Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,18
a suspicious look, like I’d been inappropriately touching people. I think he sensed my newfound power and was threatened by it.
But I did sit down.
chapter 5
With only seventy-two hours left before school started, I was off to a magical place that would be the source of all my vampire secrets and power. The Pelham Public Library. I still believed books could change your life, even though they hadn’t worked during my previous attempted transformations (see the still shrink-wrapped copy of Weightlifting for Wimps on the third level of my bookshelf).
Thank God for my kick-ass attention span. Between Saturday and Tuesday morning, I read the following books: “The Family of the Vourdalak,” by Count Alexis Tolstoy; Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (this one had some really cool lesbian vibes going on like 150 years before Marissa kissed Alex on The OC); Dracula, by Bram Stoker (this one I just flipped through; I’ve read it twice before. I also saw it acted out in the episode of Degrassi where Emma gets gonorrhea); Revelations in Black, by Carl Jacobi; ’Salem’s Lot and “The Night Flier,” by Stephen King; Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett; four books by Anne Rice; two House of Night books by P. C. and Kristin Cast; and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.
Getting any reading done, much less this many books in one nerdy weekend, was an impressive feat considering I shared a room with Luke. In Alexandria, we’d had rooms at opposite ends of a hallway, and I’d only heard about his cracking a wooden ceiling beam with a basketball, his using his bed as a trampoline and swinging from the window sash. In Pelham, I got to experience it firsthand.
At some point in my research, when I already had, like, twelve paper cuts, I heard Luke pounding his way up the stairs. The lamps in our room were trembling in fear of him. I swear, the kid’s a portable earthquake. I looked around quickly. All the book covers on my bed looked suspicious and creepy—knives, blood, some bare female chests. So I scooped up five of them and shoved them into the crack between my bed and the wall, where I kept all my other suspicious and creepy stuff like my Megan Fox Transformers poster (it’s life-size, and you can totally see one of her nipples).
Luke banged open the door, his white headphones blaring and his shirt soaked through with sweat. He lifted it over his head while he walked to his bed. My brother walks around shirtless more than Mario Lopez.
“Summer reading?” Luke’s pecs asked me.
Yeah, right. I’d completed the Pelham summer reading list by the fourth of July. Summer reading is my favorite thing in the world!
“Just reading,” I said.
“Hey, when are we going to the beach again?” Luke asked. “I never got to go.”
“The beach made my skin boil,” I told him.
Luke shrugged. “Mom said she enjoyed it.”
I rolled my eyes. Then I put The Queen of the Damned down on my bedspread. Although I never thought I’d say this, I was sick of reading. I decided to do what the rest of the country did instead of reading: watch TV.
“Hey,” I asked Luke, “did you ever watch True Blood?”
Luke took one of the towels we shared and rubbed it over his head, neck, and chest. Reminder: never use that towel again.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A show on HBO,” I said. “There’s vampires.”
“What happens on it?” Luke pulled a polo shirt over his head.
Retaining Luke’s attention requires a team of Mexican soap opera scriptwriters, but he agreed to watch the DVDs and followed me downstairs to the den, where we have that enormous HD television whose radiation my mother fears. I put the first season in the DVD player and got absorbed in the show almost immediately. My brother, ADHD poster child, left the room whenever no one was being killed or having really noisy sex. Luckily, there were a lot of murders and a hell of a lot of sex (maybe becoming a vampire would be more fun than I predicted). Luke was better able to pay attention when he watched while simultaneously trying to balance on this wooden board on wheels. That balance board is the first physical manifestation of my father’s midlife crisis. He bought it to work on his balance when he decided to become a surfer. That never worked out for him. Or me. Apparently delusions of surfdom run in our family.
While Luke balanced (or, rather, crashed into the couch, like, three