Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,26

There I sat, legs crossed, perusing my options. Weight Training. No way in hell. Soccer. Eh. CardioPump, CardioFunk, CardioFlex… embarrassing. Nutritional Science?

“Shit, man. All that’s left is Nutritional Science,” one guy leaving the line told another. Both guys sat down next to me.

“Hey, what is that?” I asked. “Nutritional Science?”

“You sit in a classroom and talk about vegetables,” the guy told me. “You even have tests. It sucks.”

“Yeah, sounds bad,” I said.

Tests? I loved tests! I was great at tests! Folding my paper over so they couldn’t see, I wrote a huge number 1 next to Nutritional Science. I creased the paper in half and slipped it into the pile on the coach’s table.

The first day went so well that, by the time it was over, I had forgotten the one rough patch—homeroom. In fact, I didn’t remember it until now, when I’m remembering everything.

Eff the F homeroom. It’s always a terrible place. For fifteen minutes between first period (history) and second period (physics) I was plunged into a boiling pot of kids from all different cliques, with the only thing we had in common being F last names. Our homeroom teacher was Mr. Pitt.

“Frame?” Mr. Pitt, who was more pit stains than Brad Pitt, squinted at his attendance sheet.

“Is that Frame? Where’s Frame?”

I tried to hide behind two kids playing hacky sack between the desks.

“Uh… uh,” I stuttered. Then I remembered I was a vampire and stood up proudly.

“That’s me,” I declared.

“It’s Frame? First name?” Mr. Pitt squinted at his sheet.

“Frame, last name,” I said.

“So it’s Finbar?”

“Right.”

I sat at my desk.

“Jesus,” said a lacrosse player next to me. “What kind of gay name is that?”

His friend, who was wearing one of those white baseball caps that’s never seen a washing machine, gave a dumb laugh.

I waited with forced calm until Lacrosse turned around to check on my reaction.

The old Finbar would have turned red from embarrassment. Now, as Vampire Finbar, I retained my pasty serenity and focused by unwrapping a stick of Doublemint. Gum was also part of my plan. Somehow, gum chewing and coolness are associated in my mind.

When he turned toward me, I had a better view of the lacrosse player’s rampant acne. Every lacrosse player I’ve met has been covered in zits. Neutrogena must be making a fortune off those cagey helmets.

“No answer, kid?” Lacrosse prodded. “What kind of gay name is that?”

I pointed toward a particularly ripe zit on his chin. It had two half-moon indents where he’d clearly tried to pop it with his nails but hadn’t succeeded.

“You have something on your face… right there,” I said.

God bless his friend’s stupidity. He gave that same stuttering laugh to my comment as he had to Lacrosse’s.

“Shut up, dude,” Lacrosse muttered vaguely, to one or to both of us.

The bell rang. Homeroom torture was over and I felt different than I had before, when mocked. At St. Luke’s, I’d always scrunched up in my seat, slumped over, or shrunk back. Today, I felt tall.

chapter 7

Upon first impression, Pelham Public looked just like I assumed it would be from Matt Katz’s first-day-of-school nap: relaxed. But there was bullying going on—more than the snide remarks about my name.

During my second week at my new school, I left physics class early to get my lab notebook and saw this kid Chris Cho from my Nutritional Science class in the empty hallway. Cho is a freshman, but he’s so skinny and small he looks like a lost middle schooler. He has one of those faces that always looks sad, but this period he looked even more bummed than usual. Then I saw that he wasn’t alone in the hallway—he was with Chris Perez.

Chris Perez was a sophomore with a shaved head. Girls went crazy for him—partly because he was good-looking and partly because he was a badass. Everyone called him Perez. Everyone talked about him. I mean, I’d only been here a week and a half, and I’d heard several legends about him already. Perez had parked in the teachers’ parking lot. Somehow he’d convinced the principal to let him keep the spot. Perez had climbed to the top of the rope in gym class. Perez had set off the fire alarm. Perez had bigger balls than anyone at Pelham Public. He was notorious at Pelham because he got in trouble a lot. Wait, correction—he should have gotten in trouble a lot. But when teachers caught him marking up the desks with ink pens or stealing from the school store,