Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,19

times), I let all the information I’d read and watched come together. Every book had a different take on how vampires worked. For example—how were vampires made? Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, said it took three bites from a vampire to “turn” a human. The House of Night books said that becoming a vampire was an automatic physical change, like puberty (and God knows, I didn’t want to relive puberty. I think I would have rather turned into a vampire than get braces with red rubber bands). And what was the deal with vampires and the sun? In True Blood, sun shriveled up vampires until they dropped dead. In the Twilight books, sun doesn’t hurt vampires but reveals their super-beautiful skin. Well, I didn’t have to worry about that.

But there were a lot of “vampire rules” I couldn’t possibly follow. For example, True Blood is actually the name for this fake blood drink that Bill Compton and the other HBO vampires drink instead of biting people, which reminded me: vampires can’t eat. This led me to realize that vampires also can’t drink, or breathe. Eating, drinking, and breathing? I probably couldn’t kick those little habits. Also, according to my books, vampires freak out if they see religious symbols, like crosses or Christian statues. If this were the case for me, I wouldn’t be able to enter my own home. My mom has saints and Virgin Marys camping out all over our backyard.

But I realized, as I watched the on-screen vampires with their deep, drawling voices, their slick movements, their secret-agent reflexes, and the way they drew the attention of everybody (mostly every girl) when they walked into a bar or a party, that there was more to the vampire image than drinking blood and biting people. There was even more to vampires than those things I was good at—the brooding, the solitude, the old-fashioned determination to act like a gentleman with girls, the intelligence and knowledge of history. There was something more than that: vampire attitude.

Maybe I didn’t have vampire attitude down yet because there was one important vampire book I had yet to read. The book that had started it all. That bible of vampiric seduction: Bloodthirsty. To be honest, I was too embarrassed to buy the book, even online. Bloodthirsty was a romance novel. Ninety percent of its readers were female. If I ordered it online, I’d probably get on some sappy romance novel list and get e-mails with pictures of shirtless men with long blond hair.

But if I was using this vampire thing to get girls, I had to read Bloodthirsty. So I sucked it up and went back to the library. I strolled the romance novel aisle between two twelve-year-old girls who were giggling and asking each other, “What’s a member? Like a member of a club?” I managed to stealthily slip Bloodthirsty off the shelf. There had been seven copies of the book, and five of them had already been taken out—a good sign about the continued popularity of vampires. Concealing my Bloodthirsty between two more macho Stephen King novels, I casually strolled to check them out.

Agnes, a librarian who already knew me by name, smiled as she took my card. But when she saw Bloodthirsty, she shook her head.

“You can’t have this one,” Agnes said.

What? She was taking this mother—or grandmother—role too far.

“There’s a parental warning on this book,” Agnes told me.

“Books can have that?” I asked.

I thought parental warnings were for video games where you could steal cars and pick up anime prostitutes.

“I can call your mother and get permission over the phone,” Agnes suggested.

I looked down at the cover of Bloodthirsty, with the young woman’s breasts featured prominently.

“No thanks.”

When I first settled down in a dark, private corner of the Pelham Public Library to read Bloodthirsty without checking it out, I didn’t see why the book was so forbidden. The first chapter was poorly written, but not very scandalous. The story started off as a harmless Dracula rip-off with a bunch of cheesy dialogue. This English girl, Virginia White, is chosen to deliver a message to this rugged mountain town in Eastern Europe, despite the fact that she is a terrible messenger, can’t climb mountains, and wears white dresses everywhere, which is dumb to do in a rural place. Anyway, Virginia White ends up at the estate of Chauncey Castle, who used to be a professor at Oxford but did some controversial research into immortality and drinking blood and got kicked out.