and take off her shirt? Throw her in the back and…

“Can you come say hi to my dad?”

Wow. So the opposite of what I had in mind.

But I answered, “Sure,” automatically.

Nerves shot through me and made it extra difficult to parallel park. I really needed to make a good impression on Kate’s dad. He wanted to make sure that I was a safe and dependable guy…. Wait, hold up… this was fantastic! That meant that Kate had insinuated somehow that I was not a safe and dependable guy. How awesome! Kate didn’t think I was safe and dependable (or rather, she didn’t know I was safe and dependable). Kate thought I was dark and mysterious! She thought I was dangerous, which was miraculous, considering the whole night I’d stayed five miles below the speed limit. This whole vampire thing must be working!

Or maybe Kate’s dad thought I was a different kind of dangerous. Maybe he thought I was someone way worse than a vampire. Maybe he thought I was an older guy who had a decent chance of scoring with his daughter. He thought this was a date. I practically skipped around the car to climb Kate’s front steps. This was a date!

chapter 11

Something drew me again and again to the conflict between Chris Perez and Chris Cho. I shouldn’t have cared. Not only was apathy part of my vampire agenda, but I had never spoken to Perez or Cho in my life. Yet I kept finding excuses to leave physics between the class period and the lab period. I even volunteered to be shot during the paintball lab so I could escape to my locker for a change of clothes. When I reached my locker, I would watch from twenty-five feet down the hall while Chris Perez robbed Chris Cho.

The first few times I watched, Perez roughed Cho around a little bit. He pulled at the lapels of his jacket to bring him close, then pushed him back into a locker or a bathroom door. He cuffed him on the jaw a little too hard. Then Perez would pat down Cho’s chest and his jacket pockets. He’d undo the Velcro of Cho’s pocket, dig inside, and pull something out. He treated everything as if it were his, violating Cho’s Velcro, his jacket, his wallet.

Perez started by taking cash. Whatever Cho had on him. Cho wised up and started carrying less cash on him—down from two twenties, to a few singles, finally to no cash at all. But then Perez stole his leather wallet. After his wallet was gone, Cho would purposefully bring in objects, offerings for the ancient god that was Chris Perez. A CD or DVD, then this gold key ring that looked like it should have belonged to a mafioso, not a pubescent Asian American. Once I saw Cho try to give Perez a book. Perez rejected that, turned Cho’s backpack upside down, flipped his pockets inside out, and took his iPod Touch instead.

A few weeks into school, Jenny had told me that Perez was a bullshitter and no one in his family was an immigrant. He was actually really rich. His father owned the biggest spring-break resort in Puerto Vallarta, and his mom was blond with fake boobs. She’d almost been chosen to be one of the housewives in The Real Housewives of New York City. The only true part of his sad tale was that his mother may or may not have been a stripper, but either way they’d never gone hungry.

So was I obsessing about Perez and Cho because Perez was a spoiled liar and a jerk to steal someone else’s stuff when he was rich? Actually, that wasn’t why. It wasn’t even Perez’s behavior that bothered me most. It wasn’t how possessive he was, how he put his hands all over Cho in an odd, almost seductive manner. It wasn’t the voice he used when he dug in his pockets, this wheedling, creepy voice, like the one Harry Potter used when he talked to snakes. It wasn’t the praise he heaped upon Cho when he’d given him what he wanted.

It was Cho’s behavior that bothered me. You couldn’t even call what Perez was doing “stealing” anymore. Cho was just handing all his crap over! That drove me crazy—how Cho shuffled down the hallway so dutifully, like Dilbert heading back to his cubicle. How he slumped his shoulders in that oversize jacket. How he didn’t even walk down the other side of the hallway.