." I lived there until I was sixteen, after which I was hopefully still growing. I was already six-foot-one, but in terms of facial hair, I'm behind the curve, so perhaps I hadn't reached maturity. Anyway, Alexandria, Indiana. Its claim to fame is being home to the World's Largest Ball of Paint. What's a ball of paint, you ask? Fair question. It's actually a regular-size baseball with more than 21,500 coats of paint. You can check it out on our family Christmas cards from the past twelve years. We pose in front of it every year.

My dad was a regional sales manager for an electronics company. He was like one of those CIA guys who goes to the office and comes home and never speaks of what he does. The only part of his job he brought home was his love of gadgets. This really pisses off my mother, who's really nervous about things like technology and assumes that anything that plugs into a wall is a carcinogen. Although my dad is clueless, somewhere someone thought he was smart enough to be promoted to a consultant. That's how he got moved to the New York office. Apparently a consultant is someone who peers over your shoulder as you do your job and tells you how to do it better. I couldn't picture my dad doing this. My mother, on the other hand…

My brother, Luke, and I had just finished the tenth grade at this Catholic school, St. Luke's, a few towns over. Luke was a running back on the football team and a point guard on the basketball team. He had played both so well in his sophomore year that the coaches promised he would start as a junior. As for me, I'd been promoted to editor of the literary magazine. Okay, so I'd been promoted from sole contributor to editor. And, okay, the St. Luke's Lit only had a circulation of five (that would be me, the faculty adviser, my mother, and two anonymous students who had been too embarrassed to include their names in a survey). But "editor of the literary magazine" would look good on my college applications.

But I was pretty sick of St. Luke's. Despite my powerful position on the Lit, no one really respected me. Especially this kid Johnny Frackas, who was always bugging me. Since everyone called him "Johnny Freckles" (both for his own freckles and for his mother's full-body freckles, which were the subject of much speculation), he grew embittered and took his anger out on the closest person. Thanks to the school's obsession with alphabetical order, the closest person was me: Finbar Frame. Every homeroom through ninth grade, Johnny Frackas would hail my arrival in the classroom with "Good morning, Fagbar" and a bout of raucous laughter. In tenth grade, I got upgraded to Admiral Fagbar. In reality, that should have made him a loser, because it was an allusion to Return of the Jedi, but somehow pointing this out didn't win me any points. And I should have been protected from this torture by my twin brother, who shared my last name and thus should have shared my homeroom. But Luke only showed up in homeroom three times a year, because his football and basketball coaches gave him passes to get him out of everything. I was left to fend for myself.

Monday mornings of sophomore year were the worst. Most guys were starting to get driver's licenses, girlfriends, and fake IDs that didn't make store owners laugh in their faces. Other guys now looked forward to the weekends, to house parties and playing beer pong and puking their guts out and kissing girls. (Hopefully not those last two simultaneously, although I've heard stories…) None of these things was happening for me, not even the puking.

It wasn't like I was never invited anywhere. In fact, my brother, Luke, invited me everywhere. Every Friday afternoon, he'd sprint down the long hallway that separated his room from my room and say, "Hey, Sean O'Connor's brother gave him three cases of beer. All the cans have dents in them, but he Googled it and said that we probably won't get botulism. Come drink with us!"

Or: "Maddy Keller's hot sister got back from Sweden and they're having a party. With Swedish girls. They're the hottest girls after Brazilian girls. Finn, you gotta come with. It's gonna be uh-may-zing."

Or: "Did you see the commercial for that horror movie where that Disney Channel girl shows her boobs? The team is going, come with!" Pause. "But there's chain saws, bro."

To my brother, Luke, a ball of energy and optimism, lots of things were uh-may-zing. That's because every time Luke walked into a room, there was applause and adoration. For Luke, every high school party was like a red-carpet movie premiere, and he was Vince Chase from Entourage. People were fighting to talk to him and ask him questions. Girls were tugging at his clothes and asking for his autograph. Guys were calling out to him with weird nicknames they'd come up with between Gatorade spits on the football field. Everyone was happy to see him.

I could only imagine how guys like… oh, say, Johnny Frackas, would react to me showing up at a party of Swiss girls and adding to the sausage fest. Or how Sean O'Connor would feel if a random nerd showed up to drink one of his precious cans of dented beer. Or how hard they would laugh if they ever saw me try to do a kegstand (Luke made me do a kegstand once when our parents were away, and I'd since been convinced you have to be a Romanian gymnast to perform one). It wasn't that I didn't like Swiss girls or horror movies. And it wasn't like I didn't like Luke. I liked Luke, but I didn't want to hang out with those other St. Luke's assholes.

I would never ever tell Luke that I was worried his friends would be mean to me. First of all, my brother never worried about social interactions, and he wouldn't understand. Second, Luke took everything literally and might tell people, "Don't be mean to my brother." Which would, of course, have the opposite effect.

So sometimes I would give my brother a legitimate excuse, like, "I'm sick of hanging out with the guys from school."

Sometimes I would go a little more ridiculous and tell Luke very seriously, "Oh, I can't drink that beer. I'm really scared of botulism."

Or, about the movie: "I heard that Disney Channel girl is actually a transvestite."

Or, about the party: "Too bad all the girls in Sweden take vows of celibacy till they're twenty-five. No, I read it, the government makes them."

But Luke did not fear botulism, gender confusion, or the challenge of state-enforced abstinence. So off he went and I sat home while other guys racked up months of sexual experience. Every Monday, those guys would come to school looking all disheveled, like they were exhausted from rounding the bases. And every Monday, Johnny Frackas asked me, "Score any ass this weekend, Fagbar?"

Did I snap back with a clever response? Did I use my wit and mastery of words to craft the mother of all Your-Mom jokes? Did I take advantage of the fact that Johnny "Freckles" Frackas was such an easy target? No. Never. Never once. In fact, I never even answered him. I sat there like a wuss, shrugged my skinny wuss shoulders, or pretended to be really interested in my chemistry textbook all of a sudden. I never said a thing. And I really regret it.

So I was obviously glad to leave St. Luke's and move to New York. It was definitely an ideal time for a transformation—but New York itself didn't turn me into a vampire.

Maybe the whole transformation started in New York, with that girl on the train. She spotted me the second I got on and beelined for the seat next to mine. Although she was reading a thick paperback book, she was sneaking sideways glances at me every other paragraph. Her eyes took in the raised red patches on my hands and the bandages on my arms. Then she told me she knew what was wrong with me. And she seemed so certain, so understanding, that I agreed with her. Maybe that's when I decided my life needed to change.

Or maybe the need for transformation started fifteen years and nine months ago, with the fertilization of two very different eggs by two very different sperm. Sorry to bring up my parents' sex life, but that's how Luke and I started. My mother released one egg with her enthusiasm and energy, and another with her social anxieties and cheesy sentimentality. My dad released one sperm with his sports skills and his mild likability, and one with his tendency to hole up in his room for an entire weekend. The cool sperm found the cool egg and they hung out together in the cool part of the uterus. The wallflowers got together by default and made me.

The doctors told my mother she was expecting dizygotic twins, more commonly called fraternal twins. Two different sets of genes. Two different kids. One absorbed all of the nutrition and grew round and healthy. The other was malnourished but too sleepy to put up a fight. To this day, the first still has twenty-five pounds on the second.

One of us was named Luke, and one of us was named Finbar. It's hard to think that my lifelong bad luck wasn't confirmed by that name choice.

Luke was born into a world full of praise and admiration. And girls. My brother was exiled from the YMCA day camp playground eight times in one summer for being kissed by girls. It was actually unfair. My brother shouldn't have gotten in trouble; he was the victim. He was the one attacked by girls. He still is, to this day. He was the only sophomore guy at our school who was invited to a prom. This hot Asian girl from All Saints' Girls School asked him. And believe me, despite the school name, those girls were not all saints. My brother came home with his rented pants on backward.

The differences between us really kicked into gear when we were twelve. Luke came home from a boy-girl party with kids from our parish and announced to our parents that three girls had kissed him that night. Like, kissed him. On the mouth. My mother, who's a die-hard romantic but also a germaphobe, was torn between horror and curiosity. She solved this dilemma by asking my brother for all the gossipy details while driving him to the doctor for a mononucleosis test.

I also wanted to know more about these kisses (had one been from that girl with the rosary beads and halter top?), but by the time I asked, Luke was distracted by a fervent hunt for Fruit Roll-Ups. Where, you may ask, had I been when all this kissing was going on in the basement of little Mary's house? I was there. At the same party. But Luke had been in the basement, and I had been upstairs, watching Henry Kim play solitaire. P.S., the only thing more pathetic than playing solitaire at a party, even a seventh-grade party, is watching someone else play solitaire. Plus, I hadn't even known there was kissing going on in the basement. I always missed all the kissing.

Because telling my parents that I was hanging out alone with another guy while everyone else was kissing girls might have given them the wrong impression, I just shrugged when they asked, "What about you, Finbar?"

It's not that I'm not interested in girls. Just ask the priest who hears my confession every month. I'm very interested in girls. In fact, I'm interested in girls every morning for about six minutes in the shower. I have the sex drive of Bill Clinton. Even my obsessive love of books may stretch from my overstimulated libido. Specifically, from the children's librarian at the Alexandria Library. This librarian had really big breasts. Actually, not big. Enormous. Each one was the size of an adult bowling ball. I swear. As a result, from my Once Upon a Potty days onward, I associated reading with all the things the female body represents: comfort, softness, sensuality, motherly bonding, nutrition, a sense of well-being… and boobs.

Because I don't get out much, in my mind, love and sex are all tangled up in books and movies. I've lived vicariously through Heathcliff, Romeo, Rhett Butler, George Clooney, Harrison Ford, and James Bond. From the safety of my bedroom, it's easy to believe I could be as gallant and brave as any of these old dudes. My mother, too, finds these things in books. Well, not sex. She's a stringent Catholic. But she loves love stories. Like a bloodhound, she sniffed out that romantic streak I tried to hide. I became her companion, her romantic-comedy buddy, her personal Oprah's Book Club. Let's just say I know more about the evolution of Katherine Heigl's hair color than any man should.

In many ways, the woman ruined me.

My mother's romantic comedies made me believe girls want guys who are thoughtful, dependable, and romantic. Sure, when the movie starts, the girl's dating the self-absorbed guy in the Maserati. But slowly she's drawn to the guy who remembers her favorite flower, picks her up from the costume party where she's the only one in a costume, and reassures her that her interesting mind makes her far more sexy than her sister, the Playboy model. The whole audience melts when this guy delivers the heartfelt speech of genuine reasons he loves her. His occasional awkwardness and fumbling only make him more dreamy. This is the guy I could be. This is the guy I am.

And yet? High school girls hate me.

Guys who get girls in high school honk their car horns and yell at girls with short skirts; they down tiny hotel bottles of vodka at school dances and work up their nerve as they work their hands up girls' dresses; they make fun of girls at football games for tucking their jeans into their boots and put girls' numbers into their phones as "Blonde" because they never asked their names and never cared. Or because they genuinely forgot. That's how Luke is with girls. That's why he gets them—and actually, now that we're talking about girls, it started with one.

So that's where it started.

Celine.

chapter 2

But hold on. Before I launch into my tale of humiliation (the first of many), I'll tell you more about the move to New York.

In August, we moved from Indiana to Pelham, New York. Pelham was bordered by the beach and the Bronx, both of which Luke and I thought were awesome. Within a week, my mother had located all Catholic churches and emergency rooms within a fifteen-mile radius of our new house. Having grown up in Boston, my mother was glad to live near New York City and reacquaint herself with all her urban neuroses—about falling in that crack between the platform and the train, getting robbed in a back alley, being tempted to join a gang with a cool handshake, contracting diseases carried by homeless men and pigeons (my mother hadn't quite reached the level of sympathy that her oft-referenced role model, Jesus Christ, had for the poor). She equipped Luke and me with medical masks and silver whistles. After deciding we looked like SARS patients heading for a gay club, we promptly "lost" both—in a very unfortunate incident involving the Long Island Sound and a receding tide.

My dad got a raise at his new job, so we got a new car for Luke and me. A silver Volvo. Luke and I spent July learning how to drive, and we both passed our driver's tests. I was actually a good driver. Luke was such a dangerous one that I think our evaluator passed him out of relief for having survived the test. One car for two eager teenage drivers—and for once, things worked out in my favor. I got the Volvo, sexy airbags and all, to drive to school. Luke would be taking the train to a Catholic school in the Bronx called Fordham Prep. Fordham had recruited him for the football team, and he would be taking the train every day. Fordham was a lot like St. Luke's—a small community, uniforms, heavy focus on sports, and all boys.

In a rare moment of true empathy, my mother had realized that I needed a change from St. Luke's School, or, perhaps, a change from Luke. She enrolled me in Pelham Public High School.

"You'll get to meet more people!" my mother said. "It made me sad that you didn't have more friends at St. Luke's."

"Mom," I groaned. "I had friends."

"Oh, yes, Henry Kim! I forgot about Henry Kim," she said. "What a nice boy. He was so good at math. And the violin."

(The worst part about my mom's shameless stereotyping of Henry Kim, who was Korean American, was the fact that he was very good at math and the violin. Of course, he was also a star player on the varsity soccer team. But I didn't tell my mother that, because I didn't want her to know that Henry was better at sports than I was.)

This was my first time going to public school. This was my first time going to a different school than Luke. Most importantly, this was my first time at school with girls. But I had already met a girl in New York. Celine.

We had been talking online for four months. We'd met on an Internet message board called College Confidential. It isn't a dating site. Usually it's a place for high school students to post a list of extracurriculars the length of War and Peace and then ask, "Will I get into Duke?!?!?!?!?" Sometimes it's a place for parents to advise one another on which is a more admissions-friendly extracurricular, fencing or playing the oboe.

For Celine and me, it was a place to chat about colleges with comparative lit majors. Then our relationship got more intimate, moving over to Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger. We began talking weekly, and then every other day, discussing our favorite books and degrading their crappy movie adaptations. Once she went to a reading by Jeffrey McDaniel (a performance poet we both liked) and messaged me immediately when she got home. She wrote, "I was hoping you'd be on!!!" That was a spectacular moment. I could see my own doofy grin in the reflection on the screen.

Luckily I could play it very cool through a wireless connection. Celine had actually never seen my face, because my Facebook profile had a picture of Tolstoy instead of a picture of me.

Celine was born in France but lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She went to this snooty all-girls' school with the daughters of hotel magnates and faded rock stars and their second wives. Celine told me all these things about her life that she didn't tell anyone else, like how her classmates threw parties at their lofts when their parents were on Martha's Vineyard and got their malti-poo dogs drunk on Smirnoff Ice. Celine—like me—didn't drink, which probably made us the only two teenagers in the world who weren't chugging beer every Friday night. Celine smoked, but only clove cigarettes. Besides, it didn't really count because she was European. And she had tried pot twice, but the first time was only to see what it was like and the second time someone had tricked her into it with brownies, which she couldn't turn down because she had PMS (I didn't ask more questions about that story).

As a European, Celine surely appreciated someone with sophistication, intelligence, good manners, and a broad knowledge of literature and culture. These are the exact traits I've developed during my years reading in the Alexandria Library, smushed between the ginormous breasts of the children's librarian and Live Bait, the bar/strip club/fishing supply store next to the library.

Celine and I had upgraded to the intimacy of the text message after I moved to New York. We agreed to meet up in late August to hang out and get to know each other. We planned on a coffee date. But then I switched it up: instead of coffee shops, I searched online for French restaurants on the Upper West Side. I texted Celine: "Change of plans," and I sent her the address of the restaurant. She would think I'd found a great coffee shop halfway between my train station and her apartment, but really, I would wow her with a fancy dinner from her native land at a place called Les Poissons, which had good reviews of its food but also a review that declared, "The waiters were unforgivably rude." These two comments combined led me to believe it was an authentic French restaurant.

Yes, I know, I am a suave and romantic gentleman. In fact, this move showed me to have the elegance of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, the spontaneity of George from A Room with a View, the boldness of Harrison Ford in Star Wars, and the technological skill of Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail.

But even when you've got a romantic plan in place and you're wearing a collared shirt, there's nothing more stressful than waiting for your Internet date to show up. First I started to question myself. From "Is there too much gel in my hair?" down to "Loafers? What was I thinking?"

Then, when she was sixteen minutes late, I began to worry about her. Was she still as cute as her pictures? Maybe she'd looked like that once, but she had gained three hundred pounds. Or had gotten her entire face pierced. She was now ninety percent metal and could never return to her home country because of the airport metal detectors. Or she could be an alien. Or she could be a murderer. Or she could be a man!

Seventeen minutes into my wait, anxiety switched to primal fear. I looked rapidly around the restaurant. Who was in this restaurant to protect me if Celine burst in with a chain saw and metal face? There were two tables of older couples, and by older, I mean old enough to order alcohol legally. Then there was a table of scientists in lab coats who were toasting to some discovery. Wow, that stereotype of the mad scientist wasn't so far off….

Until—

Oh. My. God. There she was.

I'd never understood what science classes taught you about matter, about the very physical stuff of existence, but there she was existing in real life, taking up a solid outline of space between the fancy glass doors. She wasn't text on my computer or a snapshot taken from above by her own hand. Celine was real.

And she was perfect, in a little pink dress that showed the golden-brown skin on her thighs and all up and down her arms, her chest. What a tan! This girl was a melanin goddess!

Improbably, she walked toward me.

The men in the restaurant turned to watch her. The women in the restaurant turned to watch her. The scientists turned to watch her. Then they all watched her walk over and hug… me. Yes, me, the slumped-over boy with the sweat under his arms and his legs jiggling. I could see the scientists furiously developing hypotheses to explain:

"What is she doing with him?"

I could sense them evaluating me.

"He seems to suffer from a lack of pigmentation," the oldest scientist would observe clinically.

"And from excessive perspiration," his younger colleague would add eagerly.

"He doesn't appear very fertile," the only female would surmise. "I wouldn't select him as a mate."

But the scientists could suck it, because Celine came up and hugged me! As her head pressed against my chest, her dark brown hair felt like ribbons. She smelled like she wore deodorant over every inch of her body. God. Wow.

"How great to meet you!" Celine said, pulling away. "And—the restaurant! This is… well, a surprise."

"Do you like it?" I asked, pulling out Celine's chair for her.

"It's certainly a surprise!" She laughed, folding her little pink skirt under her tan legs. "I thought we were just having coffee."

"I thought we could have dinner instead."

"Oh! Well, great!" Her voice was so high-pitched that I couldn't tell if she was excited or faking enthusiasm in a high-decibel range.