pop song blaring out of his iPod headphones. Lacking my discriminating taste in music, Luke always downloaded whatever was playing incessantly on the radio. On this Labor Day Monday, the last day of summer vacation, it was Lady Gaga, a club remix at max volume.
Usually I would throw a pillow at Luke, miss him by six inches, roll over, and go back to sleep. Today as he lifted his t-shirt to wipe his face and then did a goofy dance to the song’s refrain, I sat up and fixed my eyes on him.
“Turn it off,” I called out, loud enough for Luke to hear me.
“Huh?” Luke lifted both hands to pop out his headphones, and when they dangled on his chest, they blared even louder.
“Turn the music off,” I said.
Then Luke got the full brunt of the ferocious vampire stare, which I’d been perfecting in my mom’s makeup mirror for three days. It was designed to either (a) melt him into a puddle of his own sweat, or (b) make him totally obedient to me. Initially it worked in the second respect. Luke met my eyes and came over to my bed. It was working! My powerful gaze was pulling Luke over to me. My powerful gaze was powerful! Then Luke sat on my bed and told me:
“You have that crusty stuff in your eyes.”
Luke reached toward my face. I lifted my arm to block him, but my vampire reflexes hadn’t kicked in yet, and I was too slow. Luke poked me in the eye.
After Luke left for practice, my mother came in with the Dirt Devil, which I knew meant she wanted to have a heart-to-heart. She sat down on my bed and asked, “Is anything wrong, Finbar?”
I raised an eyebrow skeptically, but then I remembered I was practicing vampire habits. What would Chauncey Castle say?
“Is anything right?” I asked dramatically in return.
“Finbar.” Now my mother’s eyes narrowed and she gripped the cross at her neck like she was in distress. “Are you on drugs?”
“What does it matter what I am on?” I asked her. “All that matters is what I am….”
“FINBAR!” my mother shrieked, popping up off the bed. “YOU’RE ON DRUGS!”
This Chauncey Castle dialogue didn’t work so well in real life. Maybe there’s a reason Publishers Weekly called the book “skanky trash.”
“I’m not on drugs, Mom,” I said. “Where do you even come up with this stuff?”
“You’re moody, you’re not talking to any of us, and you’re eating less,” my mother said, then took a deep breath. “Are you doing pot?”
“Mom, if I were doing pot, I would be eating more.”
My mother aimed the Dirt Devil at my chest and switched it on, sucking on my black pajama shirt.
“Only someone doing pot would know that!” she yelled over the vacuum’s roar.
After my mom left, I finally hopped out of bed. I took advantage of Luke’s absence to perform an important pre–First Day of School task: decide what I was going to wear.
How was I going to dress like a vampire? I had a pretty lousy history of trying to convince people I was someone other than who I was. Look at my childhood Halloweens. Every year I’d start in August, brainstorming the scariest costume possible. A ghost, or a zombie, a mummy, or an ax murderer. When my neighbors opened the door, I’d growl, I’d wield a knife, I’d rage, I’d roar like the entire Broadway cast of The Lion King.
Still, when those Hoosier moms saw me, they’d always say, “Hi, Finbar. How are you?”
The best I ever got was a halfhearted “Aren’t you scary?” But that was usually followed by the kind of aww sound you make when you find a puppy chewing your shoe. Other neighbors, knowing how to win my mother’s heart, were too busy to be scared by me because they were taping a Bible passage to an Almond Joy. Almond Joys are already the world’s suckiest candy without sores and plagues strapped to them. Pretty soon I’d be hauling half the New Testament door-to-door like a Jehovah’s Witness.
So how would I ever pull off this vampire stuff?
I was lousy with violence. So I wouldn’t be doing what made vampires vampires: I wouldn’t be biting people. Luke had tried that back in the day, and it got him kicked out of Montessori school. My glamouring had no effect on my brother, so I wouldn’t be hypnotizing people. I was certainly not Chauncey Castle when it came to seducing people. And I still didn’t